Ruth Leon recommends…Judi Dench – National Theatre Platform
Ruth Leon recommendsJudi Dench – National Theatre Platform
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While I was looking for something else on the National Theatre website this week, I came across this interview. It’s one of the Platform interviews that the National organises during runs so that the public can meet the actors and directors and find out what they’re like without the costumes, makeup and make-believe. And without the plays. Some are anodyne interviews which you could read or watch at any time when they’re promoting the current play. Ho-hum questions and equally, ho-hum answers. Some, though, are gems.
This Platform is an interview with Dame Judi Dench, acerbic, witty, down-to-earth and often side-splittingly funny. You wonder how someone whose career has been such an unbroken triumph, who also had a good marriage, who has been lauded to the skies and who has played so many different people, has managed to keep her balance, her sense of humour, and her insights into the theatre and the world so fresh and so real. She’s a revelation.
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The deepest impression she made on me was in Ladies in Lavender — because she was doing nothing, just running downhill to the shore, shaking her little plump body with the glee of an 8 years old, as if saying: look what I’ve got and how I can act with it. An actress sublime.
She does surprisingly well on Graham Norton, too!
Sadly, the interviewer is very loud and Dame Judi is quite quiet, so without subtitles is often very difficult to follow the interview.