The day Judi Dench sacked her agent on the spot: “You are fucking fired”
Plenty of actors have shown undying loyalty to their agents and stuck with them for almost their entire careers, but Judi Dench realised that enough was enough after she’d been misled into doing something that she explicitly stated she never wanted to do.
It’s got absolutely nothing to do with her acting career, though, and you can’t fault her representatives in that regard. After all, the star has been booked and busy since the early 1960s, and while it took her until three decades later to take her first serious steps in cinema, it’s safe to say she’s done alright since then.
While it’s not as if Dench has spent the last 60 years blindly stumbling into whatever part her team recommends, they’re the hagglers and negotiators who make the deals. As a result, the dame has become one of the United Kingdom’s utmost icons of stage and screen, hoovering up endless awards and acclaim along the way.
As mentioned, thespians can be fully committed to their agents, and Dench is no different. Julian Belfrage represented her for years, and when he passed away in 1994, his wife, Victoria, took over as the head of Julian Belfrage Associates, keeping hold of other famous clients, including John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Daniel Day-Lewis.
However, during what should have been a routine trip to Los Angeles, Dench lost her rag. There are a thousand reasons why a decorated actor would snap at their agent, but her reason for booting them on the spot is decidedly niche, even if a direct order was technically disobeyed, so it wasn’t out of the blue.
“We were out in Los Angeles, and my agent said, ‘I’ve got to take you to Universal Studios,'” she recalled. Why would Dench end up handing out marching orders over a trip to a theme park? Because her wishes had been made abundantly clear, and they weren’t adhered to, which left her absolutely fuming.
“I told her I didn’t want anything that shoots me up in the air,” the Oscar-winning icon explained. “So we were in little boats, and it was absolutely charming. And then, suddenly, we dropped 80 feet into a pool of water. I was so angry. I fired her at that minute. I said, ‘You are fucking fired.'”
The thought of Judi Dench at a theme park is bizarre enough, but the thought of Judi Dench at a theme park, going on a water ride, plummeting down a multi-storey drop, and then immediately sacking her agent because she was so indignant at having been put through something she didn’t want to experience in the first place is an entirely different matter.
Some folks don’t care for those types of attractions, and that’s fine. Clearly, Dench is among that number, and she was so resistant to Universal Studios’ more white-knuckle rides that she decided the only course of action was to relieve someone of their employment. It was probably only temporary, but it goes to show how pissed off she was.
