Bow down to Dame Judi Dench: the octogenarian on tattoos, rapping, and playing Queen Victoria

I watch as Dame Judi Dench eats her chilled corn soup with saffron and sips Champagne. At 82, she is just as elegant as you would imagine, with silver hair, ice-blue eyes and crisp diction. She’s 5-foot-1, but her reputation is towering.

Dench is one of the greatest British actresses – a star alum of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sally Bowles in the London production of Cabaret and an Oscar winner for her eight-minute turn as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love.

She died in James Bond’s arms, as the murdered spymaster M. And she has portrayed so many queens on stage and screen that when she plays a duchess, it seems like a demotion. So what to talk about with this regal creature?

Well, what else? Lingerie, tattoos, rap music, younger men, sex and her hobby of embroidering cushions with raunchy sayings.

This dame, as it turns out, is full of mischief.

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Dench got an Oscar nomination 20 years ago for playing Victoria in Mrs Brown, the saga of how the queen grew close to a younger man, a servant who doted on her after her beloved Albert died, outraging her household. Now she is back in Oscar contention for Victoria & Abdul, the saga of how the queen grew close to another younger man, also a servant who doted on her after the other one died, again outraging her household.

The first of the forbidden relationships was with John Brown, a tall, rugged Scotsman nicknamed “the Queen’s stallion,” seven years her junior. As Julia Baird wrote in Victoria the Queen, Victoria was so ensorcelled by the handsome Brown that she asked to be buried with a lock of his hair and a leather case full of his photos in her hand. His handkerchief was also placed on top of her body, alongside Albert’s.

The second entanglement, with the added complications of race relations in the colonial age, was with Abdul Karim, a 24-year-old Indian Muslim servant who became the 68-year-old monarch’s “munshi,” or teacher, instructing her on Urdu, the Quran and mangoes.

Dench is far more padded as the older Victoria. “She was 46 inches around her waist, and she wasn’t tall,” the actress told me. “It was difficult to go to the loo. Impossible, actually.”

Both movies begin with the small, round queen – widowed after having nine children with Albert – dyspeptic and stony-faced, miserable and in mourning with her black veil, only to show her brightening and melting under the sometimes impertinent ministrations of her attractive younger servants.

Even though her name became a synonym for priggishness, I observe, Victoria was a sexy little thing, wasn’t she?

“We are not amused,” Dench says with faux hauteur, offering the line associated with Victoria. Comparing the queen to the interior of a tree (Dench loves trees), she said: “She had a huge passion and need inside her. She had a happy life with Albert and then those years with John Brown, and then I’m sure she’d certainly given up by then and was just caught up in the drudgery of everything. And suddenly, that wonderful kind of flowering, where she thought, ‘This is really something worth living for.'”

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She said she understands that “heady state” well, discovering someone you can laugh with and learn from. “As a person,” she said, “I’m very, very susceptible. For 60 years, I’ve fallen in love with people.”

Is there any advantage in women getting involved with subordinates? She said they could get smitten with “the dustman, the postman, the butcher or the prime minister. It happens to be about the people”.

I ask Dench about her younger man.

“This is where I get up and throw the table down and sweep out,” she said with a puckish smile, pounding the table.

Actually, she’s quite open about her new beau and he’s with her in New York. Dench’s husband of nearly 30 years, the actor Michael Williams, who sent her a red rose every Friday, died of lung cancer in 2001. She met David Mills, a conservationist, in 2010 when he invited her to help open a new red-squirrel enclosure at the wildlife centre he runs near her home in Surrey, England. He is 74, and she prefers to call him a “jolly nice chap” rather than a partner.

Despite losing some eyesight to macular degeneration, Dench still seems elfin, determined to focus on “the pluses”.

I tell her that I read a recent interview in Radio Times with Ginny Dougary that she pointed the reporter in the direction of “a lovely naughty knicker shop” in Covent Garden but told her not to buy everything there because she was going, too. “I like it,” Dench conceded to me about lingerie, “but I don’t think about it.”

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She also told Dougary that older people should never give up on sex, noting that “of course, you still feel desire.”

I ask about her tattoos. She had Swarovski crystal body art spelling out “007” on her shoulder for a Bond gala and premieres and had “Carpe Diem” engraved on the inside of her wrist in St. Martin’s for her 81st birthday at the urging of her daughter, Finty.

Most memorably, she etched a message on her “bum” that said, “JD loves HW,” with a heart with an arrow through it, in gratitude to Harvey Weinstein for making her a movie star in Mrs. Brown, Chocolat, Iris, Shakespeare in Love and other films, after she had been starring in a sitcom with her husband in England.

As a young actress, she said, someone told her she would never make it in movies because “you have everything wrong with your face”.

“I’d like to know where that idiot is working now,” Weinstein tells me. “Probably for Breitbart.”

Dench pulled down her pants and flashed the tattoo at Weinstein at a celebrity lunch she arranged at the Four Seasons in 2002 with Mike Nichols, Nora Ephron, Carly Simon and others, and again at the BAFTA awards when Weinstein asked Dench to show his gift to a sceptical Oprah Winfrey at Royal Albert Hall.

“I walked in and I saw Harvey, and I said, ‘Hello, Harvey,’ and I dropped my pants down,” Dench recalls gleefully.

Winfrey, Weinstein recalls, “turned into a 12-year-old squealing girl” after Dench told her, “I hear you’ve been doubting my love for Harvey?” as she unzipped her pants.

Is the Weinstein tattoo real or simply drawn on by her makeup artist when she needs it, given that she once threatened to switch it to Kevin Spacey when he was the head of the Old Vic? In her typically saucy fashion, Dench purrs, “How can I possibly tell you? Ask Harvey.”

Weinstein isn’t sure, but he does know this: “She is one of the world’s great actresses but also great personalities. She speaks in the Queen’s English so elegantly and then she’s flirting and speaking like British sailors on shore leave. Johnny Depp and I will go to our graves thinking she’s the hottest of them all.”

I ask her if there’s a trick, when you’re the daughter of a doctor and a wardrobe mistress, to playing a monarch as well as she does. “It is more difficult finding out why you’re saying the lines,” she says. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re playing a monarch or you’re playing a slut down the street. Same process.”

I wonder why America is still so obsessed with monarchies in culture and politics after breaking away from one, noting our current mad king Trump, the princeling Jared, the princess Ivanka and the way the administration projects racial insensitivity as if it were a colonial power.

Dench says she doesn’t watch The Crown and only watched “a bit” of the recent 20th anniversary commemorations of Princess Diana’s death. “I just felt very sorry for the boys,” she said. “They didn’t ask for this, but they do it well.”

Is she surprised that the royal family seems fine with Prince Harry dating an American TV actress who has been divorced and is biracial?

“She’s divorced?” Dench says, sounding very surprised and recalling how Princess Margaret had to break it off with Peter Townsend after Elizabeth felt she couldn’t let the marriage go forward because Townsend was divorced. “It was really sad and somehow shocking to everybody,” Dench recalls.

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The dishy 30-year-old Bollywood star, Ali Fazal, who plays Abdul Karim, has come to dinner with Dench. And over his scallops and “Smokey Sour” mescal cocktail at the Orangery at the Whitby Hotel in Manhattan, he offers a story of his own about hated colonial statues.

He was shooting the last scene of the movie, when the queen has died and Abdul is back in India, withering away at the feet of a giant statue of Victoria in front of the Taj Mahal. Production designers had made the statue, since the Victoria statues that were once all over India had been removed. Suddenly, a bunch of right-wing Indian nationalists charged the set in Agra.

“I start hearing the voices, and they’re hooting and talking about Victoria, ‘Send Victoria away,’ and ‘We don’t approve of this,'” Fazal recalls. “So I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they’re coming for us.’ So I’m like, ‘Dude, shut this down, get in the tent'.”

“I FaceTimed you from there, remember?” he says to Dench. The two have just as much chemistry in person as on-screen, when his brown eyes meet her blue ones, and he sometimes takes her hand as he talks. (When I tell Dench I’m impressed that she FaceTimes, she demurs, “Well, somebody else will press the button.” About Twitter, she notes: “I don’t do it; I don’t do any of it – I barely have an ironing board.”)

Eddie Izzard, who plays the queen’s oldest son, Bertie (the future King Edward VII), has said the movie is “an edgy story because of what we did to the Indian nation back then”. But it is nowhere harsh enough for others.

Amrou Al-Kadhi, writing in The Independent, scathingly observes that Dench’s Victoria “is portrayed as what seems to be the most woke monarch in British history” and Abdul seems oblivious to the “unimaginable atrocities” in India during the Victorian era. The movie, he argues, seeks “to absolve our barbaric ubehavior in colonised countries.”

But other reviews are rapturous, especially about Dench’s Victoria Redux.

The vision of herself that Dench likes best, she has said, is Tracey Ullman’s spoof of her as a rebellious “national treasure,” shoplifting; throwing poop from her pup, Coriolanus, into trees; breaking all the china in a posh shop; kicking over trash cans and signs; writing “I hate pigs” with a fire extinguisher when she finally gets arrested.

“Because I’m a ‘national treasure,’ I could get away with anything,” Ullman’s Judi says innocently as she goes on rampages. “But, of course, I don’t.”

Dench told Radio Times: “It’s so anarchic, I love it. It’s much more like me than anything else.”

She detests being called “a national treasure.” “I hate that,” she tells me. “It’s not just tedious. It’s some old rock in a cupboard that the glass is shut on and nobody gets it out to dust it. I loathe it. I just want to be called a joker. A jobbing actor. Somebody who has a laugh.”

She did a funny video with the British rapper Lethal Bizzle, a fan of the actress who uses the word “Dench” to mean amazing. She donned a fitted cap, answered to the name Judi Dizzle and repeated his rap, “Anywhere I go gang rolling,” after Lethal Bizzle explained to the quizzical actress that the line meant that anywhere he goes, his friends are coming with him.

When asked why she decided to try her hand at rapping, she says with a shrug, “Why ever not?”

I ask Dench if she will miss being in the next Bond film. “No,” she said, adding, “I had the most wonderful time.”

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James Bond is supposed to get married to the woman he loves in the next instalment. That will go swimmingly, I note mordantly. “Who knows?” she says with a laugh. “I’m not around to give him any advice or a sharp look.”

She understood why Daniel Craig made a joke about slashing his wrists if he had to do another Bond film. “It’s a huge commitment,” she says. “But he has a ball. And the thing is, he wants a theatre career, too. And he went and played Iago, didn’t he?”

Does President Donald Trump remind her of any Shakespearean character?

“Oh, no, Shakespeare didn’t get round to that,” she says, giggling again. “That would be terrible.” An amused Fazal chimes in, “If you put Iago and him, Iago would be my hero.”

Dench, who got her start in 1957 playing Ophelia and later worked her way through Viola, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, agrees with her young co-star that Iago is the superior antagonist, pointing out that Trump should not be compared to Iago at all.

“Iago was very sharp, intelligent,” she says. “Quite a witty man.”

I say that Trump is our problem, not hers.

“Oh,” she corrects me in her soft voice, “it’s all of our problem. I think people are sharing it.”

© The New York Times