The “sensational” role Judi Dench will always regret not playing
You can only take on so many roles, but what happens when you watch the movie you turned down, only to realise how much you would’ve loved to have been a part of it?
This was the case for Dame Judi Dench, who found herself wishing she hadn’t rejected a role that could’ve actually been a major moment in her career. The actor started out in the theatre, becoming a stalwart member of the British stage, a particularly useful skill when it came to casting an actor who could play a Shakespearean woman to perfection.
Whether it was embodying Ophelia or Lady Macbeth, Dench could do it all, and her sheer versatility made her one of the most acclaimed stage actors of her generation; thus, while the dame dipped her toes into cinematic waters in the 1960s, she predominantly kept to the stage. Soon, however, when a role came along in a play that would ultimately be adapted to the big screen, she turned it down and lived to regret it.
It was the mid-1980s, and Willy Russell had penned a moving tale of feminine autonomy, Shirley Valentine, which sees the titular middle-aged Liverpudlian, fed up with running after an ungrateful husband and daughter, finally pluck up the courage to do something for herself. She embarks on a rather spontaneous holiday to Greece, where she becomes embroiled in an affair with a mysterious Greek businessman, and the holiday proves to be a transformative moment in her life, with Shirley coming to realise that she must free herself from the shackles of an existence that doesn’t fulfil her.
Both the play and the film, directed by Lewis Gilbert, take a monologue-heavy approach, allowing us to enter Shirley’s inner thoughts as she grapples with the societal expectations of being a working-class mother and a wife, while also acknowledging her desires for something more.
In one powerful moment, she says, “I have allowed myself to lead this little life, when inside me there was so much more. And it’s all gone unused. And now it never will be. Why do we get all this life if we don’t ever use it? Why do we get all these feelings and dreams and hopes if we don’t ever use them?”
The play was a great success, with Pauline Collins earning several accolades, including a Laurence Olivier Award for ‘Best Actress’. She had already made a name for herself on TV with a role in Upstairs Downstairs, but her performance as Shirley really marked her out as a true talent, and a few years later, she would reprise the role for the big screen, which would earn her an Academy Award nomination and a Bafta win.
So, it could’ve been Dench who earned this acclaim, perhaps propelling her to cinematic fame much earlier, but she ultimately rejected the part, and it’s one of the few pangs of regret that she has experienced in her long, long career, although she can hardly be that annoyed when considering how incredible Collins’ performance was.
She called Collins “sensational”, although she has certainly kicked herself for not taking on the part, which she surely would’ve performed with impressive skill. Sometimes a role just feels perfectly suited for one person and no one else, though, and in this case, it had to be Collins.
