Behind the Scenes (9781466882195)

  Sketch by Cecil Beaton, 1969

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Preface

  Introduction

  Begin Reading

  Chronology of Parts

  Awards

  Picture credits

  Copyright

  Preface

  So much seems to have happened to me in the last ten years. I have been to India twice, to film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, both directed by John Madden. I have played ‘M’ three more times, and was not best pleased when they killed me off in Skyfall.

  I made my first film in Hollywood, directed by Clint Eastwood, who was charming, and in many ways unlike any other film director I have known. I met one of my great heroines Sophia Loren for the first time when we worked together on the film Nine, and joined a host of old friends in The Cranford Chronicles for TV.

  I loved revisiting Ireland when we filmed Philomena because my mother was born in Dublin and my father grew up there. Steve Coogan was fun to work with, and we had lots of laughs between takes. I met the real Philomena, whose story we were telling, which was a great help in capturing her strong character.

  In the theatre I also enjoyed playing a richly varied group of strong women – Judith Bliss in Hay Fever, Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Titania again (half a century after I first played her), and Alice Liddell in Peter and Alice.

  I await the next offers on stage or screen with interest. My eldest brother, Peter, is always trying to persuade me of the joys of retirement, but that plays no part in any of my future plans. Since my husband Michael died in 2001 I have worked constantly. Friends and colleagues are very sustaining; they are the people who get you through it – it’s no good to be on your own.

  Looking again at these pictures brings back many happy memories; yet they also remind me of quite a number of gaps in my experience which I would like to fill. All my life I have tried hard to avoid being typecast or pigeonholed, and whenever anyone says, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t play that part,’ it only makes me much more determined to try.

  I want to do something different next, and preferably something dangerous. Of course I have enjoyed playing some parts more than others, and which are which will become apparent in the pages that follow. Some made me laugh more than others too, and surprisingly often these were in tragedies.

  I would like to thank Alan Samson at Weidenfeld & Nicolson for inviting me to put together this second photo album, ten years after I put together the first Scenes From My Life, and John Miller for once again helping me by recording my memories of some of the most rewarding experiences of my life, as well as of so many people who have been important to me in different ways.

  Introduction

  I first saw Judi Dench onstage in 1961 as a touchingly vulnerable Anya in the RSC production of The Cherry Orchard; the first time I worked with her was in 1994, when I interviewed her for my BBC Radio Ninetieth Birthday tribute to John Gielgud. He had played Gaev opposite her in that Chekhov play, and she was forever grateful to him for restoring her self-confidence when the director Michel Saint-Denis had nearly destroyed it by treating her dismissively. Our shared admiration of the great actor paved the way for my biography of Judi in 1998 and other work together since, some of which is pictured in this book.

  She was the first to agree to appear in the Gielgud Centenary Gala at the theatre named after him, which I produced for the American Shakespeare Guild in 2004; her acceptance was swiftly followed by those from an all-star cast. When I asked her which Shakespeare scene she wished to play she said immediately: ‘Oh, The Dream with Ian Richardson as Oberon again, I could go on as Titania now, I’ve never forgotten those lines.’ That was still true in 2010: when she reprised the part for Peter Hall at the Kingston Rose Theatre he didn’t bother to call her for the first week’s rehearsal, while the rest of the cast learnt to be as word-perfect as her. I saw her as Titania in each of those productions half a century apart, and was enchanted by her performance on both occasions, as I have been so often in the years between.

  It was seeing her as Lika in Frank Hauser’s production of The Promise with Ian McKellen and Ian McShane in 1966 that made me realise here was a truly great actress, destined to become the acknowledged leader of her profession, in direct line of succession to Ellen Terry, Sybil Thorndike, Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft.

  Since the publication of my biography in 1998 I have been privileged to share a stage with her on several occasions to discuss her career, at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford, and various literary festivals, all of which sold out well beforehand. This confirmed Peter Sallis’s remark to me: ‘Judi Dench is the number one box office draw in this country, male or female.’

  The most challenging request she made was to create a comic recital for her on the theme of Great Eccentrics, which we performed as a three-hander twice at the Winchester Festival, once with Michael Pennington, and once with Charles Dance. As we came offstage on the second occasion she handed me her script, saying: ‘That’s the last recital I’m ever going to do, I can’t now read the script properly, even blown up in size as you’ve done.’

  That was the first inkling I had of her macular degeneration of the retina, a development which we managed to keep to ourselves for quite a while, until one Saturday morning when the Daily Mirror splashed the story right across its front page. Judi was furious, as the ‘exclusive’ leak was then picked up by the rest of the media, here and abroad. I had several concerned calls from friends in America asking if it was true. Ironically, she was filming a Bond movie at the time, but ‘M’ never caught the culprit. We worked out that someone on the film crew must have overheard her discussing her sight problem with a friend in the cast, and sold the story to the paper.

  She hasn’t let this change get her down, and even cited the advantages when she appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in the Promenade Concert devoted to the work of Stephen Sondheim. She sang ‘Send in the Clowns’ from A Little Night Music, and said how glad she was that she couldn’t see the faces of the audience, ‘They just looked like a sea of waving cornflowers in the distance.’

  Neither has the problem stopped her from working. She has changed her method of learning a part, by listening to it on tape instead of reading it off the page. In the theatre that means she has to know her lines on the first day of rehearsal, which Ben Whishaw, her young co-star in Peter and Alice, told me was a touch embarrassing for the rest of the cast still holding their scripts in their hands. But it meant they all worked hard to learn their parts much quicker than usual. Ben was only the latest of a long line of Judi’s leading men to have told me how stimulating and rewarding it was to play opposite her – from Ian Richardson and Robert Hardy in the early 1960s to Billy Connolly and Jim Broadbent more recently.

  It is hard to credit now that Judi was told after her first screen test: ‘Miss Dench, you have every single thing wrong with your face.’ She has spared that purblind producer’s blushes over the years since by always refusing to name him, but it rather put her off screen-acting until recent years. Her Oscar nomination for Mrs Brown opened the floodgates, and leading film-makers now queue up to seek her services. Typically, when Clint Eastwood rang her up at home to ask her to play J. Edgar Hoover’s mother in his next film, she assumed it was her friend Brendan O’Hea
pulling her leg.

  I mentioned John Gielgud at the beginning, and I remember asking him why he vetoed the ninetieth birthday tributes planned by the theatre world and by his club The Garrick. He said then: ‘Oh, if they make too much fuss about me being ninety, they’ll all think I’ve retired, and stop offering me work.’ His fears were of course groundless, and he filmed his last performance just a month before his death, aged 96.

  Judi has always expressed her similar determination never to retire, so I look forward to collaborating with her on another book of reminiscences in another decade or so. Until then, I hope you will enjoy turning the pages of this one as much as I have enjoyed helping my dear friend Judi to put it together.

  John Miller

  The love of acting is in the family blood. My father was a keen amateur actor, both my brothers acted at school and I followed my brother Jeffery into drama school. I suppose it was only natural that my daughter Finty should want to follow her parents into the profession. Though she initially wanted to be an acrobatic nurse!

  My first ambition was to be a dancer. I was always dancing everywhere. I can remember very clearly my father saying when I can’t have been very old, ‘The thing about being a dancer is that before you get to forty probably you won’t be able to go on dancing, you’ll have to do something like teaching it.’ Even then, that was my idea of hell, and that really put me off. I don’t like the thought of anything packing up. Until then I was really quite serious about wanting to be a ballet dancer.

  In this picture I am not conforming to anybody, I’m afraid, and if you look very closely you can see that I have extremely scabby knees where I was always falling down. When I was a child, going to bed early in the summer was agony for me. I have such a vivid memory of hearing the boys playing cricket outside in the garden, then running up and down the stairs because somebody’d forgotten something and had to fetch it. Then friends would come over and you would hear a lot of laughing, then it would go quiet for a minute and you knew they had all gone off to somebody else’s garden. I couldn’t bear to miss it. I don’t want to be part of the action necessarily, but I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t mind if I’m just sitting on the side, so long as I’m hearing it. I don’t want to miss a lot of larks.

  On my right is my friend Ursula Gayler, who was later my dresser at the National Theatre.

  This is me on holiday in France with my brother Jeffery, my father and my sister-in-law Daphne.

  This is the earliest picture I have of my husband Michael (right) – you can already see his mischievous sense of humour.

  Michael (top row, centre) with five of his school friends and then with four of the same group on his fiftieth birthday. They all remained close friends throughout their lives.

  The York Mystery Plays were revived in 1951 and were performed every three years, directed by E. Martin Browne. Daddy played Annas the High Priest. He was a very good actor as well as a very good doctor and my ma was in charge of making all the costumes, designed by Norah Lambourne. We had auditions at school, and I got in, playing an angel.

  There were about eight of us from the Mount, and we were allowed out of school to take part. That was a terribly exciting time. Tenniel Evans played the Archangel Michael. He then went to Colchester and he wrote to me all the time he was there; we had a wonderful long correspondence until I was about eighteen. Next time I played the angel sitting at the door of the tomb in white clothing. Henzie Raeburn, E. Martin Browne’s wife, refused to let me have anything to sit on, so I had to crouch for a long time.

  Here we are during a rehearsal break in 1951. I am third angel from the right, listening to Tenniel Evans.

  York Mystery Plays, 1951

  The Virgin Mary, York Mystery Plays, 1957

  At this time I thought I wanted to be a designer, and between my second and third appearance in the York Mystery Plays I went to art school. Then I was taken to see Michael Redgrave’s King Lear at Stratford, so brilliantly designed by Robert Colquhoun, with a huge saucer and a rock, which became, in turn, the throne, the cave and everything else. I’d never seen anything like it and I felt I was very old-fashioned about what I had previously thought. It was a Road to Damascus moment for me. But still, when I come to do a play, the bit I like best is when they show me the set and the costumes.

  Finally, I ended up playing the Virgin Mary in the Mystery Plays in 1957.

  My parents gave me a twenty-first birthday party which was held at Queen Alexandra’s House, by the Albert Hall, near where I was living when I was a student at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and the actor Jeremy Kemp was also a student at the same time. On another night, when Jeremy and I were late back from seeing dear family friends John and Jean Moffat, the door was locked and we sat on the doorstep the entire night, until the door was opened in the morning. Jeremy stayed with me – gallant to the last.

  The best work, in my experience, is always done where there is a genuine company spirit. That was something I learnt to treasure with my very first company at the Old Vic, and have since usually managed to achieve in my seasons at Nottingham and Oxford, and subsequently with the RSC and the National Theatre. This photo shows some of us who were in the Old Vic Company at the end of the 1950s. I am on the left, then Maggie Smith, Moyra Fraser, Alec McCowen, Rosemary Ackland and John Moffatt.

  I adore this picture of Daddy in my dressing room at the Old Vic after a performance of Hamlet. He came to most of my performances. When I played Juliet I had a line ‘Where are my Father and Mother, Nurse?’ and he was the one who shouted out: ‘Here we are darling, in Row H.’

  For Hamlet I had this absolutely beautiful costume, designed by Audrey Cruddas: green shot with silver, and greyish silver beads. She set it in the Ruritanian period and all the chaps wore what we used to call shoes for tall girls – slip-on pumps. I got very bad notices for Ophelia. It did me a lot of good. If you get bad notices the first thing you do, it doesn’t half bring you up with a jolt. When the Vic toured America it was decided that Barbara Jefford should play the part. That was hard to bear, but I was lucky enough to be playing Maria in Twelfth Night and the Princess of France in Henry V.

  John Neville was playing Hamlet, and there is nobody who can hold a candle to John for leading a company – nobody I’ve ever met. He was brilliant at teaching you basic things that I don’t think young actors are taught anymore – the whole business of getting in on time, being prepared, and not taking up the director’s time while you sort out the problem of what is actually your homework. He had a great sense of fun, which is terribly important, and there’s no doubt that if a company is led like that it comes over to an audience that it is a unit which works together. It’s something you can’t manufacture.

  John used to hate it if anyone said they were tired and he’s quite right. Acting requires discipline, and if they are too tired well, frankly, I feel they should let someone else do it. When I caught Asian flu during Hamlet at the Old Vic, one night I cried during the scene and went to pieces, and John came off and said, ‘If you can’t do it, let your understudy. Don’t go on and show something that’s nothing to do with Ophelia.’

  I thought that was a very good lesson to learn.

  Ophelia in Hamlet with John Neville, Old Vic, 1957

  Phebe in As You Like It, Old Vic, 1959

  I had a blonde ponytail as Phebe in As You Like It – what an arse-paralysing part! When the audience is shifting about and finding their handbags, ready to go home, suddenly she comes on again, having a row with Silvius. ‘Oh good grief,’ they all think, ‘not another two having a row!’ I’m bottom left, with John Stride as Silvius.

  One night during The Importance of Being Earnest Fay Compton, as Lady Bracknell, said, ‘Thirty-four is a very attractive name, Mr Cardew.’ Alec and I laughed so much we were told off by Fay; we were really given a rocket. When I told John Gielgud much later, he said, ‘How dare she. She was absolutely frightful at laughing on the stage.’

  Cecily in The Im
portance of Being Earnest with Alec McCowen as Algy, Old Vic, 1959

  Romeo and Juliet was a great success. It was Franco Zeffirelli’s first Shakespearean production and he was quite unlike any other director I ever worked for.

  John Stride and I were in our twenties though, as you can see in the opposite photo, we looked much younger. We had a marvellous time doing it.

  Franco Zeffirelli adjusts my costume

  With Barbara Leigh-Hunt during the technical run. Her wig had obviously been taken away to be dressed during one of the waits.

  Juliet in Romeo and Juliet with John Stride as Romeo, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, Old Vic, 1960

  Maria in Twelfth Night with Joss Ackland as Sir Toby Belch, Old Vic, 1958

  One day in rehearsal for Twelfth Night Michael Benthall said to me, ‘Could you play it in a dialect?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I’ll play it Yorkshire’ and it fitted actually very well. Joss Ackland played Sir Toby on the American tour and he introduced me to jazz. Several of us went to hear Kid Ory, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday.

  Isabella in Measure for Measure with Tom Fleming as the Duke, Stratford, 1962

  With John Gielgud and Dorothy Tutin in The Cherry Orchard, Aldwych Theatre, 1961. John said that Dottie and I were like the two daughters he might have had. What a lovely man as well as a great actor.

  When we were rehearsing Measure for Measure at Stratford I used to cycle out to Tom Fleming’s cottage at Hampton Lucy for breakfast. I would collect the cream and Tom would have the porridge on, then we’d put the bike in the car and come in to rehearsal. On Shakespeare’s birthday we were invited to that big civic lunch, and the beadle said, ‘Name?’ and Tom said, ‘Tom Fleming.’ The man announced ‘Mr Albert Finney’ and then he said to Tom, ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.’ We never did find out what that was all about.