The writer Judi Dench calls “the man who pays the rent”
She’s one of Britain’s undisputed national treasures, but even stars as bright as Judi Dench need to keep a roof over their heads. Of course, the venerable Dame probably hasn’t worried about paying the bills for some years now, having featured in eight James Bond films and played two British monarchs. But like any jobbing actor, there were times when this wasn’t the case. And when Dench was looking for work, there was one man she knew she could always rely on.
Dench got her professional start on stage in 1957, playing Ophelia in Hamlet and then moving on to Henry V and Romeo & Juliet. This grounding in some of William Shakespeare’s most well-known classics earned her a spot at the Royal Shakespeare Company just a few years later. Even after shifting to television and film in the 1960s, she returned to the RSC in the mid-1970s and was plied with rave reviews for her performances as Adriana in Much Ado About Nothing and the Bard’s most fearsome female character, Lady Macbeth.
As she ascended through the ranks of British big-screen greats, aided by landing the part of ‘M’ in the Pierce Brosnan Bond revivals, it was another Shakespeare project that took her to the very pinnacle of Hollywood acclaim. In 1998’s Shakespeare In Love, Dench had a small but towering part as Queen Elizabeth I. The romantic comedy is centred on the playwright’s affair with one of his gender-bending cast members in his new work, Romeo & Juliet. However, Dench’s scene-stealing turn – barely ten minutes of screen time – was enough to win her ‘Best Supporting Actress’ at the Academy Awards the next year.
While not a Shakespeare-penned part, it’s clear Dench’s career is inextricably tied to the master storyteller, from her theatrical beginnings to her career high points. It’s no wonder then that Dench has dedicated a book to him, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent, an affectionately tongue-in-cheek title referencing this beneficial relationship.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life, Dench reveals this nickname developed between her and her late husband, the actor Michael Williams. “Shakespeare was the person [whose work] we were playing all the time, so he was very much the man who pays the rent,” she says, adding that it’s a moniker she associates with him to this day. “He knew absolutely everything, as far as I’m concerned, about every condition,” she continues. “That’s why the plays have gone on so long.”
Indeed, Dench has continued returning to this well as recently as 2015, performing on stage in long-time collaborator Kenneth Branagh’s A Winter’s Tale, and in the director’s 2018 film All Is True, not as a Shakespearian creation but as his real-life wife, Anne Hathaway.
Even having spent the last 50 years treading the boards and film sets, there are still gaps in her Shakespeare quota to fill. “I’ve never been in Othello,” she added. “That would have been nice at some point”. She also has the entirety of Twelfth Night committed to memory. As big a Shakespeare aficionado as she is, though, not all of his work resonates with her: “I don’t like The Merchant of Venice as a play,” she admits. “They all behave so badly and there’s not much excuse for any of them.”
