And Furthermore (20 page)

One of the most demanding scenes comes near the end of the film, and was shot on the beach at Southwold. Iris was by then far gone into the mists of Alzheimer’s, and she dances with her old university friend Janet, played by Penelope Wilton, to the music on the radio. It was supposed to be in the summer, but we were filming it in October, and I was the coldest I have ever been, colder even than Newfoundland. We were wearing thermal underwear under our dresses to stop ourselves visibly shivering on camera.

One day in Oxford, moving from one location to another, I couldn’t resist going and looking at the house where Iris had lived with John Bayley. I knew that John was away, but there was a window open, and his car was unlocked outside, and that told me so much about how they had lived together. I thought that Jim Broadbent was just phenomenal as John Bayley, and when I saw the two of them at the film premiere, apart from Jim looking about three feet taller, it was just uncanny seeing them together.

Hugh Bonneville played the young John Bayley. He and Jim studied each other in the role, and the similarities in their mannerisms were so marked that a lot of people in America, who didn’t know either actor, thought that Jim played the part all the way through, which is a tribute to both of them. Jim won the Oscar for it, and quite right too, it was very exciting to be there with him that night.

We found that we had several things in common: we had both gone to Quaker schools, and we have very much the same sense of humour. In the first week I asked him, ‘Do you have a cat?’

‘Yes, I have a cat, he’s called Naughty.’

‘What a great name for a cat.’

‘Not so hot when you’re sitting in the vet’s waiting room with a whole lot of other people, and they come out and call “Naughty Broadbent”.’

Jim was one of the speakers when I was given the BAFTA Fellowship, and he warned me beforehand that he felt he had to take the jokey line, so I said, ‘Please do.’ With a wonderfully deadpan face he launched into a surreal description of how he discovered ‘the real Judi, the one the public don’t see, and it was a revelation. Who of you knew, for instance, that she is over six foot tall and massively built? How many of you are aware that her strong Birmingham-Russian accent, which she so valiantly struggles to overcome in her stage and screen work, is in real life almost impenetrable? And it is a mark of her extreme professionalism that it was the very last week of filming before I even realised that she had a prosthetic limb.’ The audience found this just as funny as I did, and I was very glad that both he and Billy Connolly seized the opportunity to send me up.

No sooner had we wrapped on the last day’s filming of
The Shipping News
than I was on the plane home to report for duty at West Wycombe in my second portrayal of Lady Bracknell, this time on film.

THE DAY AFTER I GOT
back from Newfoundland I was in a very different costume for Lady Bracknell, on location at West Wycombe. It was nearly twenty years since I had played her on stage for Peter Hall, now Oliver Parker was directing the film. The only other member of that 1982 National Theatre company to join me in the cast of the film was Anna Massey as Miss Prism. Oliver cast Finty as my younger self in a flashback, and he gave his father a walk-on part for the scene at the railway station when I arrived. As a student at Oxford, Peter Parker had been a famous King Lear in an OUDS production, and much later as Sir Peter he was in charge of British Rail. So I couldn’t resist ad-libbing a line as he opened the door of my carriage: ‘To whom do I complain about the delays?’ But Oliver obviously thought that this was far too much of an in-joke, and cut it out of the film.

The costumes were very striking. My hats were so high that I couldn’t get into an ordinary car to take me up from the car park to the house, and I had to travel in a golf buggy. I was wearing what looked like two foxes having a fight over my shoulders, so it was rather appropriate that our presence was noted in the local parish magazine in the Nature Notes:

I loved the billing – after the long-eared owl, but before the stoat. It was sent to me by one of Geoffrey Palmer’s friends, Ivor Herbert, who knew that it would appeal to me.

Lady Bracknell seemed to herald a run of formidable ladies of a certain age. Peter Hall asked me to play a grande dame of the American theatre – Fanny Cavendish, in
The Royal Family
. This was the 1927 Broadway comedy based on the Barrymore acting family, and written by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. He had just formed his new Peter Hall Company, and this was to be its first production, in one of my very favourite theatres, the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, with a cast including Peter Bowles, Julia McKenzie, Toby Stephens, Philip Voss and Harriet Walter. Harriet was playing my daughter, Julie Cavendish, and we had a scene where she talked of giving up acting to marry the man she loved. To Fanny this seems unimaginable, and she insists that Julie will regret it.

Toby Stephens, the son of my longtime friend Maggie Smith, was playing my son Tony, a Hollywood star just like John Barrymore. He was always fencing up and down the grand sweeping staircase on the set, and had great fun striking dramatic poses as if he were Barrymore in front of the film cameras. After the run of the play I was due to make my next Bond film, and Toby told me that he was doing a screen test for the villain. The producers said they would let him know, but kept him waiting for several weeks for a decision. He thought that the long delay meant that he wasn’t going to be chosen, but as we were all making up one night suddenly we heard this tremendous shout from the top of the theatre. Toby charged down the stairs, and when we all came out of our dressing rooms he said, ‘I’ve got the part!’ We were all thrilled for him, and the play had an extra buzz that night. When he reached his line, ‘Oh God, I hate pictures,’ we all involuntarily went ‘What!?’ quite unrehearsed.

The press reactions to the production were mixed, and it was playing at an extraordinary time. On 11 September 2001 the world had been shaken by the devastating attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, and our play opened in November. The number of air travellers dropped dramatically, especially from America, whose theatre-loving tourists are so important to the West End (but the loyal members of the
As Time Goes By
Internet Fan Club were not so easily deterred). Several plays were forced to close much earlier than expected, but the home audiences flocked to see
The Royal Family
, which was sold out for most of the run.

My few weeks filming as ‘M’ again in
Die Another Day
sadly did not include any scenes with Toby Stephens; I was stuck in the studio, and he was doing all the glamorous things like parachuting into Buckingham Palace. Then I found myself back at the Haymarket in a new play by David Hare,
The Breath of Life
. This was a two-hander with Maggie Smith, and we hadn’t appeared onstage together since our Old Vic days. There was in effect a third character, Martin, now dead, whose life we had both shared as wife or mistress, which set up the tension between the two women. The play was only ninety minutes long, but it was very intense and wearing to play, so much so that I declined the invitation to take it to Broadway, which rather upset both Maggie and David.

Instead I went back to Stratford for the first time in over twenty years to play the Countess in
All’s Well That Ends Well
. We did it in the Swan Theatre, which had been a rehearsal room in my previous time there. It was a play I didn’t know, I had never worked with the director Greg Doran, and it was good to be part of the RSC again – I am still so fond of that company. There are not many parts in Shakespeare that I can play now, and the Countess was a rewarding part in a play that is not seen very often. I loved it, and I loved being back at Stratford, because I have many friends there, and I know the area so well. Finty was very keen for me to go back, as she had grown up there and also loved it.

Later we brought
All’s Well
into London at the Gielgud Theatre, where I succumbed to my weakness for walking-on in other people’s productions. The RSC production of
Les Misérables
was playing at the Queen’s Theatre, just at the other end of the block from the Gielgud. The Countess is off for a long while in the middle of the play, and I thought it would be thrilling to be able to put in my CV that I had been in
Les Mis
. I got them to make me a costume for it, got out of the Countess’s costume, and raced along to the wings of the Queen’s. The cast knew I was coming, but I didn’t know any of them. Someone said, ‘All you do is, you go in and put that stool down there. Then you will hear a shot in the middle of the barricades, and that’s you being shot. Then we’ll help you off.’

So I said, ‘Fine, absolutely fine.’ I got ready for it, then I suddenly thought that this was the actor’s nightmare. It is like saying, ‘What is the play, what is the part?’ I thought, What am I doing? I went on, put the stool down, we were all singing, then came the shot, I went, ‘Aaaargh!’ and collapsed on to the floor. These two actors came up to me to help me off, and said, ‘You’ve only been shot in the arm.’ I thought that this guest appearance would be our little secret within the RSC family, but a couple of days later the story appeared in the
Evening Standard
, and I have never been allowed to forget it.

While we were doing
The Breath of Life
, Charles Dance came to see Maggie and me to ask if we would like to do
Ladies in Lavender
, which was to be his first film as a director. We said yes straight away, but then he had great difficulty in raising the money to make it, which dragged on for months, with none of us knowing if it would ever happen. We agreed to defer being paid, and everyone took a cut in salary, including Charles, to get it started. Then suddenly in the middle of filming the backers threatened him with the fact that they had run out of money, and nobody in the crew would come back the next day.

This must have been a great strain for Charles, but he never let it show; he was a completely natural director. We knew he was a good actor, of course, but he acted the part of the director absolutely convincingly, because you couldn’t see the joins. He was remarkably assured, he knew exactly how he wanted something to be shot, and how he thought it should be. We had a glorious October, filming it on location in Cornwall, in Prussia Cove. It was so warm that at lunchtime the crew just dived into the sea for a swim. Maggie and I couldn’t join them, because we were all wigged and made up, so we just played furious amounts of cards in the top attic of this little house.

This time we were playing sisters who take in a young boy found shipwrecked on the beach. He turns out to be a very talented musician, played by Daniel Brühl, who was well established as an actor in Germany, and he worked really hard. We never saw him socially, because every single minute of every day when he wasn’t filming he was having to learn the violin – the fingering if not the actual playing, which was dubbed in by Joshua Bell in the end, with a lovely score by Nigel Hess.

We had to go to Shepperton studios to shoot one scene, when they were filming
Phantom of the Opera
on another stage. Somebody asked me, ‘Would you like to come in and see this wonderful theatre we’ve built?’ and Maggie said, ‘Don’t take her, she’ll want to buy it!’ Nobody ever lets me forget my extravagant gesture in storing that theatre from
Shakespeare in Love
.

When
Ladies in Lavender
came out one critic moaned, ‘This film will only appeal to fans of Maggie Smith and Judi Dench,’ so we just hoped that there were enough of them to make it a success for Charles. The last I heard he was still trying to find backing for his next film, which he richly deserves to do.

A rather different director came to see me during the run of
The Royal Family
about making a very different kind of film. The American actor-director Vin Diesel arrived at the Haymarket, bringing so many flowers which they couldn’t even get up the stairs, and certainly couldn’t have got in the dressing room. He wanted me to be in his latest science fiction fantasy
The Chronicles of Riddick
, and unlike Charles he didn’t seem to have any problems over the money. There were incredible sets, the like of which I had never seen: huge, vast sets on many, many stages. I went out to Vancouver, ostensibly for a week, and eventually stayed there for three weeks.

I never really understood the film, but I got to do that thing which I have always longed to do in a play, where somebody says something to you and suddenly your face goes into a mass of cracks, and then you collapse into a tiny little pile of china. I kept doing that a lot, materialising and then disappearing. They filmed me against a green screen with green spots all over my face, and I never quite knew what was going on. The film has still not been released in Britain, though it did get a late-night showing on television, and I wouldn’t have missed the opportunity of making it.

I always want to do something completely different next, and
Pride and Prejudice
was in a very different mood. In that film I played Lady Catherine de Burgh, and the location for my home was Burleigh House, near Stamford, which is a glorious town. Barbara Leigh-Hunt had played the same part so brilliantly in the earlier television version that I rang her up and said, ‘I’m just going to copy you.’ But I think we were quite different in the end. Joe Wright directed it, and he hired the real butler at Burleigh to play the butler in the film. Harvey Pascoe was a lovely man, and he kept us on our toes about all the etiquette. He fell into the job absolutely, so much so that I think he gave up butling to become an actor.

Lady Catherine de Burgh was a very strong character, and so was my next film part in
Mrs Henderson Presents
. She was the lady who owned the celebrated Windmill Theatre, and I went to see some of the girls who had appeared there, now in their nineties, but still fantastically glamorous. They told me how extraordinary Mrs Henderson was, how wonderful she was to the girls, how she brought them food, and paid for their weddings, she really took them on as a family.

Her husband had died, and her son was killed in the Great War, and then she did this amazing thing of buying a theatre, which she knew nothing at all about. She hired Vivian Van Damm to run it for her, and her relationship with him was often confrontational. He was played by Bob Hoskins, whom I had never worked with before, and we had a lot of laughs. We had a terrible time dancing. Bob said, ‘The trouble with you is you have hooves instead of feet!’ When Van Damm bans her from her own theatre, she disguises herself as a man, and a Chinese lady, and as a bear. When people said to me, ‘Was it you in the bear?’ I said, ‘Of course, why do you think I would not be in the bear’s costume?’

Stephen Frears was directing, and I had so enjoyed working with him on
Going Gently
and
Saigon – Year of the Cat
that I was always going round to knock on his door and ask if he had got another job for me. We had a scene where I flew in a Tiger Moth, and they kept shooting us racing along the runway without ever taking off. They did it so many times that I said, ‘This is ridiculous, it’s like being interrupted in the middle of making love, we have to take off.’ So we did, and sailed around over Henley, and back down again. I had to wear one of those leather caps like the Red Baron, and the whole thing was absolutely thrilling. That is when filming is wonderful, because suddenly you get to do something you have never done before, and I love to learn something new every day. It was like that shot in
The Importance of Being Earnest
of us firing arrows at a target; that was something that I had never done before, and always wanted to.