Failing eyesight has stopped her walking the red carpet unaided but Dame Judi Dench refuses to lose her faith.
Determination is something that Dame Judi Dench could never be accused of lacking during her incredible acting career.
‘You set your mind to a goal and go for it,’ the Oscar winner told reporters firmly in 2013 at the premiere of her movie Philomena.
Just six weeks earlier Judi had undergone painful knee surgery but she was adamant that it wouldn’t stop her walking the red carpet at the upcoming event. She even vowed to her surgeon immediately after the op that she would do so unaided. True to her word, Judi did while proudly proclaiming: ‘I have a completely new knee. It’s brilliant!’
Fast forward a decade or so and sadly, it’s a different story. At 90, she now needs a steadying hand on the red carpet due to her seriously failing eyesight.
‘Well, I have to now because I can't see,’ she says matter of factly. ‘It’s so easy to trip up; it’s really easy to trip up.’
The cause of her problem is Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) with which she was diagnosed in 2012. Like her mother before her, Judi has the rarer and more severe ‘wet’ version of the condition. It requires her to have treatment every six weeks and makes coping with daily life and her job difficult.
With typical stoicism, Yorkshire born Judi has fought hard to adapt and lead as normal life as possible. She began reading scripts in larger type and relying on old friends like the late Dame Maggie Smith to get around. Viewers of Louis Theroux’s BBC1 interview with her in 2022 may recall how she held on to his arm.
‘You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult. I’ve had to find another way of learning lines and things which is having great friends of mine repeat them over and over and over again,’ she told the Vision Foundation charity. ‘So I have to learn through repetition and I just hope that people won’t notice too much if all the lines are completely hopeless!’
Since then her central vision has deteriorated further to the point that she can trip up walking round her own home or even on ‘a flat piece of grass.’ Nevertheless, she continues to deal with the problems ageing is causing her in a pragmatic fashion.
‘Well, I have to get on with it now. Well, you don't know how much of it's left,’ says Judi who lost her husband Michael Williamson 2001 and her old chum Maggie Smith last year. She credits her ability to cope with her Quaker faith.
‘The whole business of being a Quaker is enormous. It's like the stick you put in a rather wilting plant. It holds you up. It gives you strength. I think it does. Well, I know it does. Yeah.’
Impressed by the bright blue and white uniform, Judi attended the Quaker boarding school The Mount in her home city of York and never looked back.
‘I absolutely loved it,’ she explains. But for once she doesn’t want to sound ‘theatrical’ and even struggles to find the right word to describe the pleasure she gets from her Quaker worship.
‘It's entirely meditation. It's a group of people together. You go in and you sit down, and silence kind of drops. And it's the thing of sharing a silence and sharing a meditation.’
‘Somebody will get up and say something and then they sit down again. Or sometimes you can sit through the whole meeting and nobody speaks at all. But it's a thing of a shared experience. Experience is not quite the right word. It's something shared.’
Her late husband, Michael, was a Catholic but early on they managed to conquer any fear of their different religions with the help of understanding clergy friends. After taking communion together nothing mattered.
Though it’s more than 20 years since she was widowed, Judi still admits: ‘I'm not very good at being totally on my own.’
At her grand age, it is perhaps no surprise that she has lost many loves ones. And in memory of those friends who’ve died, Judi likes to plant trees in tribute to them at her home in Surrey. In memory of Maggie, she planted a sapling which bore fruit on the day of her funeral.
‘Joe, who works for me, came in and he had one little crab apple. And so I had it in my pocket at her funeral, which was a very nice thing to have,’ she said.
As a Quaker, Judi does not flaunt her pacifist religion but says: ’I think it informs everything I do. I wouldn’t be without it.’