Judi Dench can no longer act due to years-long health battle: ‘I CAN’T DO A FILM ANYMORE’

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Dame Judi Dench is opening about her deteriorating eyesight, and its heartbreaking impact on her acting career.

Dench, 91, was diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration in 2012, a condition that causes a gradual loss of vision, which her mother also had, and how it is not only affecting her independence in the day to day, but also her ability to work.

“I can’t be on stage. I can’t do a play any more. I can’t do a film any more. I can’t read any more,” the dame told BBC Radio 4’s Today on Thursday, per Reuters.

“So you’ve got to adjust to all that, and make allowances for it and just get on and don’t think about it too much.”

The celebrated British actor revealed she can no longer read or recognize faces.

“I go up to lots of the wrong people and give them an almost hug and say, ‘Oh sorry, didn’t realize,’” she said, and admitted to host Emma Barnett: “I can’t see your face at all.”

‘I somehow get by’

Dench first went public with her eyesight issues in 2012, revealing reading scripts had become an issue and would have someone read them to her like they are telling her a story.

“The most distressing thing is in a restaurant in the evening I can’t see the person I’m having dinner with,” she noted at the time.

The Philomena star said she was determined to continue making movies for as long as possible.

“As long as there is a possibility of working I’m not going to retire because if I retire nothing will work anymore and it’s hard enough as it is.”

Two years later, she noted to The Hollywood Reporter that working had become “very, very difficult,” but added, “these are all of the negatives. What I can do, I do. And I somehow get by.”

Getting help as needed

In 2023, she said she could no longer see on film sets and relied on others to teach her scripts, learning lines through repetition.

“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,” she said on The Graham Norton Show.

“I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them. I could do the whole of Twelfth Night right now.”

Dench’s love of William Shakespeare endures, and she said on Thursday how “besotted” she still is by the sonnets.

“I just love them,” she said, describing their ability to capture human feelings simply. “It’s the rhythm of it. It’s the rhythm of your heart. It’s the way he’s summed up so simply the way that any of us feel about, well, anything.”

Dench, whose memoir Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, written with theatre director Brendan O’Hea, hit bookshelves Thursday in the U.K. and Nov. 3 in North America, has played many of Shakespeare’s major roles, including Juliet, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra.

She won an Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love and appeared in eight films of the James Bond franchise playing M during her decades-long career.

‘Work in progress’

But when it comes to choosing roles, Dench shared that performing never stopped being nerve-wracking.

“For me, always frightening, but that’s part of it,” she said. “It’s part of what that fear generates, an energy that you can use up, use the energy.”

She continued: “It’s always [a] work in progress, always.”

When asked about aging, Dench replied, “There’s nothing to say for it at all. [I] don’t think about it too much.”

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