Judi Dench has revealed that her deteriorating eyesight has gotten to the point where she can no longer attend events or go out alone.
“Somebody will always be with me. I have to now because I can’t see and I will walk into something or fall over,” said the celebrated Oscar-winning star, speaking on the Fearless podcast.
Dench, 90, first revealed in 2012 that she had age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and more recently described the severity with which it had impacted her career.
Speaking on “The Graham Norton Show” in 2023, she said it had become “impossible” to learn lines because of her eyesight loss. Dench long prided herself on having a photographic memory when it comes to scripts, but that it was now something she could no longer rely on it.
“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. “I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them. I could do the whole of ‘Twelfth Night’ right now.”
In 2021, Dench told London charity the Vision Foundation that she asked her close friends to help her memorize new scripts by reading them aloud to her as the repetition of the dialogue helps her.
“You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult,” she said at the time. “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!”
Dench — who alongside an Oscar has a six BAFTA Film Awards, two BAFTA TV Awards, a Tony Award, seven Oliviers and two Golden Globes — made her last screen appearance in the 2022 Christmas movie “Spirited.”
