The director Judi Dench wanted to work with her whole life: “I’ve waited 75 years for this”
As one of the United Kingdom’s greatest actors, with a career comparable to anyone who’s ever graced the stage or screen, Judi Dench isn’t going to bow out of the spotlight harbouring too many regrets.
However, Dench would have felt unfulfilled if she hadn’t gotten the chance to tick a key item off her bucket list, one she was so enthusiastic about accomplishing that she suggested it was literally the opportunity of a lifetime she’d been waiting for her entire career.
That might sound hyperbolic considering the raft of accolades and adulation Dench has become accustomed to since first starting out in the theatre in the late 1950s, but it just goes to show that legends recognise legends, and they regularly daydream about collaborating with each other.
It takes a special kind of talent to be put on such a lofty pedestal by an actor who’s won an Academy Award from eight nominations, scooped ten Baftas, taken home a pair of Golden Globes, notched seven Olivier Awards, seized a Tony, and spent seven decades as one of her nation’s marquee performers, but that’s the appeal of Clint Eastwood in a nutshell.
“He’s a legend,” Dench accurately surmised, per Female. “So when he rang me up, my voice went up several octaves. I thought, ‘I’ve waited 75 years for this.'” There’s a reason why the old saying posits people should never meet their heroes, though, after the former James Bond stalwart struggled to get to grips with Eastwood’s signature directorial style when she was cast as Annie Hoover in J Edgar.
Even though she’d mastered the art of live performance during her years spent treading the boards, cinema was a whole different ballgame. If Dench were lucky, Eastwood would extend himself as far as two takes of any given scene, but anyone familiar with the icon’s working method will know that doesn’t happen very often.
For his part, Eastwood celebrated Dench as a “terrific lady” who was his “only choice for this role,” leaving the four-time Oscar winner “glad she didn’t turn me down.” It was all smiles before a single frame of footage had been shot, but despite the latter being granted the opportunity she’d been waiting her entire life for by working with the former, it wasn’t entirely smooth sailing.
It does beg the question as to why Dench was so surprised and frustrated that J Edgar was a production that rarely exceeded more than a single take for any scene when that’s the way Eastwood has been steering his productions since he first stepped behind the camera. He doesn’t make exceptions for anybody, regardless of whether they’re a living legend who’d been desperate to be part of their repertory for as long as they could remember.
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