(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $55)
I didn’t realise how well I knew Judi Dench until I started her autobiography and it was as though she herself was reading it to me. I could literally hear that distinctive clipped slightly we-are-not-amused voice in my ear, which makes this wonderful book all the more engaging.
We might know her now for her oscar win in ors Brown or her role as o in the new Bond movies, or even for her popular TV shows like A Fine Romance, but her book is really a love letter to her true passion: the theatre.
To begin with I felt fleetingly overwhelmed by the name-dropping of classical actors and directors I’d never heard of, but I quickly fell so in love with Dame Judi and her mischievous stories that it didn’t matter.
As she recounted the shenanigans of life in the theatre in her frightfully English way, including all the terrible tricks the actors and actresses play on each other, I remembered that I used to love reading books about the repertory life when I was growing up.
In fact, I even sent off for the enrolment forms to drama school in London at one stage. Thankfully for all concerned, I never did anything more about it.
It just sounds like such Famous Five sort of fun moving around with various plays, collapsing laughing over private jokes during important scenes, skiving off to the pub after the matinée.
And Dame Judi’s wicked sense of humour shines throughout.
When she agreed to play the great beauty Cleopatra at the National Theatre, for example, everyone she told openly laughed in her face. This quite rightfully made her paranoid so her opening line to the director at rehearsal was: “I hope you know what you’re doing, setting out to direct Cleopatra with a menopausal dwarf.”
Don’t expect any muck-slinging, this dame is far too polite for that, nor will you find much sentimentality, even when she speaks briefly of the 2001 death of her much-loved husband, Michael Williams.
A class act from beginning to end.
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