The “unbelievably rapturous” 1965 movie scene Judi Dench will never forget: “That was quite a day”
To most of us, by simple virtue of the fact she’s now 91 years old, Judi Dench has always been something of a veteran actor. But that doesn’t mean, rather like your mum and dad, that she was always old, because she wasn’t. She was a young woman once, and one who enjoyed doing a spot of onscreen heavy petting, for that matter.
For the last 25 years or so, Dench has been a pretty constant presence in her twilight years, and in fact, it was the last part of her career that was by far the most successful: all eight of her Academy Award nominations, including one win for Shakespeare in Love, came after 1998, by which point she was already well into her 60s.
And by then she had already been in the acting game a long, long time, 40 years in fact, because she made her professional bow all the way back in 1957 in a production of Hamlet in Liverpool. After moving into TV over the next decade, she had a pivotal couple of years between 1964 and 1966, when she made her film debut in a Richard Attenborough neo-noir called The Third Secret, won a ‘Best Newcomer’ at the Baftas, and made another movie in which she was allowed to let her romantic side roam free.
Although she bemoans the fact that historically she hasn’t had many roles involving kissing, she told The Radio Times, “I made a film called He Who Rides a Tiger a very long time ago with [the late] Tom Bell, who I had never met, and on the first day we had an unbelievably rapturous scene to do…that was quite a day. That was terrific. He was beautiful and sweet…”
Dench played the female lead in the British crime drama about a burglar released from prison who goes on the run when a job goes wrong and results in the death of an accomplice. It wasn’t enough to give her the movie bug, though, and she would only make two films in the next ten years, instead focusing on TV and stage work.
Although she hasn’t had much opportunity to express her fondness for saucy stuff in her career, she has been involved in some projects that definitely tip over into that realm. And in 1978, she made a film with Jeremy Irons in which she had some nude scenes, called Langrishe, Go Down.
First broadcast on the BBC, it was a Harold Pinter adaptation of a novel about three spinster sisters, one of whom falls for Irons’ German student, and it disappeared for many years until, in 2002, it was transferred to 16mm film and rereleased by an American producer.
This wasn’t a development Dench was particularly pleased about by all accounts, especially as some moments included her smearing merengue over her chest and running starkers around a garden.
Dench also then starred, and won considerable acclaim for, a film that some described as a ‘Fatal Attraction for the noughties’. 2006’s Notes on a Scandal saw her team up with Cate Blanchett for the steamy thriller about a veteran teacher who discovers her colleague is having an illicit affair with a male student, for which both Dench and Blanchett were nominated for Oscars for ‘Best Actress’ and ‘Best Supporting Actress’ respectively.
