Dame Judi Dench has delivered a heartbreaking update on her worsening eyesight.
The Oscar winner, 91, is living with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), an incurable eye condition she was diagnosed with more than a decade ago. In a new interview, the beloved actress said her vision has now declined so much that she can no longer perform.
Speaking with Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Thursday (October 22), Dench was frank about how much the condition has taken from her.
“I can’t be on stage. I can’t do a play any more. I can’t do a film any more. I can’t read any more,” she said.
The Skyfall star also explained that she now struggles to recognize faces. She said she has sometimes walked up to the wrong person and almost hugged them before realizing they were a stranger. Even so, Dench kept her trademark good humor and practical attitude. She said people living with conditions like hers have to adjust and simply “get on” with it. Asked about getting older, she added: “There’s nothing to say for it at all.”
Dench first spoke publicly about her AMD diagnosis in 2012. Since then, she has been open about how it changed the way she works. Because she can no longer read scripts, she has relied on friends and family to read her lines aloud, repeating them until she memorizes them. She has said she learns “through repetition,” and has joked that she still has a near-photographic memory for older roles. She once said she could still perform the whole of Twelfth Night from memory.
Her latest comments, however, suggest that even these workarounds are no longer enough to keep her on stage or in front of the camera.
Dench’s career spans more than 70 years across theater, film and television. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Shakespeare in Love (1998), earning the Oscar for only about eight minutes of screen time as Queen Elizabeth I. She also holds a Tony Award and a record seven Olivier Awards.
To a generation of moviegoers, she is best known as M, head of MI6, in eight James Bond films, starting with GoldenEye in 1995. On stage, she became one of the great Shakespearean actors of her era, playing roles including Juliet, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra. In the new interview, she said she remains “besotted” with Shakespeare’s sonnets.
