All the World's Her Stage

THE QUEEN OF SHAKESPEARE REVEALS WHY SHE PREFERS THEATER TO FILM AND HOW LIFE TURNS INTO ART: 'NO ONE WHO HASN'T BEEN IN LOVE CAN EVER PLAY JULIET' 

- LIZZ SCHUMER

Before she became the villainous M to James Bond, before Hollywood crowned her Queen Victoria, and before she was awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her services to acting, a teenage Judi Dench fell in love with the musical language of one of history’s most celebrated playwrights. “Shakespeare is my passion,” says Dame Judi Dench, 89. “It used to be nine pence to go to the Old Vic and sit in the gallery, so we used to go and see Richard Burton and John Neville. This was before the Beatles, so the people used to just go mad. I never thought for one single second I would be part of that as my first job.”

Now, almost 70 years after she made her stage debut there as Hamlet’s Ophelia, the British acting icon is taking readers down memory lane. Written as a series of conversations with fellow actor and friend Brendan O’Hea, her new book Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, is a rollicking look back at Dench’s life, career and turn on the boards in more than 40 plays with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Dench didn’t originally set out to be an actor. She trained as a set designer, but after a 1953 visit to Shakespeare’s hometown (see excerpt), she set her sights on performing. The rest is decades of stage and screen history—but her heart will always belong to the Bard. “There is something about his rhythms that just catch you like music,” she says. “It’s in iambic pentameter, which I’ve always said is the rhythm of your heart.”