Dame Judi Dench “Don't Be So Susceptible to Falling in Love”

The great actor opens up about stage fright, working with Kenneth Branagh and her viral TikTok videos

- By James Mottram. Photographs by Dan Rowley, Shutterstock, AF Archive, Alamy stock photos, Donald Cooper, Everett Collection Inc and Reuters

“I MIGHT COUGH a bit… don’t get alarmed!” says Dame Judi Dench. In these pandemic-riddled times, any tickle in the throat is a concern—especially if you’re 87 years old, as she is—but it’s nothing serious, she assures me. With a floral scarf wrapped around her neck, her white hair neatly cropped, the acclaimed star of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Philomena, looks in fine fettle when we connect over Zoom.

These past months, the biggest issue Dench has experienced, like so many of us, is psychological. “The thing about COVID is that it mucked up the rhythm inside me, I feel,” she says. “I don’t know what the outcome of that will be. But it’s a curious, odd, and unsettling feeling.” She pauses for a second. “Hopefully, we’ll get back to some kind of, well, normality… or something approximating normality.”

For an actress who has been performing professionally since 1957, rarely stopping, it’s no surprise to find her destabilised by the past two years. Theatre, television and, more recently, film, have been her lifeblood. So how did she cope with the enforced lockdown? Baking banana bread? “I planned to learn all the sonnets, the Shakespeare sonnets. I didn’t do that. I just didn’t do it,” she sighs. Inertia got the better of her. “You get nothing done.”