The director who “almost destroyed” Judi Dench’s career: “Gave me a very hard time”
Even though nobody who’s ever worked with Judi Dench has a bad word to say about her, no actor is immune from having a run-in with a director or two, and one of them was so dismissive of the star’s talents that it almost ruined her self-belief.
As one of the most accomplished stage and screen performers of her, or any other, generation, it boggles the mind that anyone would think Dench wasn’t cut out for a career in the performing arts. Then again, she hadn’t quite established herself by the early 1960s, when she was singled out for scorn.
She was hardly a novice, though, having tread the boards in multiple productions and won plenty of notice for being one of the Shakespearean scene’s fastest-rising names. Still, any inexperienced thespian who takes a verbal tongue-lashing from a director is going to take it personally, even if there was a notable silver lining.
It wouldn’t be the last time the Academy Award winner ran into trouble with the people calling the shots, either. Dench admitted that she’d spent her entire life dreaming of working with Clint Eastwood, and when she finally did, she grew increasingly frustrated with his habit of shooting one or two takes and then moving on to the next scene.
When she collaborated with fellow British heavyweight, James Ivory, on A Room with a View, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he never wanted her there in the first place. Even before she’d graduated to the silver screen, an unnamed director told her she “had the wrong face” for cinema, which hardly held her back.
In 1961, Dench was cast as Anya in a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which was also the first time she’d worked with John Gielgud, who played Leonid Andreievich Gaev. It was the beginning of a friendship that would last until his death in 2000, which meant there was at least one positive to an experience that almost shattered her aspirations.
“The director, Michel Saint-Denis, gave me a very hard time and almost destroyed my confidence,” Dench shared. “But at one rehearsal, as we exited the end of Act 1, Sir John said, ‘Oh, if you’d been doing that for me in one of my productions, I’d have been delighted.’ I was devoted to him forevermore.”
If there’s one thing an actor needs to succeed, it’s confidence. Unfortunately, Dench’s was in dangerously short supply after being berated and belittled by Saint-Denis, who was constantly criticising her approach to the character. If it wasn’t for Gielgud providing a source of positivity among the relentless dressing-downs, then who knows what the long-term effects may have been.
Ironically, despite Saint-Denis insisting that she was playing the part of Anya all wrong, Dench reprised it the very next year in a made-for-TV adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, so she must have been doing something right. In a roundabout way, it was a big ‘fuck you’ to the director, seeing as Michael Elliott had absolutely no issues hiring her to play the very same part.
