Dame Judi Dench’s eyesight continues to deteriorate.
“I can’t see on a film set anymore,” the Oscar-winning actress, 88 told the Mirror’s Notebook magazine in an interview published Sunday. “And I can’t see to read. So I can’t see much.”
Despite the setbacks in learning a script, Dench refuses to wallow in self-pity.
“You just deal with it. Get on,” she continued. “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.”
But that’s not to say the “Notes on a Scandal” star hasn’t been devastated by her vision loss.
“It’s the most terrible shock to the system,” she said. “Ghastly. It’s terrible to be so dependent on people.”
Dench, whose career spans more than half a century, was diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in 2013.
In a 2021 conversation with the Vision Foundation, a London-based charity for blind and partially sighted people, the James Bond actress revealed she asked close friends to help her memorize new scripts by reading them aloud to her in hopes that the repetition of the dialogue would help 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!”
In 2015, Dench confessed that she was no longer able to travel solo.
“These days I can’t really travel on my own because I need someone to say, ‘Look out, there’s a step here!’” she told the UK’s Radio Times (via the Mirror). “Or else I fall all over the place like a mad, drunk lady.”
Dench, who scored an Oscar nomination for her supporting performance in Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” is still planning on working and living by the Latin phrase she had tattooed on her wrist at the age of 81: carpe diem (seize the day).
“I have an irrational fear of boredom,” she said. “That’s why I now have this tattoo that says carpe diem. That’s what we should live by.”
