Is it too late to make a run for it? Judi Dench answers in 368 pages
Judi Dench's memoir came out on 22 October in the UK (Michael Joseph, £25) and reaches the US on 3 November. It was written in conversation with actor and director Brendan O'Hea, her partner on the 2023 Shakespeare book.
Judi Dench is 91, has been working for seven decades, and has now put the whole of it in one book. “Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?” came out on 22 October from Michael Joseph, a Penguin imprint: 368 pages, £25 in hardback, with an ebook and an audiobook alongside. The American edition, from St. Martin’s Press, follows on 3 November.
She wrote it the way she wrote her last one, in conversation with her friend Brendan O’Hea, the actor and director who worked with her on “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent” in 2023. He asks. She talks. It reads like an afternoon in her company, which is rather the point.
What’s in it
The publisher’s outline covers her childhood in York, the parents who shaped her and the brother who nudged her towards acting. There are pranks, on stage and off, a close look at her best-known screen roles, and her marriage to the actor Michael Williams, which lasted from 1971 until his death in 2001.
Then there are the stories that sell a memoir. Penguin teases the night she was locked out of the Oscars, a too-close brush with crocodiles in Borneo, and a mother who occasionally felt the need to turn a garden hose on her.
A career in numbers
Few actors have a record like it. One Oscar, ten BAFTAs and eight Laurence Olivier Awards, which is a record of its own. To film audiences she is M in seven Bond films, from “GoldenEye” in 1995 to “Skyfall” in 2012, and the Elizabeth I of “Shakespeare in Love”, the role that won her the Academy Award.
In the launch interviews she made it plain that she loathes being called a national treasure and has no plans to stop. In a year of big career tributes, she has chosen to tell her own story, in her own voice. No Portuguese edition has been announced yet.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: cover © Michael Joseph / Penguin Books (Tugadaily composite)
