If You Love Judi Dench, We Have Very Good News for You

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent

If, like us, you already love Judi Dench, we have very good news for you.

There is a book.

And not simply another celebrity memoir, dutifully marching from childhood to triumphs to honors received. Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent is something much more appealing: a long, wonderfully entertaining conversation with Judi Dench about Shakespeare, the theatre, the actors and directors she has worked with, the roles she has loved (and occasionally not loved), and what happens when you spend the better part of a lifetime in the company of the Bard.

The book grew out of conversations between Dench and her friend, actor and director Brendan O'Hea. What emerges is less a formal memoir than the rather wonderful sensation of being allowed to eavesdrop on two old friends talking about a lifetime in the theatre.

We're very glad they let us listen.

The Man Who Paid the Rent

Even the title has a story.

When Judi Dench and her late husband, actor Michael Williams, were young married actors, Shakespeare provided so much of their employment that they referred to him as “the man who pays the rent.”

And he certainly did.

Dench made her professional stage debut as Ophelia in Hamlet at the Old Vic and went on to play an astonishing collection of Shakespeare’s women: Juliet, Titania, Viola, Beatrice, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Gertrude and many more.

But what makes the book so appealing is that Dench doesn't talk about Shakespeare as something preserved under glass.

For her, these are plays she has actually lived in.

What makes the book such a pleasure, though, isn’t simply the remarkable list of roles. It’s the conversation. Dench talks about Shakespeare with the ease of someone discussing an old friend — affectionate, occasionally exasperated, and very funny. There are stories of rehearsals and performances, parts she loved, parts she questioned, things that went gloriously right and things that most certainly did not.

You don’t need to know your quartos from your folios to enjoy it. This is Shakespeare brought down from the pedestal and back into the theatre — alive, unpredictable, and meant to be heard.

This is Shakespeare without the homework.

A Shakespeare Jukebox

One of the great pleasures of Judi Dench is the apparent contradiction between the formidable actress and the thoroughly mischievous woman.

She can summon enormous passages of Shakespeare seemingly at will—Graham Norton has rather wonderfully described her as a “Shakespeare jukebox”—and then tell a story that completely punctures any possibility of taking the theatrical world too seriously.

She doesn't merely remember Shakespeare.

She seems to carry him around with her.

Judi & Ian

And then there is Ian McKellen.

Long before either became a beloved elder statesman of British acting, Dench and McKellen played Lady Macbeth and Macbeth together for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Trevor Nunn's celebrated production of Macbeth.

Which makes seeing the two of them together all these decades later particularly irresistible.

We came across this wonderful conversation between Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, with Jim Carter—yes, Mr. Carson from Downton Abbey—and it is simply too good not to share.

They tease one another. They interrupt. They remember. They disagree. They make each other laugh.

And underneath all of it is an extraordinary lifetime of experience on the British stage.

More than anything, it makes you wish someone would simply put three comfortable chairs in a room, keep the cameras running and leave them there for another couple of hours.

Watch Judi Dench & Ian McKellen in conversation with Jim Carter

Perhaps That's Why We Love Her

There are actors we admire because they are brilliant.

Judi Dench is certainly one of them.

But there are a very small number we develop genuine affection for, and somehow she belongs in that group too.

Perhaps it's the twinkle. Perhaps it's the refusal to behave as though being Dame Judi Dench requires Dame Judi Dench to behave herself.

Perhaps it is simply that after decades of extraordinary performances, Shakespeare, Bond films, queens and national-treasure status, she still seems genuinely delighted by the whole improbable business of acting.

And that is really the pleasure of Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent.

You don't have to be a Shakespeare scholar to enjoy it. Frankly, you don't even have to be particularly devoted to Shakespeare.

You just have to enjoy Judi Dench.

The book feels less like reading a theatrical memoir and more like being lucky enough to have been given the chair next to her while someone asks all the questions you wish you'd thought of yourself.

We happen to have copies at Clever Girl.

But mostly, we wanted to tell you about it.

Because when we discover something this delightful, keeping it to ourselves would be terribly bad form.