Known for her amazing acting skills, Dame Judi Dench is a household name in Britain. The actress however is suffering from debilitating health complications which she says has made acting impossible.
The actress has been suffering from macular degeneration for more than a decade and says she now finds it hard to read as well. “It has become impossible 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.
Dame Judi Dench
“I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them. She also supports Vision Foundation, a charity for those who have lost the ability to see.
“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 to me over and over and over again… I was doing the Winter’s Tale with Kenneth Branagh a couple of years ago, playing Paulina, and after we had been running for three weeks or so at the Garrick, 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]. I rely on people to tell me.”
Judi Dench also says that she has a lot of material memorised specifically from her Shakespeare days. “I could do the whole of Twelfth Night right now.”
Despite all these challenges Dench did play a supporting role in Belfast in 2022 for which she was nominated for an Academy award.
The actress has to date won an Academy award, a Tony Award, two Golden Globe Awards, four British Academy Television Awards, six British Academy Film Awards and seven Olivier Awards.
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