The actor who “completely changed” Judi Dench’s life: “I was going on one road”
For many creatives, whether you’re a performer, director or a painter, there’s a moment when everything just seems to click with an overwhelming sense of clarity, and you realise that you have to head in a certain direction, where nothing else will do.
Reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids did that for me as a teenager, becoming a clarion call that told me I had to dedicate myself to writing and creating, no matter what, and perhaps for you, it was standing in front of a specific painting, listening to an album or watching a film that set you on your path to creation.
However, sometimes it so happens that you can’t imagine someone bring inspired by anyone, like Dame Judi Dench, who seems to possess the essence of having always been sublimely talented, such that you just kind of assume that she was born to be one of the greatest performers of her generation, but even a young Dench wasn’t immune to the influence of others, and it was a specific performance that changed the trajectory of her career.
Becoming a star of the stage in the late 1950s, she soon took on practically every Shakespearean leading female role across the West End and Broadway, displaying an incredible talent for mastering any dramatic or comedic role, which eventually led her to a long-running career on screen, appearing in the James Bond series and winning an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love; it was a full-circle moment, in a way.
But Dench’s career might’ve ended up on a very different path if she hadn’t watched Peggy Ashcroft performing as Cleopatra on stage. The legendary actor, who starred in many films but predominantly earned her flowers from a long-running tenure as an icon of the stage, proved to be a huge influence on the veteran actor.
Talking to The Standard, Dench revealed, “In the ’50s, I was taken to Stratford by my parents, where I saw Peggy playing Cleopatra and it completely changed my life”. In 1987, many decades later, Dench would play Cleopatra herself in a production of Antony and Cleopatra, surely fulfilling a long dream of hers.
She owes a lot to Ashcroft, whose presence on stage did a lot to convince her that this was her calling, too. “I was going on one road and completely veered off along another. Subsequently, she became an unbelievably good friend and a mentor to me,” she admitted.
Ashcroft would win an Academy Award for A Passage to India in 1985, but her legacy really resides on British stages, where she became known for taking on many Shakespearean women, much like Dench would come to do, which makes one wonder what the latter’s career would look like if she hadn’t been taken to watch Ashcroft’s performance that fateful day.
It’s interesting just how life-changing a single event can be; if Dench’s parents hadn’t suggested taking a trip down to Stratford, home of the Bard, then she might never have become an actor, for soon after, she applied to study at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and later in her life she would follow in her icon’s footsteps to become a president of that very same institution.
