As part of his ongoing My Worst Audition series, Jimmy Fallon had Dame Judi Dench relate her most memorably bad experience on The Tonight Show. Dench told a story she’s obviously told before about a long-ago audition where film director told her she’d never make it in movies because she had “every single thing wrong with her face.” So we’re all on the same page, this is what the lovely Judi Dench looked like in 1963.
Dench very prudently refuses to reveal the name of the director who handed her this insult, but we know this audition happened between 1957 and 1961, when Dench was in residence at the Old Vic Theater in London. So feel free to do your own math about which “big film” Dench missed out on.
And while that particular experience may still haunt her––she told The Mirror just a few years ago that she’s still “rather self-conscious about how I look”––it did nothing to stop her career. Dench was a huge star of stage and television and, in the 90s, got her biggest break in film with both the Bond franchise and her legendary association with Harvey Weinstein. Dench famously got Weinstein’s name faux-tattooed on her bum in gratitude for his support of films like Mrs. Brown, Shakespeare in Love, Chocolat, and Philomena, all of which garnered her either an Oscar nomination or an Oscar win.
In fact, with seven Oscar nominations and a host of British honorifics (DBE, OBE, and CH) to her name, that old act of unkindness from that unnamed film director looks pretty foolish. But Dench is in good company. Meryl Streep tells a similar story about producer Dino De Laurentiis saying, “Che brutta,” (in other words, “how ugly”/“what an ugly woman”) to her during a 1975 audition for King Kong.
In that same interview with The Mirror, Dench revealed her frustration with the lack of guidance for young actors who go on auditions these days. “What is your encouragement as a young actor? Where do you go to learn? Where do you get to make the mistakes?” Well here’s some encouragement, young actors, from Meryl Streep and Judi Dench to you. Don’t believe everything you hear in an audition.
