And furthermore by Judi Dench: book review

And Furthermore (first published 2010, this version 2012) is, as Judi Dench says, not an autobiography, but a memoir, because “John Miller has covered much of my life in his 1998 biography.”

Born Judith Dench in 1934 in England, she skips her early years and starts in the 1950s with the Central School of Speech and Drama and her first plays with the Old Vic Company (1957-1961) where “I learnt how to be part of a company.” She acted in many plays with her partner Michael Williams who proposed to her in Adelaide while they were both performing in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in 1970. They married in February 1971.

She writes of William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in 1979 in which it “is difficult to make sense of … My worst memory of it is the scene where Imogen wakes up beside what she thinks is the body of her husband with his head cut off. Bernard Shaw wrote a whole essay on how unfair it was to put the actress in that position, and I was inclined to agree with him. I was not helped by the fact that the dummy in my arms had knees that bent in both directions, so it was very tricky to manoeuvre without getting unwanted laughs.”

One of the most interesting parts is her account of working with director Sam Mendes. He first directed her in Anton Checkhov’s The Cherry Orchard in 1989 when he was only 23 years old, and again in 1991 in Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, and for the third time in a row in 1991 in Edward Bond’s The Sea. The next time Mendes directed her was in 2012 in the James Bond film, Skyfall, her last Bond film as M, 007’s boss, and the first woman to head the Secret Intelligence Service MI6. Dench starred in seven James Bond films, commencing with Goldeneye in 1995 with Pierce Brosnan. It was a role she relished, and has praise for both Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig (Bond from Casino Royale in 2006).

Her transition from plays to film commenced in 1964, at 30 years of age, with The Third Secret. At her first screen test she was told “Well Miss Dench, I have to tell you that you have every single thing wrong with your face.” Fortunately she went on to star in further films – and is still acting. Her memoir concludes with the 2012 film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel filmed in India.

As an annex, Dench includes a section on What Young Actors Need to Know – a series of questions and answers. Here she states (twice) that “the best actors are not always the ones who are employed.”

Readers will hear the familiar Judi Dench voice on every page. But it is not an accomplished piece of writing, and in covering a vast array of plays and films it is not detailed. It is, instead, a memoir of interesting snippets with a nice collection of black and white, and colour photographs, and a companion piece to the more detailed biographies that have been written about her.