Judi Dench Guides Us Through Her Brilliant Career (Photos)
thewrap.comA version of this story about Judi Dench first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.Dame Judi Dench and and Sir Kenneth Branagh’s twelfth collaboration since they met in 1987 was a auspicious one: Playing her longtime friend’s grandmother in his autobiographical coming-of-age drama “Belfast” earned Dench her eighth Oscar nomination. (Branagh didn’t fare too poorly, either: He now has nominations in more categories than anyone in Oscar history.) “It is good, always, to know somebody so well that you have a kind of shorthand with them, which I have with Ken because we’ve worked together for such a long time,” Dench told TheWrap. “But this was a very personal story to him and we all, I think, felt a tremendous responsibility to him to get it right.
And I hope that’s what we did.”Dench’s career, of course, was thriving for decades before she and Branagh crossed paths. She spent years in the London theater beginning in the 1950s, performing alongside the likes of Vanessa Redgrave and Ian McKellen, won her first BAFTA Award as Most Promising Newcomer for the film Four in the Morning in 1965 and went on to land Oscar nominations for Mrs.
Brown, Shakespeare in Love (for which she won), Chocolat, Iris, Mrs. Henderson Presents, Notes on a Scandal, Philomena and now Belfast—as well as playing spymaster M in eight James Bond movies.Here, Dench offers her takes on photos from throughout a career that, she said, was never really planned. “I never know,” she said. “I just wait and hope that something will turn up.”“My very first job, playing Ophelia (in Hamlet) at the Old Vic in 1957.
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