The one and only actor who hates being compared to Judi Dench: “It pisses me off”
The majority of actors would kill for a career that’s even half as lengthy and successful as Judi Dench, and they’d love nothing more than to be mentioned in the same breath as a legend of stage and screen, but rules are made to have exceptions.
If a thespian drew a line under their professional life with even half as many trophies as Dench has in her cabinet, they’d be thrilled, seeing as she’s got an Academy Award, ten Baftas, two Golden Globes, seven Olivier Awards, and a Tony from a combined total of 63 nominations spanning from 1965 to 2022.
She’s also one of the most celebrated Shakespearean performers to ever tread the boards, one of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever actors, and one of the few people, if not the only person, to have shared a stage with John Gielgud and shared a screen with Vin Diesel, which sums up her versatility and longevity.
Having worked with everyone from Vittorio De Sica and Clint Eastwood to Samuel L Jackson and Josh Gad, Dench has seen and done almost everything there is to see and do in film, television, and theatre. There’s always pressure when one name is compared to an icon that came before, but there’s one actor who actively bristles at the prospect of the long-time M’s name being invoked.
That’s probably because it’s her daughter, though. Finty Williams, the only child of Dench and her late husband Michael Williams, is an experienced performer in her own right. Her career stretches back to the early 1990s, and much like her old dear, it’s covered stage and screen, while she’s also added audiobooks to her arsenal.
The pair have worked together on a number of projects, including Mrs Brown, Ladies in Lavender, The Importance of Being Earnest, a theatre production of The Vote, and the animated children’s TV series Angelina Ballerina, where Finty voiced the title character. Like many other second-generation stars, she’d love nothing more than to escape the inescapable.
“A lot of people want to go, ‘She’s not as good as her mother’, which is true, but I can also name you another 80 people who probably aren’t as good,” she told The Times. “It pisses me off being pre-judged. That pisses me off, pisses me off hugely. Just because I don’t think it’s fair.”
“I don’t know whether, if your father is a brain surgeon, people go, ‘He’s not as good a brain surgeon as his father,'” she reasoned. “I don’t know whether that happens, but because of who ma is, a lot of people have an opinion, which they form before they get to know me, or before they can see what I can do.”
It’s a completely understandable perspective, one that a lot of folks in her position have suffered from. 99.9% of actors would probably love to spend a day in Judi Dench’s shoes, and it only seems fair that one of the very few outliers who doesn’t is her child.
