Judi Dench can no longer read scripts due to deteriorating eyesight
LONDON – Actress Judi Dench (right, in a 2017 photo) has opened up about her deteriorating eyesight, saying she could no longer read scripts.
The British star, 88, who revealed this on BBC chat show The Graham Norton Show last Friday, said: “It has become impossible and because I have a photographic memory, I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines, but also tells me where they appear on the page.”
“I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them. I could do the whole of Twelfth Night right now,” added the Oscar winner for Shakespeare In Love (1998).
The prolific actress, whose 66-year career spans film, television and theatre, found international fame as M in eight James Bond movies from 1995 to 2015.
Dench has been battling age-related macular degeneration for more than a decade and previously said it was “intensely irritating”.
At a 2021 online event for the Vision Foundation, a sight-loss charity, she said: “I have had to find another way of learning lines and things, which is having great friends of mine repeat them to me over and over and over again, and that’s the way I can learn.
“So I have to learn through repetition and I just hope that people won’t notice too much if all the lines are completely hopeless.”
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