Judi Dench’s favourite songs of all time
Following her 1957 Old Vic debut, Judi Dench went on to make a name for herself onstage in the 1960s thanks to starring roles in Shakespeare classics when playing Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and as Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, as well as appearing as Anya in an adaptation of Anton Chevok’s The Cherry Orchard, as well as Irina in his play Three Sisters, but towards the end of the decade, she showed that her talents didn’t end with acting.
Cast as the leading lady Sally Bowles during the 1968 production of Cabaret, Dench could be heard singing to the rafters each night and belting out renditions of timeless songs like ‘Don’t Tell Mama’, ‘Maybe This Time’ and, of course, the titular ‘Cabaret’ and received rave-reviews for her work.
Though she has been more closely associated with straight theatrical work throughout her long career, she has at times returned to more musical ground. In 1981, Dench was cast to play Grizabella in the then-new production of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Cats, which would have seen her tackle the musical’s one good song, ‘Memories’, but she had to pull out of the commitment due to injury (Dench was much later recast in the role of Old Deuteronomy in Tom Hooper’s live-action movie adaptation, although the much less said about that movie the better). She returned to musical performance in the leading role of Desiree Armfeldt in the 1995 West End revival of A Little Night Music, where she notably sang the musical’s most famous song, ‘Send in the Clowns’.
And it was around this time that Dench made the real jump from stage icon to screen legend, as she took on the regular role of M in the James Bond franchise. While she had made many appearances on television before, Dench had only appeared on the big screen a handful of times before the Bond series turned her into a much more in-demand actress. Though her career might not be so widely associated with the music from her productions, the Bond series most certainly is, with each new movie’s theme song as much of a story as the actor cast to play Bond or his comically/erotically/drolly named sidekicks.
Despite the fact that she is not known as much for her involvement with the music in her work than she is for her acting, Dench holds a deep and abiding love for a wide range of genres, and has as deep a reverence for the great composers and singers of classical and jazz as she does for any playwright. At various times throughout the years, whether first in conversation with Sue Lawley or later with Kirsty Young, Dench has enthused about classical pieces such as Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’, Henry Purcell’s ‘March’ and Hubert Parry’s piece ‘I Was Glad’, or else Mozart’s ‘Soave sia il vento’, as well as landmark jazz recordings like the Charlie Parker and Miles Davis collaboration ‘Blues in Green’, Count Basie’s ‘All Right, Okay, You Win’ and Billie Holiday’s haunting and frighteningly powerful 1959 song ‘Strange Fruit’.
Elsewhere, she has shown some range in admitting her admiration for Chris de Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’, but it is a song made most famous by Old Blue Eyes that she has singled out as her all-time favourite. When asked on a 2015 Desert Island Discs appearance what her favourite song of all time was, Dench replied of the Cole Porter-penned ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ that “This is Sinatra, who I think I’ve probably chosen every time I’ve ever been asked to choose a record. I can’t be anywhere, actually, without Frank Sinatra”.
