D - “Dench”

 

While Charlton Heston as the Player King gives his passionate speech, intertextual scenes play out, illustrating “Aeneas’ tale to Dido, and thereabout of it especially when he speaks of Priam’s slaughter” (2.2.281). We see the fall of Troy, in which Sir John Gielgud is Priam and Dame Judi Dench is Hecuba, whose brief, tortured, open-mouthed cry of grief seems to resound in our ears despite the near-silent film presentation of the scene, so powerful is her cameo appearance. 

Dench met Branagh while filming the Ibsen play Ghosts for television in 1987. They hit it off almost immediately when their giggling over a line Michael Gambon delivered about eleven potatoes got them thrown off the set. A little while later, she sent him a birthday card and he mustered the chutzpah to ask her to direct Much Ado About Nothing for a series of Shakespeare stage plays he wanted to mount with his Renaissance Theatre Company in1988 featuring actors as directors. He also convinced Derek Jacobi to do Hamlet and almost got Sir Anthony Hopkins to participate but he was a bit frightened of the task at the time. 

Dench, who got her start at the Old Vic playing Ophelia in 1957 and acted in dozens of Royal Shakespeare Company performances and partially lived in Stratford throughout her career, is as steeped in the Bard as humanly possible. She was Mistress Quickly in Branagh’s directorial debut Henry V (1989) and continued to work with him onscreen and onstage almost a dozen times. She even played his wife Anne to his William in the fictionalized Shakespeare dramatization All is True (2018). They were both honored for their contributions to Shakespeare in 2022 with the Freedom of Stratford-upon-Avon, where they unveiled the newly restored Garrick statue of Shakespeare, and were, as tradition dictates, afforded the right to herd sheep through the center of town. David Garrick, who was a prominent Shakespearean actor in the 18th century, was given the same honor in 1769 when he donated the statue to the Town Council.

Often noted as one of Britain’s greatest actresses, Dench was fittingly awarded an Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love (1998).

Sources:

Branagh, Kenneth. Beginning. Chatto & Windus Ltd London, 1989.

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