Huge props to British Vogue for putting Dame Judi Dench on their June cover. American magazines, for the most part, avoid putting any woman older than 50 on their covers. If they put an 85 year old woman on an American cover, they would probably find some way to use a really old photo of her. Anyway, I love Judi. Everybody loves Judi. She’s one of the most beloved and unproblematic treasures in entertainment. This cover profile was exceptionally well-written too – British Vogue spoke to her just before and just after the coronavirus lockdown, and Judi was already locking down in her Surrey home. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

On the lockdown: “I am sure I feel like everyone else, such unprecedented times are quite hard to comprehend… What is a good thing is that it has made people aware of the predicament of others who are completely alone. If a great deal of kindness comes out of this, then that will be a plus.”

On her role in Cats: “The cloak I was made to wear! Like five foxes f**king on my back.” She’d hoped she would look rather elegant. Instead: “A battered, mangy old cat,” she says, appalled. “A great big orange bruiser. What’s that about?” I reassure her that irony-loving younger audiences can’t get enough of it, and she nods. “I had a very nice email… no, not an email.” A text? “Yes, a text, from Ben Whishaw [the actor], who just doted on it. So sweet. So lovely.”

She’s been a Quaker since her teens & she loves nature: “I’ve planted all those trees for friends. I bought an acre and a half or something in Scotland and, in actual fact, I’m going to plant 12 trees in the next two, three weeks, because the family is flying to Barbados and back, six of us. And I think that is, you know, being responsible. Don’t you?” She will later remark, after that holiday has been and gone and she is deep in quarantine in late March, “We have the incredible bonus of glorious weather at the moment, and for me it is the most wonderful time of year. To see the trees coming into blossom and daffodils in the garden, they certainly give you hope, and we need a lot of that at the moment. I am very aware of people who may not have a garden and are not as fortunate to be able to sit outside in the sunshine.”

What she enjoys about being 85: “Nothing. I don’t like it at all. I don’t think about it. I don’t want to think about it. They say age is an attitude… it’s horrible.”

On her deteriorating eyesight: “I saw Mags – Maggie Smith – the other day, and she said, ‘My god, I think they’re going to stop me driving my car.’” Dench had to give up driving a few years ago, when her sight began to deteriorate. She misses it horribly. “It’s the most terrible shock to your system. Ghastly. It’s terrible to be so dependent on people.”

Her late husband Michael Williams: “He used to cry when he laughed. The more he laughed the more he cried. Oh god, he made me laugh.”

On Harvey Weinstein: “My sympathies go to anybody who went through an experience like that. It’s very upsetting.” On some level it’s clear she is still computing it; to have so misjudged a boss and friend. “It’s good that things come to the surface and are spoken about and people feel a kind of freedom, I’m sure.” Were you ever sexually harassed in your own career? “No,” she says, adding obliquely, “not something that I wasn’t able to deal with.”

How she spends her time in lockdown: “I haven’t got my family with me, but we are keeping in touch lots by phone calls and FaceTime. I am disciplining myself to learn all the sonnets. I try to learn something new every day, anything.” If she makes the font mega-sized, it works, she says.

[From British Vogue]

I’ve seen Judi talk in interviews about how her deteriorating eyesight has changed the way she works – she truly can’t sit and read her scripts and memorize her lines that way. She gets family members to read scripts to her, then she records the audio of her lines so she can listen to them repeatedly and that’s how she learns them. She seems incredibly close to her family and they seem to enjoy spending time with her, so I imagine the quarantine has been very difficult for her, even though she was putting on a brave face in March. Also, I had no idea she’s a Quaker! And omg, Ben Whishaw texted her a compliment for Cats?? I love him so hard.

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A post shared by British Vogue (@britishvogue) on May 4, 2020 at 9:15am PDT

Cover and photo courtesy of British Vogue.