Key Points
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Judi Dench is reflecting on her decades-long friendship with Maggie Smith.
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“She really was the most marvelous company. She had a ferocious intelligence, an acerbic wit and was very, very funny,” Dench recalls of Smith.
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Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?is available for purchase wherever books are sold.
Judi Dench is putting a decades-old rumor involving Maggie Smith to rest.
The Oscar winner, whose memoir Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? details her prolific career and anecdotes from her personal life, also looks back at her friendship with Smith. Throughout the book, Dench and Brendan O’Hea chat about anything and everything, including an old rumor.
“I mentioned you and Maggie Smith because you occasionally hear of actors falling out over the dressing room they’ve been allocated. It’s to do with hierarchy and status,” O’Hea asks Dench, to which she responds, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
O’Hea continues, “It’s true. I know of a producer who was so fed up with all the actors in the company arguing over who should be in Number 1 that he put a 1 on every dressing-room door.”
“What’s the matter with people? Haven’t they got enough to worry about with the play? I never mind where I am,” Dench fires back.
“And I love sharing – you know how miserable I get when I’m left by myself. I hated being on my own when I played Juliet at the Vic – so much so that Nicholas Meredith, who was playing Capulet, took pity on me and started coming into my room to apply his make-up beside me.”
Dench then admits that she doesn’t think she and Smith — who she affectionately calls Mags — would have shared a dressing room. “We’re too different,” she says. “Mags would prefer to sit in a corner, quietly reading, whereas I need the hustle and bustle of people coming in and out of the room – the hubbub and the chat and the tannoy turned up to full.”
Elsewhere in her memoir, Dench reflects on her decades-long friendship with the Downton Abbeyactress, whom she met in 1958 at the Old Vic, a theatre in Waterloo, London, when they were starting out as young actresses.
They wound up sharing the screen in A Room With a View, Tea With Mussolini, Ladies in Lavender, and the 2018 documentary Nothing Like a Dame.
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Smith died in September 2024 at 89. “One minute she could be howling with laughter, sending herself up, and the next, off-piste with grief over something, utterly discombobulated,” says Dench.
“She was a very complex person – intensely private, and I suspect quite lonely at times; she’d occasionally erect an electric fence around herself.”
That said, Dench’s lasting memory of the Harry Potterstar “is one of unadulterated joy and laughter.”
“She really was the most marvelous company. She had a ferocious intelligence, an acerbic wit and was very, very funny. And she was so beautiful, especially when she was young with that wonderful red hair. I mean really striking. And yet there wasn’t an ounce of vanity about her.”
“God, I miss her. I sometimes go to pick up the phone, thinking I must give her a ring, just to hear her voice, and I realize she’s no longer there,” concludes Dench.
Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?is available for purchase wherever books are sold.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
