AS she prepares to turn 90 this year, Dame Judi Dench looks back on a stage and screen career that has been a picture of perfection.
That is, apart from the moment she was killed off in her prime playing spymaster M in the James Bond movies.
It may be almost a decade since her last 007 appearance, but Dame Judi is still smarting over her demise in 2012 film Skyfall.
In new Channel 4 documentary Dame Judi & Jay: The Odd Couple, she opens her heart to her new pal and unlikely co-star, The Repair Shop presenter Jay Blades.
Recalling her hired-to-fired journey, she says of being asked to appear in 1995’s GoldenEye: “They rang up and said, ‘Would you like to play M?’ and (her husband) Mikey said, ‘You’ve got to do it — I’ve got to live with a Bond girl!’
“While theatre has always been my greatest passion, being asked to play the head of MI6 in the Bond series with Pierce Brosnan was simply irresistible.
“I absolutely loved it, but I’d have liked to have been running along the rooftops a bit, and things. Never mind, I sat in an office.
“I appeared in eight Bond films in all, but they decided to kill me off. How dare they?”
Dame Judi’s irritation is understandable, given that from 1995 to 2015 she appeared in more 007 movies than any of the actors who played Bond.
Roger Moore and Sean Connery racked up only seven movies each, and the two Bonds she presided over — Pierce, then Daniel Craig — managed four and five respectively.
That she felt some ownership of the film is obvious in the new programme with Jay, as they go for a speedboat ride on the Thames and whizz past the real MI6 building in London.
“That’s my gaff,” she jokes while she surveys the landmark, which was blown up in 2015’s Spectre — the last Bond movie she appeared in, albeit in a post-humous cameo for her character, Olivia Mansfield.
Her annoyance about her departure from the franchise is probably rooted in the fact that she has always embraced new things in her career.
After all, she went from the darling of Shakespeare classics in her twenties and thirties to a TV sitcom queen in her forties and fifties, first in A Fine Romance, with her actor husband Michael Williams, then in As Time Goes By, with Geoffrey Palmer.
As a result, she quickly gained national treasure status and in 1988 she was made a Dame.
When, seven years later, she was first hired to play M she had just turned 60. And it sparked a fresh clamour to sign her up for Hollywood movies.
That included 1998’s Shakespeare In Love, which earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing an ageing Queen Elizabeth I.
She earned further Academy Award nominations for her roles in the films Mrs Brown, Chocolat, Iris, Mrs Henderson Presents, Notes On A Scandal, Philomena and Belfast.
Judi made the new road-trip documentary with Jay after they became friends when she appeared on BBC One’s The Repair Shop in 2022.
Jay, 54, who has been the foreman/presenter of the hit programme since it launched seven years ago, concedes that they don’t seem to have much in common. But he also recognises a quality in her that he finds alluring.
He says: “Judi is a trouper. She’s willing to just give things a go, and that’s why she’s got to where she has got to.
“She is so willing to learn. I’m in awe of her attitude — ‘No, you can’t tell me I can’t do that, I’m going to do it and who is stopping me?’ What she’s achieved is just remarkable.”
Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would ever act at the Old Vic. I owe it such a lot
Dame Judi Dench
During their time together they take each other to locations with special meaning for them — and for Jay that was returning to East London to show Judi his love of music.
He introduces her to a set of record decks and the art of scratching and mixing.
And proving she is still ready to take on anything, it turns out that Dame Judi is better at it than he is.
Blending tracks and dancing to the tunes, she jokingly describes the experience as being “the highlight of my career”.
When Jay jokes that she may have a calling as a DJ, she quips back:
“No, I’m the JD — and I’ve learned it all now, the timing, and all the buttons.”
Later the pair have even more fun as they visit a local market where
Jay’s mother used to spend hours shopping and gossiping.
Despite struggling with her eyesight due to the condition macular degeneration, Dame Judi wastes no time in getting behind a market stall, and starts flogging plantains.
She enthusiastically tells shoppers: “I hope it’s not the last time I get to do this because I quite like it.
“Do I think I’ve got a future as a plantain seller? Yes, definitely. I love this job.
“I’m a person who can’t see very well. I am very uneasy about things that haven’t been written, but I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”
In turn, Jay — who only learned to read at the age of 51 after a lifelong struggle with dyslexia — turns his hand to reciting part of the script from Hamlet.
Their venue is the stage of London’s Old Vic theatre, where Dame Judi started her career doing Shakespeare plays in 1957.
She earned huge acclaim as Lady Macbeth, Ophelia in Hamlet, and Juliet in Romeo And Juliet, among many other classic roles.
I’ve been lucky enough to have a career as an actor, but the thing I’m most proud of in my life is my family
Dame Judi Dench
Jay is guided by his expert pal along the way as he slowly and carefully makes his way through Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech.
Meanwhile sharp-as-a-tack Judi recites the Bard’s Sonnet 29 — “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” — from memory.
Holding back tears, she reminisces: “The love of acting was very much in my blood. I was in a family where nobody ever stopped quoting Shakespeare.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would ever act at the Old Vic. I owe it such a lot.”
Jay is equally emotional when he returns to his youthful haunts in Islington, North London, and Hackney to the east, to meet some of the local community leaders who helped to ensure he stayed on the right track.
He grew up in a single-parent family in the Seventies and Eighties, surrounded by the temptations of crime, and dodging the threat of racist attacks from the National Front.
He had an absent father and now has 27 siblings dotted around the capital, a fact which seems to leave his travelling companion flabbergasted.
Similarly, Dame Judi makes a teary journey back to the house near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire where, during the Seventies, she was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and where she lived with husband Michael, who died of lung cancer in 2001, aged 65.
Jay is also taken to meet the couple’s daughter Finty Williams, an actor, and they go to the local pub for a quiz in which they test their knowledge about one another.
Among the gems that emerge is that Dame Judi once performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the family goldfish — and she succeeded in bringing it back to life.
Looking back on her life, she says: “I’ve been lucky enough to have a career as an actor, but the thing I’m most proud of in my life is my family.
“I’d like to go back and have a lot of it all over again.”
