The actor who refused to make eye contact with Judi Dench: “He would never look at me, never”
To trot out an old cliché, the eyes are the windows to the soul. With that in mind, a decent pair of peepers is an indispensable tool for any actor, whether communicating with their co-stars or the audience. However, Judi Dench struggled when one of her scene partners spent their entire time together, refusing to look her in the eye.
It sounds like one of those eccentricities a method actor would use to deliberately distance themselves from their colleagues to aid their immersion into character, but that’s not quite the case. For one thing, the star who never once locked eyes with Dame Judi wasn’t even a practitioner of the method, not that they ever gave an explanation for their aversion to gazing into her eyes.
It happened at the beginning of her legendary career, too, leaving the rising star equal parts confused and bemused that an established name – who was only six years her senior – couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact no matter how hard she tried to make it happen.
Dench started her career treading the boards in London in the late 1950s, usually with the works of William Shakespeare, which is why she’s spent her entire professional life calling him “the man that pays the rent.” A year after she’d made her debut, she found herself working opposite the vaunted Laurence Harvey in a production of Henry V at the Old Vic.
He was already a known name to cinema audiences, having appeared in dozens of pictures, and he was only one year away from delivering an Academy Award-nominated performance in John Brayne’s 1959 drama Room at the Top. He’d been a stage actor for a decade longer than Dench, so maybe that’s why he wouldn’t give the newcomer the courtesy of eye contact.
“Larry Harvey never looked into my face,” she recalled to Cornwall Live. “Larry Harvey looked about a foot and a bit above my head all the time. He would never look at me, never.” In her efforts to remedy the situation, Dench admitted she “kept trying to attract his attention” by craning her neck directly into his line of sight, which “never worked.”
Then again, perhaps there’s an obvious explanation. One of the stage and screen’s most diminutive icons, Dench stands tall at a mighty five feet and one inch. By comparison, Harvey was exactly a foot taller, so maybe he was looking directly in front of him at all times, and she was simply too small to enter his sightline.
That said, it’s not like his neck didn’t work, so there’s a chance he was doing it for other unusual, possibly bizarre, but nonetheless actor-ish reasons than avoiding the pitfalls of chronic pain by spending the duration of their time on Henry V looking downwards at Dench.
