Dame Judi Dench has been very candid about her struggle to continue acting, as her vision has worsened over the last few years. She revealed back in 2012 that started to suffer from age-related macular degeneration (AMD). In 2021, the 90-year-old actress revealed at the London charity Vision Foundation that she started to have friends help her memorize lines by reading her dialogue to her so the repetition can help her remember. In 2023, Dench revealed on The Graham Norton Show that it’s become “impossible” for her to read scripts due to her condition, which is especially defeating as she prided herself on having a photographic memory.
Variety reports that Dench, who is known for her work on the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig James Bond movies, appeared on the Fearless podcast where she says she is now unable to attend events unless she has someone with her to help her around. The Academy Award-winning actress explained, “Somebody will always be with me. I have to now because I can’t see and I will walk into something or fall over.”
When she was dealing with her condition back in 2021, Dench could still adapt to her situation and stated, “You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult. I’ve 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. 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!”
On The Graham Norton Show, she also explained how well her photographic memory served her and how difficult it was becoming to memorize her dialogue. She 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.”
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