The “hair-raising” 1981 role Judi Dench called “the most difficult thing I’ve ever done”
There isn’t much about acting that should give Judi Dench cause for concern, but dipping her toes into uncharted waters in the early 1980s for the most difficult role of her career certainly did.
Even though she was already 20 years into her career at that stage and regarded as one of her era’s most gifted performers, most of her work was in the theatre. Not that it’s a lesser medium, and it’s always been her favourite, but it’s a completely different animal to doing the same job in front of the cameras.
Dench was hardly a novice on that front, although it wouldn’t be until 1997 that she played her first leading role in a feature and landed her first of eight Academy Award nominations for Mrs Brown. She’d been in a handful of films throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but then she gave cinema a massive swerve.
Between 1974’s Dead Cert and 1985’s Wetherby, she didn’t make a single movie. Treading the boards was the priority, and when she wasn’t delivering the latest in an ever-increasing line of Shakespearean soliloquies, the future dame was popping up all over the shop on television.
Despite having more than two dozen small-screen credits, the closest Dench had gotten to anything approaching a regular TV gig was 12 episodes of Jackanory in 1968, and when the show was on the airwaves for over 30 years and over 3,000 episodes, you can’t really call that being a regular, can you?
However, that would finally change in 1981, when Dench crossed the frontier and took an unexpected detour into sitcoms. In November of that year, A Fine Romance premiered in the United Kingdom, and during its initial run, it lasted for four seasons and 26 episodes. For someone of her talent and reputation, it doesn’t sound too difficult or demanding, but the opposite was true.
“Situation comedy is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” Dench declared. “You don’t get a preview; you get one chance to get it right.” Not even the presence of her real-life husband Michael Williams was enough to untangle the bag of nerves she’d become every time she stepped onto the set, not that audiences ever noticed.
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Handily, despite her insistence that it was the hardest gig of her career, Dench didn’t show it, with the star notching back-to-back Bafta nominations for ‘Best Entertainment Performances’ in 1983 and 1984. It was the first time she’d set foot in the sitcom world, and it scared the shit out of her, but she was a little more comfortable the second time around when she starred with Geoffrey Palmer in As Time Goes By.
“The most hair-raising bit of all is when you have to go out in front of an audience and say hello to them,” the awards-laden veteran noted. “That’s more taxing than doing the rest of the show.” Dench might have been quaking in her boots, but it’s not like she dropped the ball, and nobody was any the wiser to the constant apprehension that plagued her throughout A Fine Romance.
