Judi Dench Reflects on Choosing Roles in New Book of Conversations

Dame Judi Dench is revisiting her life and career in a new book, 'Is It Too Late to Make a Run For It?', written with her friend and fellow actor Brendan O'Hea and published by St. Martin's Press. The book gathers conversations between the two that range across a working life stretching from Shakespeare to James Bond. Dench and O'Hea are set to discuss it with Seth Doane on 'CBS Sunday Morning' on November 8.

Dench has written several books, including 'And Furthermore,' 'Behind the Scenes' and 'Scenes From My Life.' In an excerpt from the new volume titled 'Choosing a Part,' she talks candidly about how she decides which roles to take.

She says she has not always been in a position to choose and calls it something she will never take for granted. She recalls that Mikey used to say, 'Always behave as if it's the last job you'll ever do,' and admits, 'I still carry the fear of not working. Or of never being asked again.' An actor, she notes, cannot simply expect to be employed when so many terrific performers are ready to step in.

Dench contrasts her approach with that of other actors she has known. One judged offers by three questions: 'What's the billing? What's the money? What's the role?' In that order. Others, she says, turned down jobs because their character did not say the last line of the play, something she calls ridiculous, since you would never play Hamlet or Lady Macbeth that way. She also wonders whether it was Michael Caine who said he judged a script by its location, and she understands the logic: one reason she was so keen to do 'Mrs. Brown' was that it meant a month in Scotland, which she calls bliss.

As for her own criteria, she confesses, 'I'm not very good at it, so I tend to leave it to others.' When Mikey was alive, he would read any scripts she was sent and she trusted his judgement completely. She has never enjoyed reading scripts and much prefers to be told the story, ideally by the director. She recalls meeting Stephen Frears to discuss the television drama 'Going Gently' during a walk around Holland Park, listening to him with 'no pressure, no expectations, nothing calculated.'

Some directors, she says, are more cunning. Howard Davies came to her house to talk about 'Mother Courage' and told her only the good bits, neglecting to mention that the character is 'in every bloody scene and doesn't shut up' and pulls a massive cart around the stage all evening, while her mute daughter, played by Zoe Wanamaker in their production, sits perched on top, says nothing and then steals all the reviews.

Asked why she prefers being told a story rather than reading it, Dench cites 'laziness, probably,' along with the childhood memory of being read to. But hearing it from a director, she says, also lets her be more objective and imagine herself in the audience experiencing it for the first time. Holding on to that instinctive response matters, she explains, because once rehearsals begin it is easy to get lost in the weeds of a part, and keeping the overall view is 'a bit like being able to reference the picture on the front of a jigsaw box.'

She agrees with the old line, 'You can make a good script bad, but you can never make a bad script good.' That, she says, is why it is important to be alert to any little niggles when a director first tells the story, and to ask whether the story is worth telling and arresting enough to make an audience sit and listen.

Notably, Dench says, the size of a role never enters her thinking. 'For me, it's the story that's important,' she explains, along with knowing who she will be working with. She enjoyed being directed by John Madden on 'Mrs. Brown' so much that she wrote to him asking for 'any old part, however small, even if it means just walking across the back of the shot.' He wrote back that, funnily enough, he had exactly such a part, and that is how she came to play Elizabeth I in 'Shakespeare in Love.'

'Is It Too Late to Make a Run For It?' by Judi Dench with Brendan O'Hea is available from St. Martin's Press in hardcover, large print, eBook and audio formats.