And Furthermore (16 page)

We were still expecting
Mrs Brown
to go out on the BBC, but then the American producer Harvey Weinstein saw it and said, ‘No, no, this is going to be a movie.’ That meant that Billy and I had to go to America to promote it. As we left Heathrow, I picked up a newspaper and saw a big headline: ‘Brown says the Queen must pay for her own helicopter.’ So I cut it out and when I got to New York I had it made up into cards, which I sent to everyone. It was thirty-eight years since I had last visited with the Old Vic, and I fell in love with the country and the people all over again. When Finty rang my hotel and said, ‘Can I speak to Dame Judi Dench?’ the switchboard girl said, ‘Is that all one word?’

Billy and I had to do so many interviews, one after another, that he couldn’t take them seriously. When he was asked for the umpteenth time what it was like working together, he would scream, ‘She’s a nightmare, ooh nauseous, an absolute nightmare.’ Then they would ask me, ‘Apart from
Mrs Brown
and “M”, have you done anything else?’ So I thought, Well, that is the whole of my theatre career gone swish, straight past my ear.

We had a wonderful week in New York and Los Angeles, and Larry Guittard came with me to the premieres in both places; we have stayed good friends ever since
A Little Night Music
. I thought that was it, never dreaming that I would be back again the next year, when to my great surprise I was nominated for an Academy Award for playing Queen Victoria. By then I was back at the National Theatre, playing in
Amy’s View
.

I CAME TO ADMIRE DAVID HARE’S
gifts as a screenwriter when I worked on
Wetherby
and
Saigon – Year of the Cat
, especially after all the problems we had with the latter, so I was keen to appear in his new play
Amy’s View
at the National Theatre when Richard Eyre asked me. My part was Esme, a successful actress who in the last act has lost all her savings in the Lloyd’s Names insurance crash in the City. We had a particularly strong cast, including Joyce Redman, and Ronald Pickup and Samantha Bond, both of whom I had worked with before. But from quite early on I found David’s script much more difficult than I expected. At the end of the first week I went for a costume fitting, and when I came back I went straight to Richard and said, ‘You must let me go, I can’t do it, I can’t learn it.’ I was in the most frightful state about it. I have never experienced anything quite like that before.

David’s dialogue is very like that of Shaw or Wilde: you can go completely off-beam, it isn’t naturalistic at all, it has its own metre, and you can hear it. It is because we don’t speak correctly any more, so you suddenly think, Oh, the word comes there in the sentence, does it? David writes wonderfully rhythmically, and once you have learnt it, it is just a rhythm in your mind.

When I came home, Michael said to me, ‘Pull yourself together, do what I do, go up and run a bath, get into the bath, and then you’re not allowed to get out until you know three or four pages, or whatever you set yourself.’ It was a wonderful way of learning, especially if you did it last thing at night. The difference between us was that Michael would come home and sit in the kitchen, and just work and work at learning lines, and I couldn’t do that. He used to say to me, ‘You learn the lines by osmosis.’ That was true, I always had, but now I had to adopt Michael’s version of learning Esme’s lines. I would do an hour in the bath, just going at it every day. I hate working like that, but it was a necessity.

The other difficulty was having to smoke in the play. I don’t like it at all. I started on the first day of rehearsal, but I dreaded it, I never developed a taste for it, and it made me very sick sometimes. But I could see that it was essential as punctuation in David’s script. When my driver, Bryan, was waiting for me with the car one day, he overheard one woman say to another as they came out, ‘She doesn’t usually smoke in a play, does she?’ as if it was me smoking and not the character in the play.

One journalist even said to me, when she interviewed me about
Mrs Brown
, ‘Oh, I found it so irritating, you upstaging people looking for your cigarettes, I longed to shout out, “Sit down for goodness’ sake and be quiet.”’ That undermined me terribly. When we came to do it on the Friday night, and I got to the speech about the journalists, I absolutely let fly. Samantha Bond was playing my daughter, Amy, and she was so taken aback by this that she asked our wig lady, ‘Has something upset Judi?’ ‘Why?’ ‘My God, she didn’t half let fly about the journalists.’

After one performance, I was going on to dinner at the Ivy with Nigel Havers and his wife and parents. I had a bunch of visitors in my dressing room, so the others went on ahead, while Nigel waited to take me. When we got out of the car, we were surrounded by photographers, it so put me off that I didn’t want to go any more. Another time I was waiting outside the Connaught for my old friend Pinkie Johnstone, now Kavanaugh, when I saw this man with a long-range lens, and wondered what he was photographing. Then my picture appeared in
OK
magazine, carrying a lot of Marks and Spencer bags, looking extremely cross, with a caption, ‘Dame Judi knows how to shop.’ He even followed us round to Scott’s restaurant, and took more pictures of Pinkie and me sitting outside. I don’t see how that is interesting, for one thing, and I really don’t think that is anybody else’s business.

David Hare was a huge comfort throughout the rehearsal period from the very beginning. A couple of weeks before we started he sent me a lovely note with a little appeal at the end:

He came to nearly every rehearsal, and it can sometimes be very off-putting to have the author there all the time, but he laughed at all the jokes every time, which was most encouraging. He said he was happy to do any rewrites if we were unhappy about anything, but asked us to say so earlier rather than later. I nearly asked him to change my entrance at the end of the play in a howling storm, when I had a bucket of water thrown over me before coming on. I said, ‘That’s going to make a
great
curtain-call, dripping wet!’ but I could see what an effective moment that entrance was.

David was much less sympathetic to the audience at the fund-raising gala preview for the sponsors. I was more than a bit daunted myself on that occasion, but in fact that was quite a good thing. I was so frightened at the gala that it completely took the edge off the first night, which became a real work-in-progress night, whereas the gala had been utter white-hot fear.

I just thought to myself, Stuff you lot, I haven’t worked forty years in the theatre to let a bunch of dinner-jacketed stiffs oppress me. I have got a job of work to do here, I have got to remember the lines. Part of the tension was caused by the large number of people in the audience who had lost lots of money in the Lloyd’s Names crash, just like Esme in the play. At the supper afterwards one woman told me tearfully, ‘That’s my story too.’

David rather lost his temper with some of the sponsors when they criticised the play. Then he came shamefaced into my dressing room and said, ‘Did you hear what I’ve done?’ ‘No.’ ‘I told them to get out. They said they were entitled to their opinion, and I said, “Yes but not to have free drink.”’ That is such a funny argument, but David is like any of us – you are very raw and wounded at such a point.

Hal Prince came round afterwards one night, and said, ‘You’ve got to come to New York with this.’ I told him that I wanted to go to New York with it, but that Meryl Streep and Glenn Close had been to see it the week before, so I knew what was going to happen. The next morning Hal sent me a note, saying, ‘Meryl and Glenn are too goddamn smart to try to muscle in on your role, come to New York.’ We did eventually, but I had to go to America for a different reason long before we took the play.

We made another series of
As Time Goes By
during the run of
Amy’s View
, and one day I was having lunch in the canteen at the BBC rehearsal rooms in Acton when Tor Belfrage (who took over as my agent when her husband Julian died in 1994) rang to say, ‘You’ve been nominated for an Oscar for
Mrs Brown
.’ That was the first I knew of it, and so that meant a lot of rushing about getting dresses, shoes and goodness knows what else. By then
Amy’s View
had come out of the repertoire at the National, and transferred to the Aldwych for a continuous run. The nicest thing about that transfer was that Michael was going to do his one-man show, John Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
, at the Duchess Theatre just round the corner, so we were able to travel home together.

The snag was that his opening night was the very night of the Oscars in Hollywood, and there was no way he could come with me, so I took Finty instead. My first reaction was that I couldn’t go either, because I was in the theatre and I didn’t approve of buying out performances to make such a thing happen. But Harvey Weinstein insisted, and Miramax bought out two nights of the play so that I could go to Los Angeles.

I thought that this was going to be such an extraordinary experience that I had better try to keep some sort of diary, so here are a few short extracts of some of the stranger happenings from 27 February onwards, when I first heard about my brief release from the Aldwych:

COUNTDOWN TO THE OSCARS!
or Will I be the only unlifted face in Hollywood?

After that I simply didn’t have time to keep up the diary. The whole thing was absolutely wonderful, but it is like nothing we do here. You start getting ready at crack of dawn, there are hairdressers and people to do your nails, your feet, and goodness knows what arrives – permanent orange juice, and coffee, and strawberries dipped in chocolate.

After lunch I called Michael at the Duchess Theatre. He said they cheered a lot at the curtain call for
Brief Lives
, so then a great weight fell off us, and we were in the right mood to go to the Oscars. We got dressed and climbed into this vast limo. They said ‘Are you ready for the red carpet?’ but nobody prepares you for that. It is about a hundred yards long, with the bleachers going up so high, and absolutely packed full of people. It took me an hour to get along it, with all the cameras and interviewers. Finty said, ‘Mama, look,’ and up in the sky at that minute a plane had made a huge heart with a vapour trail, that was lovely. Then we went in, by which time my feet were killing me. As soon as I sat down I saw Vanessa Redgrave with Franco Nero, and we had a bit of a chat.