Interview: Judi Dench, actress

FEW things we all know and love about Judi Dench. She is amongst the greatest actors of her generation, no, any generation. She is one of the best things about Britain, up there with fish and chips, The Beatles and the NHS. She is basically like the Queen, only better. She has a wicked sense of humour. She has a voice as cracked and powerful as an earthquake. She is a national treasure. She is a Dame. Oh, and she has the most twinkly eyes in the business. Seriously, Dame Judi Dench's eyes are so twinkly that writers spend entire careers trying to come up with novel ways of describing them. But there is no other way. They're just too twinkly.

I could go on, but she wouldn't like it. As far as Dench is concerned, national treasures are dull and dusty things, destined to be forever trapped behind glass. She would rather be out in the world, hard at work, getting up to mischief. She would rather we stopped banging on about how brilliant she is. In fact, if you were to go by past interviews (and they're surprisingly rare), she would rather be left alone.

This can prove tricky if you're the one interviewing her. In fact, it can be like drawing blood from a stone. Take what Dench says when I ask her if she can watch herself on screen. “No, no, I can't do that,” she says, appalled at the very thought. Then her voice drops to a theatrical hoarse whisper. “Not at all.” I try again. Is she eventually able to judge her own performance? “Look at it dispassionately, you mean? No, I can't.” She looks alarmed, as though I've just asked her if she ever runs down the street naked whistling the James Bond theme.

So she never thinks she has nailed a part? Really? What about Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown, a stupendous portrayal of buttoned-up, festering, passionate grief that led to her first Oscar nomination at the age of 62? Or what about her pinched, poisonous turn as Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal, a performance that forced us to rethink again our image of the saintly national treasure? Now, she's properly horrified and fixes me with those glittering hooded eyes. “Never, ever, ever, ever,” she announces. “I have never thought that. Never, ever. Very good screen actors can look at a take after they've done it and see something, then go back and translate to the screen what they have seen. That's supreme. I can't do that.”

None of this stops us from bowing down. It makes us worse. For Ian McKellan, “one of the great joys of being alive in England in the 21st century is being around when Judi Dench is”. Stephen Fry, meanwhile, wants to put railings around her “so that all may admire her in an orderly and respectful fashion”. And in a TV special over Christmas called The Many Faces of Dame Judi Dench, Geoffrey Palmer, her co-star in long-running sitcom As Time Goes By, simply gushed, “she's everything that everyone says about her”. What did Dench have to say in response? Nothing. She was the only face absent from the programme.

That's the thing about this 77-year-old grande dame. Usually, whenever and wherever she is mentioned, and by mentioned I mean adored, there is a Dench-shaped hole in the proceedings. She may love the company of actors, and her craft, but she doesn't like talking about it. She would rather disappear. Part of this is down to good old-fashioned British modesty of the stop-making-a-fuss sort. But it's also, I suspect, because Dench doesn't get how good she is.

People talk about her extraordinary emotional intelligence, her ingenious ability to cover the entire spectrum of feeling, often in a single scene, and sometimes without even using that famous voice. But she doesn't see it like this. You get the impression that because it comes naturally to her, she doesn't quite recognise or trust it. “Animal intuition,” she says sharply, correcting me. “That's all. It has nothing to with intellect or intelligence of any sort.” Really? (For some reason, ‘really’ is how most questions end up with Dench). “Nothing at all,” she insists. “It's gut feeling.”

We meet in London to talk about her latest film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, as opposed to Jane Eyre, J. Edgar or My Week With Marilyn, all of which she has done in the last 12 months. This one is a comedy drama directed by John Madden, and stars, alongside Dench, much of the great and the good of British acting. Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Celia Imrie, Penelope Wilton ... all give typically dignified performances, but as usual Dench still manages to steal the show. Adapted from a Deborah Moggach novel, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – a kind of Ladies in Lavender in Jaipur – follows the fortunes of a group of British pensioners who, lonely and invisible in their home country, decide to relocate to a retirement home in India.

Dench plays Evelyn, a gentle, compassionate, understated woman who falls in love with India and in so doing transforms her own life. Like Evelyn, Dench had never been to India before. “I was bewitched by it, I must say,” she tells me. How long did it take her to settle into the ten-week shoot in Jaipur? “A day and a half,” she says with a giggle. “Pretty fast, isn't it?”

Before my audience with Dench, I meet Madden, who first directed her in Mrs Brown and then in Shakespeare in Love. He tells me Dench is very similar to Evelyn. “Someone who is self-effacing and is constantly denying the effect she has on other people.”

What's it like working with her? “It's like having a Stradivarius,” he says. “An incomparable instrument. She has one of the great instincts – so true, simple and specific. And that's combined with an astounding modesty, a genuine belief that she hasn't got much to offer, that she doesn't really know what she's doing. If you've been lucky enough to work with her, it will count as one of the most extraordinary blessings of your career.”

And so to the Stradivarius herself. She is sitting in the middle of a gigantic sofa when I enter the room. I say gigantic, but it's more that Dench is so small. Her tiny feet barely touch the carpet. Her tiny hands roam and wring while she talks, bracelets clacking in agreement. Her tiny teeth glint when she laughs. She is very glamorous, dressed in black, her silver pixie crop shimmering like a jewelled cap. Her eyebrows are plucked into fine arches. She seems a bit scary, more M than Mrs Henderson. Those eyes can go from a soft gleam, as though brimming with tears, to seeming as hard, bright and cold as diamonds.

I tell her about Madden's comparison of her with Evelyn. “Well, I suppose we did both fall in love with India,” she says, already wary. “And I suppose I am quite independent.”

Modesty was the word he used. “Well, I don't know about that, do I,” she replies, a bit crossly. Then she realises how modest that sounds, and bursts out laughing. This is why Dench is such a great actor: everything is on the surface, you can see the play of emotions sweeping across her face and you never know what to expect next, if that voice is going to crack into laughter or tears.

Dench doesn't prepare for a role in the traditional sense. She doesn't read scripts. Until he died, in 2001, her husband Michael Williams would read them and then tell her whether or not to take the part. These days, her agent does it. With The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Madden went to her house and pitched the script to her directly. “Well, I can't read now anyway,” she tells me. “I have to have someone read to me. But if I'm playing Ophelia, I don't go to an asylum, if you know what I mean.”

Part of the reason for this method of working is fear. Dench is a fan of the deep end. She likes to frighten herself, be in freefall, fling herself off the cliff. Fear is her great motivator, and part of what keeps her working so tirelessly in her 70s. “I'm always fearful,” she says, throwing her arms up so her bracelets chatter. “And the day I'm not fearful I shall walk home and shut the front door and put my feet up the chimney. Fear generates in you a huge energy. You can use it. When I feel that mounting fear I think, ‘Oh yes, there it is!' It's like petrol.”

Is it true that she auditioned for Sally Bowles from the wing because she was so terrified? An enormous smile breaks out, drawing wrinkles in all the right places. “Yes,” she says. “I did.” It must have been terrifying. “Yes, it was.”

The year was 1968, and when Hal Prince offered her the role in the original London production of Cabaret, she thought it was a joke. She had never sung a note on stage before. “Well, I think I might have sung a bit at the Old Vic in The Double Dealer but even then I remember Michael Benthall [the director] saying, ‘We can't possibly end the act on that.'” She laughs, relishing any opportunity to send herself up. “So it never occurred to me. And I told Hal I wasn't a singer. He said, ‘You musn't change. The voice you speak in must be the voice you sing in.' That was a real eye-opener. It unlocked something for me.”

Dench was born in York in 1934 and was steeped in theatre from an early age. Her father, a doctor, was the GP for York Theatre and her mother was the wardrobe mistress. She remembers seeing her brothers on stage at school. “I was a very little girl then,” she says. “My brothers did Macbeth and George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. And my parents used to take me to the theatre. I remember seeing A Cuckoo in the Nest. I laughed so much when a man jumped out of a trunk that I actually made myself sick. My mother had to take me home and bring me back the next night to see the rest of it.”

Was she an especially sensitive child? “I don't think so,” she says, a little defensively. “I was always with my two brothers, looking for old Roman coins and uncovering old foundations in the garden. Well, we thought they were old foundations but it was actually a greenhouse. Our house was always full of children, roller-skating, and dressing up.”

She initially wanted to be a stage designer and it was only when her brother Jeff started to pursue acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama that she caught the bug. She applied, was accepted and ended up graduating with a gold medal and a first-class degree. Her professional stage debut was with the Old Vic Company in 1957, as Ophelia in Hamlet. The reviews were mixed. “They were terrible,” she says. “No, not all of them. Kenneth Tynan gave me a good notice. And Milton Shulman. See how I remember that, 54 years later?” She laughs. I tell her I read that at the RSC during the 1960s half the company were in love with her. The laughter stops instantly. “A gross misinterpretation,” she snaps. “Don't believe what you read. Not true.”

In 2010 Dench was voted the greatest stage actor of all time. But it was only in 1997, with Mrs Brown, that Hollywood cottoned on to her talent and she made the transfer to the silver screen. Since, she has received six Oscar nominations, all of them in her 60s. What was it like being feted by Hollywood as an older woman? It must have been so different ... “From what?” she interrupts. Well, Hollywood is famous for ignoring women over 40. “There are only so many parts,” she says. “It's no better here. I've been very lucky.” What about talent? “No,” she replies. “It's called good luck. Being in people's minds.”

In 2001, her husband of 30 years died. Theirs was a famously solid marriage and Williams, her co-star in 1980s sitcom A Fine Romance, gave her a red rose every single Friday. They had a daughter, Finty Williams, together and Dench's grandson, Sammy, now lives with her. After Williams's death, her film career continued to go stratospheric and she has worked non-stop ever since.

Fear may be her big motivator, but what about grief? “Yes, that is a fact,” she says. “After Michael died, there were a lot of things [being offered] and my agent said, ‘We can't do them all.' I said, ‘We have to try.' And so just after he died I started The Shipping News and went out to Halifax and Nova Scotia for six weeks. I flew back and within a day started Notes on a Scandal. Then I flew to Newfoundland to finish The Shipping News, and back to start Pride and Prejudice ... people underestimate how remarkable people are in this business. They are not full of self-regard. I have the most incredible friends who have got me through difficult times.”

Grief is a vast, and often uncontrollable welling up of emotion. Did it have an impact on her acting? “A director would have to tell you that,” she replies, retreating again. But then her eyes glisten like tiny wet pebbles and she starts talking. “I don't know. You can expiate your grief in a way ... you can use it, like you use fear. Grief generates incredible heat in you. If you can put it to good use then at the end of the day you are very tired and you've forgotten how you're feeling. You know?”

Dench's range has always been extraordinary. Now that she is in her 70s, her fear is increasing. She worries about forgetting lines. This is probably why Dench continues to be such a great actor. She still feels like she's in freefall. “I don't think there are many advantages of getting old actually,” she says. “I wish I was younger. I suppose the advantages are you know lots of people and hopefully you're wiser and more capable. But Michael and I always said that whenever you come to a part and think, ‘I know how to play this', the difficulty arises. It is fatal to think it's all fine and you know you can do it. There is always something to trip you up.”

Is she easier on herself now? More comfortable in her skin? “No, none of those things,” she laughs, eyes ablaze again. “I still try and look tall, willowy, blonde and 45. And then argh! I catch sight of myself and think, ‘That can't be me.' That happens a lot.” She sighs, laughs, looks defiant, runs the gamut of emotions once more.

“I don't know,” she says, her voice cracking. “You just have to get on with it, don't you?”

• The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is released 24 February