Dame Judi Dench says her eyesight has deteriorated so far that she can no longer act, ending a stage and screen career that spans seven decades.
“I can’t be on stage, I can’t do a play anymore, I can’t do a film anymore, I can’t read anymore,” Dench, 91, told Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday. She advised accepting the change and getting on with life without dwelling on it.
Doctors diagnosed Dench with age-related macular degeneration in 2012. She revealed her condition that year, when she said she could no longer read scripts and relied on friends and family to read lines aloud. Last December, she told the Radio Times that she sees faces only in a fog and called the condition a “crusher.” She now listens to the television rather than watches it.
Faces have become a daily puzzle. Dench said she sometimes approaches strangers she mistakes for acquaintances and nearly hugs them before realizing her error. Asked about ageing, she dismissed it with the line that there is “nothing to say for it at all.”
The interview came ahead of her new memoir, “Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?” which she wrote with theatre director Brendan O’Hea. It follows their earlier collaboration on Shakespeare, “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent.”
Shakespeare dominated the conversation. Dench traced her devotion to age nine, when she watched her brother play King Duncan in “Macbeth.” His line “What bloody man is that?” convinced her the stage was her future, she said. Today she calls herself “besotted” with the sonnets, which she loves for their rhythm and for how plainly they capture what people feel.
She also described the profession as perpetually frightening. Fear, she said, produces energy an actor can use, and each role stays a work in progress.
Dench has won an Oscar for playing Elizabeth I in “Shakespeare in Love,” a Tony and seven Olivier awards. Her roles include Juliet, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, and global audiences know her as M in the Bond films.
