by Judi Dench
We got married on 5 February 1971, in Hampstead’s Catholic church just round the corner from my house in Prospect Place. My eldest brother, Peter, gave me away, and the ushers were Ian Richardson and Alec McCowen. Danny La Rue sat with his wedding present of two exquisite crystal glasses on his knee throughout the ceremony. There were more than 250 guests crammed into that little church, and the critic John Trewin and his wife enclosed a picture of Mary Anderson with their wedding present, to tell me that she had been married there (that was when I learnt that she had been the first to double Hermione and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale). Then we all went off to the reception at London Zoo, which I had always liked since the days I had a flat near there.
Trevor Nunn had given us a lovely advance wedding present by casting Michael and me in his next production for the RSC at the Aldwych, Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance. Trevor had come to meet the company at the airport when we returned from Australia, and saw Michael and me coming off together, which is why he cast us as the young lovers. The play had been unjustly neglected for years, and we all enjoyed ourselves hugely. Ronald Eyre directed it, and he sent me a note beforehand, saying, ‘Do remember that Grace Harkaway is the sort of girl who would send valentines to herself, then fall over with the joy of it when the card arrived from herself.’ That was a good note.
Michael was the young man who wins my hand, and Donald Sinden played his father, Sir Harcourt Courtly, as an elderly roué, heavily made-up like the outrageously camp actor Michael MacLiammoir. I had a long speech to Donald that got murmurs of laughter, turning to a kind of expectant buzz, and then an enormous burst of laughter. I used not to look at Donald too much during it, because Grace was off on a great flight of fancy, and I thought it was so wonderful the way the speech was going. It was only later that I glanced at Donald and saw that, as my speech got more flowery and more over the top, he very gradually looked out towards the audience, and pursed his red lipsticked mouth, with his eyebrow going up and down. It used to bring the house down, and I realised it wasn’t my speech at all, it was Donald’s reaction.
The production was such a hit that it ran for two seasons. It was huge fun, we got great belters of laughs from it, the audiences loved it – apart from the broadcaster Alistair Cooke, who left before the end. But the grimmest audience was the night the Queen came with Edward Heath, then Prime Minister. It wasn’t her fault, it was just that every time there was a line saying, ‘Oh, the Queen’s gone mad again’, everyone looked at her for a reaction.
All the family were in this production; in addition to Michael and myself there was my brother Jeff and, for six months, my daughter Finty, as I was pregnant for most of the run. I had a lovely friend in Nottingham called Brian Smedley, who was a judge, and he had asked me to marry him. I had told him, ‘I’ll have to think about it, Brian.’ But I never got in touch with him, and the next time I saw him I was about five months pregnant. He just put his head round the door of my dressing room and said, ‘I take it the answer’s no?’ I was six months pregnant when I left the production in the last week. In the first scene Janet Whiteside had to say to me, ‘Do you feel nothing stirring?’ That got the biggest laugh.
After the last performance the cast gave me a huge Paddington Bear as a leaving gift for the baby; Grace Kelly was in the audience that night and Donald Sinden asked her to present it to me.
6
Happy families
1970-1975
THE POPULARITY OF LONDON ASSURANCE ensured that it stayed in the RSC repertoire for longer than most productions. During this time I also did four markedly different plays. The first of these was Major Barbara, directed by Clifford Williams, who specialised in plays by Bernard Shaw. I had played Barbara on television eight years earlier, with Brewster Mason as Undershaft, and luckily he was also playing the same part again. He was a boyfriend of mine for a short while, and he used to take me to a little club near the Comedy Theatre, where I met several members of the Crazy Gang – Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox, and Monsewer Eddie Gray – and we all used to play the bluffer’s game Spoof; that was good fun. In addition to Brewster, the cast included old friends Richard Pasco, Roger Rees and Elizabeth Spriggs.
The Merchant of Venice was much less fun. I loathe the play, I think it is terrible, everyone behaves so frightfully badly. Who cares about anybody in it? My instinct was to say no when Trevor asked me, but then he talked me into it. Terry Hands was directing, and I think I drove him mad, but I couldn’t do it, I never want to see it again, I wouldn’t cross the road to see it, it is the only play of Shakespeare’s I really dislike. Emrys James was playing Shylock, and there was rather an antagonism between us. Terry got very cross with me when we were rehearsing the scene with the knife. Antonio bared his chest and Shylock raised the knife, and I had to say, ‘Tarry, Jew.’ Whenever I said it, Terry would tell me, ‘Don’t say it yet.’
I had to wait until his hand was actually coming down to Antonio’s chest, and I thought that was false. At one point Terry sent everyone else out of the rehearsal room and jumped up on to a table, he was so cross; I will never forget it. He said, ‘You’re not to be unkind to Emrys, his father was a miner.’ I wasn’t being unkind, I was trying to make sense of the scene. She would never have left it that long, she would have died of fright. How could she leave it until the knife was actually coming down on him? In one of the notices I was criticised for being self-indulgent, waiting for that moment.
Nothing went right. I had this idea of a wig for Portia with lots of curls, and John Neville came one night, I had not seen him for years, and he knocked at my dressing room, put his head round the door and just said, ‘Hello, Bubbles,’ that was all he said, and quite right too. But the worst moment happened onstage. Michael was playing Bassanio, and I had a speech to him in the Caskets scene:
‘I speak too long; but ’tis to peize the time,
To eke it, and to draw it out in length,
To stay you from election.’
One night I said instead: ‘…to stay you from erection.’ Well, the Wind Band stopped playing and left the stage, my brother Jeffery with Bernard Lloyd and Peter Geddis all left – nobody could stay. And I laughed. Poor Michael had a speech coming up, I have never seen him use his hands so much, and turn his back to the audience; it was terrible.
Michael and I played brother and sister in The Duchess of Malfi; he was Duke Ferdinand and I was the doomed Duchess. It is a difficult play, but I loved it. I kept thinking of that famous picture of Peggy Ashcroft as the Duchess eating the apricots, and it was thrilling to play. It was, though, very difficult to learn, and in fact I can’t remember a single line from it, which is unusual for me. Clifford Williams was in charge of the production again and he made the most of it, though the notices were mixed for all of us.
By complete contrast, the Christmas play for children was Toad of Toad Hall, in which I played three parts – Mother Rabbit, First Fieldmouse and a Brave Stoat. Michael was Mole, Jeffery was Rat, Peter Woodthorpe was Toad, and Tony Church was Badger. So many of the children wanted to come round to see us, and I remembered my disappointment as a child when I did that. My family were all great fans of Gilbert and Sullivan, and when the touring company came to York two of the cast would always stay in our house. The girls said I had to go round afterwards, and I didn’t know what that meant. The man who played Nanky Poo had a lovely voice, and a wonderful shock of black hair. When I went round they knocked on his door and said, ‘Here’s somebody who would like to meet you.’ I walked in and saw this man who was bald; he had taken off his wig and was sitting there in a white vest with braces. So to avoid that kind of disappointment we made a plan at Stratford that we would not get out of our costumes, and just stay dressed as we were. But some of the younger children found it quite frightening to see someone in make-up for a badger or the other animals close up.
I got very sick during the run, with awful bilious attacks, and when the doctor came to see me I was being sick into a great big dustbin, stil
l dressed as the Stoat. That was when I discovered my condition, because he said, ‘Your trouble is you’re pregnant.’ I was already playing Mother Rabbit as very pregnant with lots of children, and now I really was.
Michael and I both thought the baby was going to be a boy, and decided on the name Finn. On 24 September 1972 I gave birth to a girl, and we called her Finty. She was actually christened Tara Cressida Frances, but has always been known as Finty to us and everyone else. We didn’t think for a moment that she would be an actress. She wanted to be an acrobatic nurse, and I encouraged her, she would swing down the ward and take your temperature hanging upside down.
I wanted to give up working, to see that she was safely in the nest, but Michael said, ‘Please don’t.’ So I tried to arrange it that in the beginning I was with her during the day, and going to the theatre in the evening when she was in bed. Then when she went to school later on I could do things like television during the day, to be with her in the evenings. To a large extent that was how it worked out. But I did do the BBC film of John Osborne’s Luther not long after she was born, and I laughed the whole way through it, as all my nerve ends had gone to pieces after the birth.
My return to the stage was far from auspicious, and Michael and I only did it really because it was in York, at the Theatre Royal. The director, Richard Digby Day, had tried before to get us to go there, but the play he chose was Content to Whisper, adapted by Alan Melville from a French stage adaptation of a novel, La Lumière Noire. It has to be the most terrible play known to man, and very soon Richard knew it too. Sydney Tafler was the worst laugher with whom I have ever shared a stage. Sometimes it was so dreadful he just could not get the words out.
The only good thing about that return to York was being with Mummy and the rest of the family. She and Michael’s parents hit it off immediately, and the three of them used to come and stay with us at Christmas and Easter. One night Michael said to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all just live together?’ That was absolutely my idea of heaven, it is like a proper Quaker community, certainly for bringing up a child, but also the whole idea of looking after your parents. What appals me more than anything else in this country is just sending them off somewhere, where they sit like zombies in a room and they are just there to die. That is not to demean what the staff do in those homes, but I don’t think it is healthy for the inmates.
We eventually found a converted stable block with eleven rooms just outside Stratford at Charlecote. Mummy moved in at the beginning of 1974, and Michael’s parents, Len and Elizabeth, a little later. Finty remembers it so well, being brought up with her grandparents. It was not a very pretty building at all, it had been converted from some old stables into a modern L-shaped house with stone steps up to the front door, and it could actually have been converted very beautifully. It had three double bedrooms, all with their own bathrooms, a couple of little rooms, one of which was a study, a big drawing room and a kitchen. So everyone had their own room, but there didn’t seem any point to me in getting a place where we could all live in separate rooms. Of course that sometimes created quite a lot of tension. I wouldn’t say for a second that it was always easy, I was in tears quite often, but the good times far outweighed the bad, and I don’t regret a day of it.
When we were playing at the Aldwych and staying at Hampstead, we would drive up to Stratford every Saturday night after the performance; no M40 then, so it was quite a long drive. I would cook the Sunday lunch for all of us. We had to buy a toaster every year we were there, which was twelve years. I never knew how they used to break them, but we bought a new one every Easter.
It was the year after that before Michael and I rejoined the RSC, and moved back to Stratford ourselves. After the York disaster, Frank Hauser asked me to return to Oxford for The Wolf, written in 1911 by the Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár. This was another British premiere by Frank for a classic European play unknown here, and it was wonderful to be directed by him again, you just felt totally confident that there was somebody on the bridge. This was his farewell production for the Oxford Playhouse after seventeen years, which was one of the reasons I was keen to be in it.
Leo McKern was to play my insanely jealous husband, and Teddy Woodward my lover. We had a scene where we were all drinking, and one night Teddy knocked the bottom of his glass and it broke off, so I handed him mine. Leo said, ‘What good’s that going to do us?’ as we had some stage business with the glasses later on. In the first act Leo had a line, ‘I’m so happy,’ and a man shouted out, ‘Well, I’m glad you are!’ But everybody else seemed to enjoy it, with the exception of Finty. She was brought in when I was having a costume fitting, and when she saw me dressed up she burst into tears. She got more used to seeing me like that as she grew up.
The show transferred to London, but we kept getting moved from one theatre to another – the Apollo, the Queen’s, and then that barn of a theatre, the New London. We called ourselves the only touring show in London. After six months I called it a day, and left to do my second musical, The Good Companions, with a director who was not in the same league as Frank.
Braham Murray seemed all over the shop to me, and I had never done a musical from the beginning before, so I didn’t know that it was all rewritten in rehearsal. For Cabaret Hal Prince had ironed out all those usual teething problems during the American run, but now we were starting from scratch. Ronald Harwood had adapted J.B. Priestley’s original play, André Previn wrote the music, and the lyrics were by Johnny Mercer. Christopher Gable was in it, and I was so bewitched by working with a real ballet dancer, after my childhood dreams, that all the way through the run I used to try and catch him unawares, and run at him and jump into his arms, so that he could hold me up in that wonderful balletic pose. Poor Chris.
This was the first time that I worked with John Mills, and not many people realised that he was a proper hoofer, he really could tap dance. He had a song and dance number that used to bring the house down. I managed to get to know him really well, because my first entrance was in a little car with John, and we used to sit in it for ages before we were needed, and just talk. It became like a private confessional, and Johnny said, ‘Afterwards I’ll have this car put in the garden. I’ve said things to you in this car that I’ve never said to anyone!’
He and his wife Mary used to invite Michael and me to dinner with them after the show, and because our curtain came down quite late we had to tell the restaurant beforehand what we wanted to eat. So when Johnny came on with a clipboard in one scene, calling, ‘Miss Trant, Miss Trant,’ he would come up to me with the whole of the menu, and say, ‘What do you think you’d like tonight?’ We would go right down the menu and choose something, and I would say that Michael would probably have the fishcakes.
Johnny was a man after my own heart. He and I organised a very elaborate practical joke to play on a member of the company who we didn’t think was behaving very well. He kept going and looking down at the orchestra, and we were thinking, Oh, come on, there is a show supposed to be going on here. We had a scene at Crewe Station with three big theatre companies all going off in different directions on other trains, with a huge number of suitcases. So we put two stage weights in the case for this particular person, and John had to give them out. Everyone used to take their case and swing it up above their heads, but of course his case was so heavy that it swung away from him and threw him on the floor. John and I laughed so much when we did the scene that afterwards we were helpless with laughter in the corridor, and Ann Way, who was also in that scene, came towards us and said to John, ‘I have never seen anything in my life so amateur!’ She was quite right of course, but oh gosh, it was an irresistible afternoon. Waiting for it to happen was the best bit, when everyone else picked up theirs, he was dragging his along the floor.
Celia Bannerman was playing Susie, and I thought she was wonderful, but she seemed uneasy about singing the songs. She left suddenly early on, and the understudy had to go on. We worked so hard that nig
ht helping the understudy through it, and the next day we got such a dressing-down from Braham Murray. I was so angry that I exploded, ‘You must be joking if you think that any of us wouldn’t be working hard. You must be joking, Braham, if you think that we were all pulling back and not doing our best, with an understudy on, playing the lead!’
It ran for about nine months at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket, and I think it might have run for longer if it had not been for the spate of IRA bombs in London. I remember one going off in Pall Mall just round the corner. Audiences were understandably not keen to go out while all that was happening.
Then I moved up the road to the Albery, to be directed by my great hero, John Gielgud, in Pinero’s The Gay Lord Quex, which had been very popular in the early years of the last century. Daniel Massey played the title role, Siân Phillips was his old love the Duchess of Strood, and I played the manicurist Sophy Fullgarney, the role which made the name of Irene Vanbrugh in the first production in 1899. Sir John had seen her act in the Thirties, and had wanted to direct this play for years, but even he came to recognise that it had become very dated. His production had a beautiful look, but it was not a good play.
We rehearsed in the crypt at St James’s Church in Piccadilly, and one morning when we had been working for a couple of hours, suddenly out of the loo came a man carrying a pair of trousers, who ran straight through the room and up the stairs. Then came a man not wearing a pair of trousers, who rushed after him straight up the stairs. Sir John laughed so much that he cancelled rehearsals for the rest of the day.