For over six decades, not much has gotten in the way of Judi Dench and a good performance.
Her career has earned her 52 award nominations and 18 wins, and she's considered one of Britain's best actresses.
But recently, Dench has admitted that the past 10 years, dealing with a worsening health condition, have been difficult.
Watch Judi Dench speak to Anderson Cooper about her eyesight. Post continues after video.
Dench's career first began as an appreciation for the theatre. After seeing King Lear with her parents in 1953, she was inspired to pursue set design.
"It was the most incredible set, like an enormous poppadom, and it blew my mind," she told High Profiles in 2022.
"I thought: 'That’s the kind of designer I would like to be'."
Dench started studying to advance her career prospects, but on an impulse, followed her older brother to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in 1954.
All he'd "ever wanted to be" was an actor, and his passion inspired her.
In 1957, Dench made her acting debut playing Ophelia in an Old Vic Company production of Hamlet. She clearly had a gift and loved it.
"[Acting gives] that wonderful feeling of a community of people [working] together, wanting to do something, and then -this is what’s wonderful about the theatre - wanting to do it better the next night. And the next night, better than that," she said.
"It’s a calling. You’re very lucky if you have one, because there are people who don’t have that passionate urge to do something, you know?
"A lot of people are in things they don’t ever feel that they were cut out for or they enjoy."
In 2012, Dench was diagnosed with macular degeneration - making her ability to learn lines increasingly difficult.
In a statement at the time, she asked for her condition not to be "overblown".
"This condition is something that thousands and thousands of people all over the world are having to contend with. It’s something that I have learnt to cope with and adapt to - and it will not lead to blindness," she told Reuters.
Over the last decade, Dench has spoken about the condition worsening; and earlier last week, she admitted on The Graham Norton Show it's now "impossible" to learn her lines.
"It has become impossible," she said.
"And because I have a photographic memory, I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines but also tells me where they appear on the page."
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For the better part of 50 years, Dench had no issue with memorising long, word-heavy scripts.
"I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them," she recalled. "I could do the whole of Twelfth Night right now."
To avoid using her eyes to feed her the lines, she's added repetition into her memorisation process.
"You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult," she told an audience during a February 2021 charity event for London’s Vision Foundation.
"I’ve had to find another way of learning lines and things, which is having great friends of mine repeat them to me over and over and over again."
"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," she added.
In fact, she plans to avoid retirement for as long as she can.
"I don’t want to retire," Dench said in Louis Theroux Interviews...
"I’m not doing much at the moment because I can’t see. It’s bad. But I’ve got to teach myself a new way of learning."
In 2022, the actress starred in Alleujah, a film based on Alan Bennett's play of the same name.
The year before, she appeared in Kenneth Branagh‘s Oscar-winning movie Belfast, earning an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Granny.
Despite the difficulty, Dench says her condition has resulted not just in struggle, but in funny moments too.
"I was doing The Winter’s Tale with Ken Branagh a couple of years ago, playing Paulina, and after we had been running for three weeks or so… he said to me - I have a long speech at the end - he said, 'Judi, if you were to say that speech about eight feet to your right, you’d be saying it to me and not to the [proscenium] arch,'" she recalled.
"I rely on people to tell me!"
Feature Image: Getty.
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