“She’s a proper punk”: the booze-fuelled karaoke that unleashed Judi Dench’s inner rockstar
“Rage against the dying of the light” goes the refrain from Dylan Thomas’ poem, but let’s face it, if you recognise it then it’s more likely you’ve seen Interstellar, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Regardless of where you know the phrase from, it applies to anyone who doesn’t let their advancing years put a stop to embracing life to the full, and Judi Dench is a fine example of that.
She may now have finally retired from acting after a nigh-on 70-year career, but even well into her 80s and the last few Daniel Craig James Bond movies there was a brilliantly mischievous air about her, a kind of unflappable ‘I’ve seen and done it all darling now, off you fuck’ grandeur that made her on-screen death in 2012’s Skyfall even more iconic after eight outings as ‘M’.
That career, which spanned seven decades, eight Academy Award nominations and one win, for 1998’s Shakespeare in Love, undoubtedly stands as one of the most impressive of any British female actor in any era, certainly in the conversation with the late Glenda Jackson and Maggie Smith, who died in 2024. She started off in theatre in the 1950s, doing Shakespeare for almost a decade before making a film debut in 1964 thriller The Third Secret and winning a ‘Best Actress’ Bafta as early as 1968.
What followed was an astonishing, prolonged period of success that saw Dench rack up countless awards as the years ticked by, notable by the fact she actually seemed to get better once she was into her 60s, as evidenced by a run of Oscar nominations in the 2000s for films like Chocolat, Iris, Mrs Henderson Presents, the Steve Coogan-penned drama Philomena and 2021’s Kenneth Branagh movie Belfast, when she was 86.
A glimpse into what a spirited figure Dench can be in private came from a possibly unlikely source a couple of years back, as Texas singer Sharleen Spiteri recalled spending time with her away from the movie cameras.
She told the Financial Times: “Judi has such a naughtiness about her, which I absolutely love.. In January 2023, a group of us were celebrating Hogmanay at The Fife Arms in Aberdeenshire, and the two of us were drunk. We were going from one room to another, and came across an automated piano playing… She jumped on and started playing.”
Adding: “I drunkenly sat down beside her and started singing Abba’s “Waterloo”…we had no idea that anyone filmed us. And then we were at lunch the next day, and I had all these messages from all over the world saying, ‘I saw you and Judi Dench singing on BBC News!’ I thought it was awful, my idea of hell.”
She concluded, “I walked over to Judi and gave her my phone, and she laughed and said, ‘God, if only we had known, we would have rehearsed!’… Judi doesn’t give a shit. She’s a proper punk.”
Dench’s last full movie came in 2022 with the Alan Bennett comedy Allelujah, but she has lent her voice to a couple of shorts in the years since, and will do so again in the upcoming The Forgeries of Jealousy, doing the monologue from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
