by Judi Dench
They even got wrong the story about the wonderful set that was created for the original Rose Theatre in the studio. It was so authentic that I begged them not to break it up after the filming finished. So they said, ‘Well, you can have it if you like, we’ll give it to you if you’ll store it.’ It was carefully dismantled at the end of shooting, and shipped off in sections to various storehouses in London and Manchester. Then the newspapers said I had bought it, which wasn’t true, although I did find that the initial storage fees were quite high. There were various plans to rebuild it for use as a theatre, none of which have reached fruition yet, though I hope very much that it will return to life one day as a working playhouse.
Shakespeare in Love received thirteen Oscar nominations, including mine for Best Supporting Actress – much to my surprise. I was even more surprised when I actually won. I just thought, Well, I didn’t get it for Mrs Brown, so I am certainly not going to get it for eight quick minutes with bad teeth. The lovely thing was that this time Michael was able to come with me, as well as Finty, because Miramax very generously invited both of them too. We went to their party the night before, and when we got there, who was first on in the cabaret? Me! I had to do Brenda Blethyn in Little Voice, so Finty quickly rehearsed me in a corner behind a pillar, and I had to wear a terrible red wig. The difficulty was that it was cocktail time, before you had even had a drink to get in the mood.
But the organisation of the awards ceremony was just as chaotic as before. We had to wait half an hour for the car downstairs, which seemed a very long time, and then we joined the convoy of stretch limousines. I vowed if I ever went again, I would go on the back of a motorbike. It was ridiculous, we were so late that they had locked the doors. They said, ‘Oh my God, they wanted a shot of you when Whoopi Goldberg came in dressed as Elizabeth I.’ They had to wait until a break and then smuggle us in.
Robin Williams was presenting the award, and when he looked down to read the name, Michael squeezed my arm and said, ‘Jude, you’ve got it,’ just before we heard him say, ‘There is nothing like a Dame.’ He said he could tell by the look on Robin’s face. All I can remember after that is looking at Michael, standing up and kissing him, but I don’t remember walking up all those steps. The only other thing I remember is Robin Williams curtseying; I don’t remember the speech, nor anything about how I got off the stage.
I remember crying in a lift, completely overcome, and then meeting the immensely tall James Coburn, who had won Best Supporting Actor for Affliction, and having my picture taken with him, and then with Gwyneth, who won Best Actress. There were so many photographers, you are all blinded for a bit after all those flashlights going off. I had to go into lots and lots of rooms, where there were masses of people, and all the world’s press asking, ‘Why aren’t you wearing diamonds?’ I said, ‘I’m not a diamond girl, I’m afraid.’
Then we went to two parties. The Governor’s Ball was so beautifully done, in a wispy kind of sea-greeny-blue tent. But everybody only goes for twenty minutes, and then comes away again; nobody eats the food. There was a wonderful band, too, I thought it was terribly sad. In fact, I went up to a waiter and said, ‘I’m so sorry about this.’ I don’t think they minded, but I minded, I thought it was terribly rude. We went on to the Miramax party, and I drank a lot of champagne.
The next day Michael and Finty went home, but I had to fly to New York, where Amy’s View was due to open on Broadway. I was wandering about the airport at Los Angeles, and suddenly an air hostess came up to me and said, ‘Would you like to get on the plane early?’ So I said that would be very nice, and she said, ‘Well, you might find it tricky otherwise.’ That would never happen here. You could be in an awards ceremony the night before, and nothing would happen at all the next day. They put me in a first-class seat, right at the front of the plane. The only thing that we had not thought of was that every single person had to file past me as they came on board. So there was a lot of shaking hands and taking photographs, until I felt I had met the whole of the plane. I went to sleep on the flight, and when I woke up there were a lot of stick-on notes on the rug over me.
I was very tired when I arrived in New York, so I was glad to be met at the airport by my good friend James Triner, and driven to the apartment they had booked for me at the Sutton Building. It was overflowing with flowers and champagne, and the fridge was full of food, including caviar. That night I went with Larry Guittard to a cocktail party upstairs at Chez Josephine, run by the son of the cabaret star Josephine Baker. When we left to go out to dinner, everyone downstairs clapped. I thought this was so bizarre. Nobody knew me here before, now everyone seemed to know me. The Americans are so nice and welcoming, everybody stopped me on the street to say, ‘Hi, Judi.’ They are not intrusive, just absolutely open.
A lady who was serving in Bergdorf Goodman suddenly said, ‘Oh my God! Look who’s here!’ and gave me the most enormous hug. Maggie Smith was also staying at the Sutton, and when we went into Tiffany’s I said I might get her this very lurid bracelet. The young man was standing there looking down through the glass case, and started to say, ‘Yes, good morning, ladies, can I help you…Ohh, my God,’ as he looked up and saw us. Maggie and I were both in hysterics.
The American stage crew were a knockout. When we did Sunday matinees, everyone brought in something for brunch, and all of us, the actors and the crew, ate it together downstairs. Every other Saturday, between the two shows, the crew cooked a barbecue on the other side of the theatre, which was fenced in. That was so nice. We had a good company spirit at the National, but on Broadway we had it from day one. There was a proper feeling about telling the story, nobody competed with anybody. I still hear from the Barrymore crew.
David Hare had to change some of the dialogue for the American audience – ‘spanner’ to ‘screwdriver’, and ‘Sainsbury’s to ‘supermarket’. They had no idea what a ‘fête’ was, very little knowledge of what the Lloyd’s Names crash was all about, and the line ‘I don’t care if he’s buggered the Dagenham Girl Pipers’ went for absolutely nothing.
We had two weeks of previews before the first night, by which time all the critics had been. I said to Sam Bond, ‘Honestly, we don’t have to be worried about this, they’ve seen it, they’ve made up their minds.’ We had the most glorious first night, with the kind of reception you only seem to get in America, which we then had on nearly every night during the run. I always got a round of applause when I came on, and most nights there were standing ovations at the end. Nobody normally stands up for you in England, that is not our fashion. Many things are different in the American theatre. The curtain never went up on time, it was always about ten past eight, it just isn’t fashionable to go up on time. The cellphones rang occasionally, despite the notices up in the foyer, but that now happens in England too – far too often.
The thing I never quite got used to were the wooden police barriers placed outside the theatre, to control the large numbers of autograph-hunters, which I had never experienced before. I had a wonderful driver called Mike to take me to and from the theatre, and sometimes after a show he had to wait for up to half an hour before I could get away. I would glance up at him leaning on the car, and he would say, ‘They’re selling them all.’ The joke was that when Michael came over to see the show, I warned him in my dressing room, ‘Wait till you see the crowds at the stage door, wait till you see,’ and when we went out there was just one man standing there.
The trickiest audience came the night after the nominations were announced for the Tonys (the Antoinette Perry awards for performance in the New York theatre). We could feel the audience take several paces backwards, as if to say, OK, show me – which is exactly what happens at home too.
You can never predict that a play will be a success on Broadway just because it has been in London, or vice versa. Nobody ever quite knows how productions will cross the water. It is a very subtle thing, but you can never say whether or not something is going to be a success when it transfers. So
I was rather pleased when one of the New York papers pronounced: ‘This Dame is a class act.’ To stop it going to my head, someone else asked, ‘Is she a Dame as opposed to a broad?’
It was nearly forty years since I had been there with the Old Vic, so I went down to Greenwich Village and walked around with Larry Guittard, looking for my old haunts of that visit. When we walked past Julian’s Bar, where we used to drink before, Larry said, ‘Look at Julian’s.’ There were about fifteen men at the window, all waving; Julian’s is a gay bar now. New York is just as beguiling today as it was on my first visit, the only difference between then and forty years earlier was that now I needed a rest every afternoon, whereas when I was there before I didn’t. Then I hardly had any sleep at all, but I knew I couldn’t do this show on no rest.
At the Barrymore Theatre I had the dressing room that Marlon Brando shared with Karl Malden in A Streetcar Named Desire. I used to tell everybody that this was where Karl Malden used to go to the loo in the loo, and this is where Marlon Brando used to go to the loo in the basin.
One particular bonus for me was that the Barrymore was just down the road from the Brooks Atkinson where Tim Pigott-Smith was playing in The Iceman Cometh. So the black glove was going to and fro like all-get-out. It went wrapped around some flowers on Tim’s first night, and came back to me the same way on mine. I had it given to him onstage the night that President Clinton went. At the beginning of Act II when I entered all dressed up carrying a bag and gloves, and had a line, ‘Oh, let me take off this hat,’ one night I nearly carried on the black glove with my own, until it was snatched out of my hand at the last minute. That glove whirled about quite a lot on Broadway.
Various parts of my life seemed to converge during that run. I was told that one night forty-two members of the As Time Goes By Internet Fan Club were coming to the play. So they were kept in the theatre after the performance, and I took them a tray of custard tarts from Mr and Mrs Lionel Hardcastle. When their chairman said, ‘Shall I write to Mr Hardcastle?’ I replied, ‘That’s not Mr Hardcastle, that’s Geoffrey Palmer.’ When I got back to the apartment there was a note awaiting me from Geoffrey, saying, ‘I know that this is the night that I would be mobbed by the Internet crowd.’ I think he would have been mobbed too, if he had been there. They were a very nice group. They had come from all over the country to see it, and most of them had not met each other before. As Time Goes By seems to be much better loved there than in England.
The American Shakespeare Guild has created the John Gielgud Award for Excellence in the Dramatic Arts, known for short by the award itself – the Golden Quill. This is given alternately for performances in America and Britain, and previous winners have included Derek Jacobi, Kevin Kline, Ian McKellen, and Zoe Caldwell, so I was thrilled when they gave it to me during the run on Broadway. Several people in the company took part in the event.
David Hare reminded me of a letter that I had quite forgotten, when he had written to me before we ever met about one of my early performances. He read out my reply with great relish: ‘You call me beautiful, you call me brilliant, I notice you don’t call me tall.’ Christopher Plummer recalled our times together with the RSC in the Sixties, and Keith Baxter read out a sweet note from John Gielgud himself, whose name made this award so very special. The previous winner, Zoe Caldwell, presented me with the hugely heavy Quill, and said to the film people in the audience, ‘You can lease her now and then, but just remember: she belongs to the theatre.’ I could hardly think of what to say after all this, but I was anxious to pay tribute to Sir John himself, and how he had restored my confidence all those years ago in The Cherry Orchard. (The following year, when the Shakespeare Guild gave the award to Kenneth Branagh, I stepped into Zoe’s shoes and presented him with the Quill in the Middle Temple in London.)
Because Amy’s View was such a success, the Barrymore management wanted to extend the run, but I refused, saying I had to get home to be a wife and a mother again. Oddly enough, I have not been offered any more theatre work in America, only films, a couple of which I accepted.
17
Italy on stage and screen
1998-1999
THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER MADE MY life seem more planned than it ever really is, but for clarity it seemed best to follow on the filming of Shakespeare in Love with the subsequent Oscars ceremony and my time on Broadway. In reality there was a gap of something like a year between finishing the film and going to America, during which I did another play and a couple of films.
The play was Filumena by the Italian Eduardo de Filippo, directed by Peter Hall. My co-star once again was Michael Pennington, who had been agitating for ages for us to do it together. I hadn’t seen Joan Plowright in the part in 1977, but I knew that she had been a great success. Filumena is a former Neapolitan whore who has borne three sons and never told her lover Domenico which one is his. She tricks him into marriage at last by pretending to be on her deathbed, a trick he has just discovered as the play opens. So Michael had to storm on to the stage in a towering fury, shouting at me for deceiving him. We used to wind up for that opening by shouting and chasing each other up and down in the wings before we went on.
I can’t think of another play that opens with an outburst of such intensity, and it took me a while to get used to it. At first I thought the play was very slight, but after I had done it for a while I realised that it wasn’t slight at all. John Gunter had designed a brilliant set, which I didn’t really understand until halfway through. Then I thought that of course this was an Italian story, and here was a table in an Italian house which everybody sits round but is never used, everyone walks past it. The more we did it, the more I reckoned the play, and we had a hugely good time doing it.
But the first night was nearly a disaster. I completely dried on my line: ‘I don’t suppose you know those hovels in San Giuvanniello, in Virgene, in Furcella, Tribunale, Palunetto…’ I can hardly believe that I can still rattle them off now, but that night I couldn’t remember a single Italian place-name. So instead I said every kind of pasta I could think of, fusilli and vermicelli, and valpolicella – a lot of Italian food and wine, because I had been having it for three months filming in Italy.
Also on the first night I jumped from Act I to Act III, I skipped a whole amount of plot; that gave me such a fright. Michael steadied me, he cleverly and imperceptibly moved me from Act III back to Act I again. He is so cool-headed inside, even if I did see the whites of his eyes when I did it. But I really thought I had blown it on the first night. I was terribly depressed afterwards. We fully expected the worst from the reviews, but they were very enthusiastic, so we must have got away with our improvisations. The box office was besieged, and they had to schedule some extra matinee performances to meet the demand. By then, we didn’t mind that, we were so enjoying it. I remember saying to Michael one night, ‘I’ve never been so happy on stage,’ and he said, ‘Well, neither have I, oddly enough.’
Whereas I could not, in all honesty, say quite the same for my previous filming experience in Italy, just before Filumena. Tea with Mussolini should have been just as wonderful. Franco Zeffirelli was directing, and the others in the cast included Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Paula Jacobs, Lily Tomlin and Cher. We were playing an assorted group of expatriates living in Italy just before Mussolini entered the war, and my Michael played the English Consul who tries to persuade us all to leave before we were interned. The locations were in Florence, San Gimignano and Rome, which could hardly have been nicer, and Franco seemed to have as much boundless energy as I remembered from Romeo and Juliet forty years earlier. He was charming, entertaining and funny, and part of the story was based on his own early life. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, working with Maggie again after such a long time, and also making a friend of Joan, whom I had not really known properly before.
When Franco was directing, he had this wonderful old dog that was carried behind him in a box. We were going to do a scene in a garage one morning in Rome, and there w
ere Maggie, Joan, Lily, Paula and myself, all made up with our wigs and costumes, and then suddenly Franco changed his mind about the scene. He said he didn’t want to do it then, he would do another scene. He said to Joan and Maggie and me, ‘Why don’t you go to the villa and swim?’
So we went to his villa, and we were all swimming very carefully, with nobody daring to get wet hair. Then we heard a lot of barking, and Franco had come back for lunch with three of the actors playing carabinieri, so we all had to race out and dry ourselves, and rush back to the dingy garage. It was far from the best-managed film schedule I have experienced, and the crew kept changing.
I was this rather scatty bohemian art-lover, and some of my scenes in the script never got filmed at all. Some of those that were shot never made it into the final film, but that is the nature of the film business; they can’t do that to you in the theatre. There was one line from Cher that I doubted would ever hit the screen. She was supposed to say, ‘Do I know Hester? I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.’ She obviously thought that was a bit weak, so she said instead, ‘Do I know Hester? I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw Musso’s fat ass across the room.’ Unsurprisingly that got cut too.