Judi Dench auditioned for Cabaret from the wings, too scared to sing
Offered the part of Sally Bowles in 1968, Judi Dench assumed it was a joke: she had never done a musical and has a famously croaky voice. She auditioned hidden in the wings, leaving the pianist alone on stage. When Cabaret opened in London, a critic reported that she sang well.
Dench was born in York on 9 December 1934. Her father, a doctor from Dorset raised largely in Dublin, served as GP to the York Theatre Royal, and her Dublin-born mother was its wardrobe mistress, so actors often stayed in the family home. She went to a Quaker school and became a Quaker. As a teenager she took part in the first three modern revivals of the York Mystery Plays, playing the Virgin Mary in 1957.
She first trained in set design, but her brother Jeff's studies at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and seeing Peggy Ashcroft as Cleopatra, which she said changed her life, pulled her toward acting. A classmate of Vanessa Redgrave, she graduated with four prizes including the Gold Medal. Her professional debut came as Ophelia with the Old Vic in Liverpool in September 1957, when one critic said her talent would shine once she acquired some technique. Four seasons with the company followed, including Juliet under Franco Zeffirelli.
After Cabaret she spent nearly twenty years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Bernard Levin called her perhaps the best comic actress Britain had after her Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. Television brought popular success in A Fine Romance, made with her husband Michael Williams, and later As Time Goes By. In 1988 she directed for the first time, staging Much Ado for Kenneth Branagh's touring company.
Film fame came late, after years of only occasional screen work such as A Room with a View. In 1995 she became M in GoldenEye, a role she kept through eight Bond films until a last cameo in Spectre. She has been nominated for eight Academy Awards and won Best Supporting Actress for playing Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. A 2021 genealogy programme traced her ancestry to a Danish noble family linked to the astronomer Tycho Brahe.
Source: Judi Dench
