And Furthermore (15 page)

BEFORE I APPEARED IN
MRS BROWN
I had come to the firm conclusion that I had no real future in the world of film. This dated from my early days at the Old Vic, when I went for my first screen test. I walked in and they were perfectly nice to me, and then this man, having looked at me for a long time, said, ‘Well Miss Dench, I have to tell you that you have every single thing wrong with your face.’ So I just very quietly got up and left. I thought, There is no point in going on with this.

I had a tiny part in my first film in 1964, the thriller
The Third Secret
, and I only remember it for a most terrible faux pas I made. I met Vittorio de Sica, and when we were having a coffee together I asked him what he was doing next. He said, ‘I am going back to Italy to make a little film.’ I said, ‘Will that be the first film you’ve made?’ ‘No, you remember a thing called
Bicycle Thieves
?’ Then it burst on me like a rocket in my head what I had said to this brilliant man.

The following year I was in
A Study in Terror
, in which John Neville played Sherlock Holmes and Donald Houston was Dr Watson. It was a hoary old piece really, and I gave rather a hoary old performance as Sally Young, who worked in a soup kitchen. Quite soon after that I was offered my first decent role, in
Four in the Morning
, directed by Anthony Simmons. I was a young mother with a crying baby, Norman Rodway was my husband, and Joe Melia was his drinking friend. The story was about a young girl whose body is found in the Thames, and we improvised our dialogue around the basic situation. We rehearsed in my flat in Regent’s Park, and we filmed in Putney, which must be the noisiest location in the whole of London. It is on the flight-path to Heathrow, next to a railway bridge and a road bridge, and right opposite where the river barges came and dumped all their rubbish. So we never got any kind of a run on anything. Every time we were interrupted Joe Melia would sing that dreadful pop song ‘Wagon Wheels’. You never do discover which girl is the corpse.

I only made one film in the Seventies, a racing mystery by Dick Francis,
Dead Cert
, and that was really only because Michael was in it. Tony Richardson was the director, and he said, ‘Why don’t you come along and play Michael’s wife? We’ll have a lovely time.’ We did too, but I found the final version a bit strange when I saw it.

I had some more small parts in films in the Eighties, including
Wetherby
by David Hare,
A Room with a View
with Maggie Smith for Merchant Ivory, and 84
Charing Cross Road
with Anthony Hopkins, directed by David Jones. None of these had mass box office appeal, and it was not until the mid-Nineties that I was suddenly offered a part in a series that most certainly did.

This was as the first female ‘M’ in the James Bond films, a change thought to be triggered by the recent real-life appointment of Stella Rimington as the first woman to head MI5. My predecessor as ‘M’ had been Bernard Lee, a very good actor whom I had worked with in my very first television play, directed by Peter Graham Scott.
GoldenEye
also had a new James Bond in Pierce Brosnan; it was lovely working with him, and it was a very good script. I don’t think I realised at first what a huge responsibility I had in playing ‘M’, I was just really excited about it. Michael and Finty were mad about the idea too, Michael said, ‘Oh, brilliant – Bond-woman!’ The very first time that Pierce visited me at home, he stood in the doorway and said, ‘Hi, boss,’ and Finty did a very theatrical stagger back across the room.

Pierce and I got on very well indeed, and I loved the line I had rebuking him in one of our early scenes, calling him ‘a sexist, misogynist dinosaur’. I became completely drunk with power, because I can’t mend anything, or even put the ironing-board up properly. Suddenly here I am, typing in numbers and a huge screen comes up behind me, I have to look as if I have done it. I actually find it quite hard, because I am always talking about things that I don’t understand at all well. But it is just so terribly glamorous playing ‘M’ in very glamorous surroundings, flying out to Nassau, staying at ‘The One and Only’, it seems so very chic somehow.

In the next Bond film,
Tomorrow Never Dies
, I even got to order Geoffrey Palmer about as Admiral Roebuck. I had to come down a flight of stairs and walk up to him to give him a dressing-down. Well, as he is much taller than me, I would have been giving him a dressing-up, so they said, ‘Just a minute, go to your dressing rooms.’ So we did, and when we were called back they had built what looked like a small hill. I walked down the stairs looking very fiercely at Geoffrey, then up this small hill so that I faced him on the same level – that was a good feeling.

I got on very well with Martin Campbell, who directed
GoldenEye
, but much less so with Roger Spottiswoode, the director of
Tomorrow Never Dies
. The car used to call for me at 5 a.m. to take me to the Frogmore Studios at St Albans, and I was often not getting home much before 10 p.m. Then a motorbike would deliver ten new pages of script for the next day, which I had to learn in the car. Later, at the editing stage, when I had to go in for the ‘looping’ (re-recording dialogue) things rather came to a head.

My regular driver Bryan took me in to London, and we got held up by a huge container van breaking down in Conduit Street, off Regent Street, so I rang in on Bryan’s mobile phone and said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m right round the corner, but we’ve got caught because this huge lorry has broken down,’ and they said that was fine. Bryan dropped me and said, ‘It’s just four doors down there.’ So I jumped out and went down, and there was Roger standing at the door, calling, ‘Come on, come on, come
on
.’ I said, ‘Did you not get my phone call?’ He said, ‘No,’ and at that moment somebody came up and said, ‘Yes, Judi, we did get your phone call.’

I simply couldn’t shake hands with him. So I said, ‘Did you see me the other day in Streatham?’

‘Did I?’

‘You know you did, I nearly ran you over.’

At that minute Barbara Broccoli came out of the back and said, ‘Pity you didn’t accelerate and do the job for all of us.’

Then we started to loop it, and he said to me in a very surprised tone of voice, ‘You’re very good at this.’ That was really the last straw, and then I did say to him, ‘You know, it was very off-putting indeed to have learnt the script, and at a quarter to ten the night before to get a loud knocking on the door by the courier with a new script. That’s not fair.’

‘Well, we didn’t start with the right script in the first place.’

‘That’s hardly my fault.’

‘Well, I apologise. By the way, would you like to be in my new film with Jonathan Pryce? My car’s at your disposal to take you wherever you’re going.’

‘No, I’d rather walk.’

I can be really difficult when I want to be.

None of that was called for when we filmed
Mrs Brown
. It was originally shot for television, where John Madden had made his reputation as a director on many successful series. Douglas Rae of Ecosse Films offered it to BBC Scotland, with Billy Connolly named to play Queen Victoria’s ghillie, John Brown. There had been much mischievous speculation down the years about just how close the relationship was between the Queen and her servant, and the original title for the film was taken from one of the contemporary cartoons –
Her Majesty Mrs Brown
– until John Madden changed it because he thought it gave away too much of the story. I was then sent the script by Douglas, and he came to see me at the National Theatre. He looked a little surprised when I got out my diary and asked, ‘When do we start?’ Then he said, ‘I think you should know that Billy’s first choice to play Queen Victoria was Bob Hoskins.’

I soon learnt more about Billy’s sense of humour. Douglas arranged for Billy and me to meet for lunch on our own at Le Caprice, which seemed a rather incongruous choice for both of us really. I arrived a bit early, so I got out of the car and walked a bit, and when I went in they said, ‘It’s the table in the corner, and Mr Connolly’s been and gone. He was sitting there just now.’ He had gone to buy some cigars, and when he came back we started to talk, and then we started to laugh, and then he showed me – along with the rest of Le Caprice – the rings in his nipples.

We carried on laughing through most of the shoot, mostly, though not entirely, off-camera. John Brown is not a funny part, and I thought Billy was spectacularly good in it, and wonderfully professional. The biggest problem we both had was with my pony, Bluey, which kept breaking wind during the takes. There is a longshot near the beginning of the film, when I am on the pony and Billy is leading me, and Bluey farted at nearly every step. If you look closely you can see our shoulders heaving.

It was even worse up on the hill near Lochnagar, because it was windy, and ponies don’t like the wind up their bums. It was impossible to set the scene, because the ponies were all moving around, and back to back, and then suddenly mine would walk away – it was terribly difficult to control. When I gave John Brown the sprig of heather, it was a miracle that we got within passing distance.

After that, in a scene where Billy had to lift me down off the pony, we eventually had to do twenty-one takes, because something of me would catch on something of him, or the pony moved or farted, or Billy’s microphone caught on my costume…It went on for ages and ages. I should think the out-takes from that scene are pretty good. It may have been funny for us, but I kept hearing poor John Madden saying, ‘We’ve got to do it again, because the light’s going, we’ve got to get it in.’ He was right, because it was one of those rare wonderful mornings with the sun coming through all the larches, it was absolutely beautiful.

For much of the rest of the time it was unbelievably wet when we filmed in Scotland, and very, very cold. The film was shot on a shoestring, and I only had two dresses. It was harder for the boys because they were all out on the hill, and when it rained all the kilts got absolutely sodden. When a kilt gets wet, the bottom becomes like a razor; that was what killed John Brown in the end, because his leg got infected. I remember at the end of a day’s shooting exteriors we were all sitting round trying to get the circulation back into people’s feet.

It was just as cold on the Isle of Wight in October, when we had to do the swimming scene. We all had rubber suits under our clothes, and you can’t swim normally in a rubber suit; we all look like ducks in water because you don’t sink. I had to come out of a little bathing machine, down some steps, and John Madden said, ‘If I think it’s OK for us to go ahead, I’ll say go, and if not, don’t get into the water.’ But it was a glorious October morning, cold with bright, glittering sunshine, so it was OK. Also that morning I got all dressed in black with that kind of white hedgehog effect that Queen Victoria wore on her head, and when I was due on the set they said there would be a car to take me. I said I would just walk round there, since it wasn’t far. As I walked down the path a bus full of tourists was coming along the drive to Osborne House, and they got a terrible fright because they thought they had seen a ghost.

Finty played one of my daughters in it, and John then cast other young girls who resembled her, so we looked like a real family. There were also good friends of mine: Richard Pasco as the Queen’s doctor, and, once again, Geoffrey Palmer, as her Private Secretary. After she visits John Brown in his cottage alone, the two of them look askance at each other, as Geoffrey says, ‘Don’t even think it!’ Their exchange of looks got such a laugh at the preview I told them both off: ‘I think it’s outrageous that the two of you get so many laughs without saying anything! Please, do you mind, it’s my turn, I’m the Queen, you know.’ Geoffrey had previously ticked me off during filming because I was word-perfect from the first day. ‘Why can you do that for them, and not for Syd and me in
As Time Goes By
?’

At the end of a day’s filming we would all meet up for dinner at the hotel, and then Billy would sit down with his pot of tea and start telling stories. We laughed so much that I would glance at my watch, wondering if I could get by on only five hours’ sleep, and at the next glance on only four hours’. Despite all the problems with the weather, we had a wonderful time.

One night was not quite so wonderful. We were all having dinner in a pub, about nine of us, and a man began making a nuisance of himself. He was drunk, and he kept joining in and shouting at us. When one of the girls got up to go to the loo, he came and sat down. Billy said to him, ‘Don’t sit there, that’s somebody’s chair.’ Then this man said, ‘I’ve got a pub in Australia, can I take a photograph of the two of you?’ Billy said very firmly, ‘You can take
one
photograph,’ just to get rid of him. The man went upstairs to bed, but then he came back down in his socks, and carried on shouting out. When I went up to bed, the proprietor said, ‘Do you mind if I escort you to your room? I’m a bit nervous about that man.’ About three days later, there in one of the Sunday papers was our picture, captioned,
Billy takes Judi to a secret hideaway
. Billy’s language was unprintable.