“Oh, good grief”: the 1978 role Judi Dench called an “arse-paralysing part”
Is it possible to completely soil the acting legacy you’ve built up over a 60-year period, no matter how much Academy Award success you’ve had, simply due to greed? I ask because we are definitely seeing a rise in older stars taking on projects that leave you thinking ‘But why?’, and I don’t want to judge Judi Dench too much, but she is one of the frontrunners.
I should set out my argument here, so let’s remember the fact that Judi Dench has been a wildly successful and incredibly popular actor for decades, and has achieved a huge amount in that time, none of which can be disputed. She’s picked up eight Oscar nominations, winning once, and 11 Golden Globe nods, winning twice. She is, quite evidently, very good at this whole acting thing.
And with that kind of success comes considerable spoils. Now, she’s 90, she has, at a conservative estimate, accrued around £40million in terms of net worth, which is enough these days to buy a decent second-hand car and the top Netflix package. Much of that wealth would have been brought in from her eight performances as ‘M’ in the James Bond franchise, which again she was iconic in, so you have to question the need to parody, if not cheapen that completely, by doing those Moneysupermarket ads as basically the same character.
She isn’t alone in this, of course, the ‘jumping the shark’ moment in super-rich actors surely had to come when Robert De Niro did some ads for Kia simply because they had a car called the Niro, allowing him to turn up, collect a monumental cheque and say stuff like, ‘Oh I thought you said De Niro, which is rubbish and not really forgivable.
But what makes Dench’s more recent work even more egregious has to be the fact that she allowed herself to be turned into a CGI cat with James Corden for the feline car crash that was Cats, which, as late career performances go, has to rank up there with some of Axl Rose’s ‘singing’ on the last couple of Guns N’ Roses tours.
So perhaps it’s best to focus on the actually good things that Dench did, and as we mentioned, there were many of those; after all, she made her first appearance on TV as far back as 1959 and her first movie appearance in a 1964 thriller called The Third Secret. Over the next years, she honed her skills at the National Theatre and then through the 1970s with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she began to be recognised as a generational talent, winning an Olivier award for Macbeth in 1977.
But she doesn’t look back on all of those interpretations of the Bard’s works too fondly, not least one the following year as she wrote in her book Behind the Scenes, recalling, “I had a blonde ponytail as Phoebe in As You Like It, what an arse-paralysing part! When the audience is shifting about and finding their handbags, ready to go home, suddenly she comes on again, having a row with Silvius. ‘Oh good grief’, they all think, ‘not another two having a row!’”
Although Dench has now semi-retired, she still lent her voice to the ‘posh kids go on some kind of LSD trip’ movie The Magic Faraway Tree, co-starring Andrew Garfield, which is still showing in cinemas at the moment if you fancy listening to her pretending to be an enchanted fridge, which would still be better than Cats.
