‘Mrs Brown’: The movie that made Judi Dench break her cardinal rule of acting
Discipline is an important part of being a successful actor, with many of the all-time greats spending their entire professional lives with a rigid set of rules in place that they’ll never deviate from. Of course, even if rules aren’t meant to be broken there tends to be one exception that proves the rule, which was the case for Judi Dench.
The legend has been a fixture of stage and screen since the late 1950s, even if it took a while for her talents to be recognised by a global audience. Everyone in the United Kingdom was completely aware that she was one of the very best in the business, but her preference for treading the boards over the chance to strut her stuff in film and television ensured she spent a long time as one of acting’s best-kept secrets, from a worldwide perspective at least.
However, that all changed in the late 1990s when Dench secured the first Academy Award nomination of her career. She was 62 years old when the film was released, and even though she was a known quantity on native shores, her performance brought her international attention, the likes of which she’d never experienced before.
Even though she’d been a professional actor for four decades at that point, she recalled with a mixture of amusement and bewilderment how an American journalist informed her that he knew she’d done “some work on the stage” before making an impact in the movies. It was an understatement of epic proportions, but her breakthrough doubled as the film that made her break her cardinal rule.
The eight-time Oscar nominee has been adamant since the very beginning that she never wants to watch any feature-length production she’s been involved in, describing it as “an appalling thing” for any actor to witness their own performance after it’s been completed. That said, there was one role that she’d happily revisit time and time again.
“Mrs Brown,” she told The Times. “Because we had such a fun time doing it. He was brilliant, Billy [Connolly]. Well, he is brilliant. I could watch Mrs Brown again. But there are a lot of my films I haven’t seen. Maybe I will one day when I’ve forgotten a bit more about them.”
It was her highest-profile role in a mainstream motion picture, and looking at what it did for her career, it was worth the wait. Obviously, Dench was doing just fine as a jewel in the crown of British acting long before Mrs Brown, but her Oscar nod opened up plenty more doors across the pond. The very next year, she notched her second nomination and went one better, scooping the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ prize in Elizabeth for one of the shortest victorious performances in the ceremony’s history.
