The one role Judi Dench will always refuse to play: “I told him where to get off”
The more famous an actor becomes, the more likely they are to pick and choose what roles they want to play. Whether it’s in film, television, or the theatre, Judi Dench has been in that fortunate position for a long time, even if there’s one part she’d never consider playing under any circumstances.
It helps that she’s one of the United Kingdom’s all-time greats, and amassing a catalogue of acclaimed performances dating back over 60 years makes it a lot easier to tell a director, producer, or casting agent to shove their offer up their arse, although Dench probably wouldn’t phrase it quite like that.
One of the inevitabilities of the performing arts is that plum gigs are harder to come by the older an actor gets, not that it held her back. After all, Dench was in her early 60s by the time she played her first leading role in a feature, and started as she meant to go on by snagging an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’ in 1997’s Mrs Brown.
Her stock was raised even higher by an Oscar-winning turn in the following year’s Shakespeare in Love, with the diminutive thespian even becoming a blockbuster fixture through her ongoing run as M in Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig’s James Bond movies. There’s not much she can’t do, but there’s definitely one thing that she won’t.
It’s no secret that William Shakespeare has been Dench’s lifeblood for as long as she can remember, and her first time playing the secondary title role in Romeo and Juliet came all the way back in 1960. She’s reprised it several times under several guises and even directed a 1993 production of the play, but drew the line at being asked to play the Nurse.
In an interview with Tim Teeman, Dench agreed with her old friend Glenda Jackson’s belief that agreeing to embody the Nurse is the death knell for a veteran actor’s career. It was a part she never wanted to play either, and it assisted her decision to step away from being a full-time performer, and her cohort was in full agreement.
“Nor me,” Dench concurred about her aversion to being the Nurse. “I was offered it a few years ago by Peter Hall, and I told him where to get off. You get asked to do ‘flashback’ parts, except you’re the one having the flashback, you’re never in the flashback itself.”
The awards-laden icon has played her fair share of motherly figures, confidants, and supporting characters in her time, but she draws the line at Romeo and Juliet‘s Nurse. For whatever reason, Dench has always operated under the assumption that doing so would mark the beginning of the end for her relevancy as an actor, and she’s made it perfectly clear in the theatrical world and beyond that nobody should even bother asking her because there’s only going to be one answer.
Then again, Lesley Manville was in her mid-50s when she played the part in the Julian Fellowes-scripted modern-day retelling that was released in 2015, so it’s evidently not a rule that every Shakespearean stalwart adheres to.
