Judi Dench‘s latest update on her deteriorating eyesight is that she can no longer see on film sets. She previously disclosed that her eyesight loss had made it near impossible to read film scripts. Speaking to the Sunday Mirror (via The Guardian), the Oscar winner said losing her ability to see has been “the most terrible shock to the system,” adding, “Ghastly. It’s terrible to be so dependent on people.”
“I mean I can’t see on a film set any more,” Dench said. “And I can’t see to read. So I can’t see much. But you know you just deal with it. Get on. It’s difficult for me if I have any length of a part. I haven’t yet found a way. Because I have so many friends who will teach me the script. But I have a photographic memory.”
Duringa 2021 conversationwith the Vision Foundation, a London sight-loss charity, Dench revealed that she asks 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,” Dench 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 appeared on “The Graham Norton Show” earlier this year (viaPeople magazine) and said learning scripts had “become impossible” because of her eyesight loss. She said her “photographic memory” could no longer could help her.
“I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines but also tells me where they appear on the page,” Dench added at the time. “I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them. I could do the whole of ‘Twelfth Night’ right now.”
Dench picked up an Oscar nomination in 2022 for her supporting performance in Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast.” She also had a cameo in Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds’ Christmas musical comedy, “Spirited.”
