When Judi Dench humiliated herself in front of an icon: “I wasn’t able to say another word”
Her first love was, is, and will forever be the stage, but that doesn’t mean Judi Dench stumbled into a film career with her eyes closed, remaining completely oblivious to the world of cinema.
After almost a decade of treading the boards, Dench finally made her feature debut in the 1964 psychological thriller The Third Secret, even though it would be more than 30 years before she finally played the lead role in a movie. When she did, though, the floodgates were opened.
Starting off on the right foot, she nabbed an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’ for her first time taking top billing in Mrs Brown, and then went one better the following year when she scooped the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ prize for Shakespeare in Love despite her minimal screentime.
A one-time winner, eight-time nominee, and proud owner of ten Baftas and two Golden Globes, she’s a legend of the screen, which still pales in comparison to the almost deified status she holds in the world of theatre, having deservedly taken her place among the pantheon of all-time great stage performers.
Having been so committed and dedicated to performing in plays, most of which were the works of William Shakespeare, for the first years of her career, the odd case of filmic obliviousness can be forgiven. However, she’s never forgotten the embarrassing faux pas she made in front of an icon.
One of Dench’s first televised roles came in the 1959 TV series The Four Just Men, and she was completely ignorant of the fact that one of her co-stars was a pretty big deal. “In it was Vittorio de Sica and one morning, he took me for a coffee,” she told Philip Berk. “I was so young, I was just at the Old Vic and we had coffee together and I said, ‘What are you going to do next?’
It sounds like innocuous small talk, only for Dench to put her foot right into her mouth. “He said, ‘I’m going make a film, back to Rome to make a film,'” she continued. “I said to him, I mean, it’s forever on my conscience, ‘Will it be the first film you’ve made?'”
By this time, de Sica had directed over a dozen movies, won the Palme d’Or for Miracle in Milan, claimed a Bafta, been the recipient of two specially-awarded Oscars for his influential contributions to international cinema, and become a foundational pillar of the Italian neorealism movement. On top of that, he was also the mastermind behind one of the greatest films ever made, a bombshell he dropped on Dench.
“‘You may have heard of a little thing called Bicycle Thieves?'” he asked her, and she was ready for the ground to open up and swallow her whole. “Then, of course, it completely flooded in. I wasn’t able to say another word to him.” Everybody makes conversational mistakes every now and then, but Dench might be the only one who asked late 1950s Vittorio de Sica if he’d ever directed a movie before.
