“I MIGHT COUGH a bit… don’t get alarmed!” says Dame Judi Dench. In these pandemic-riddled times, any tickle in the throat is a concern—especially if you’re 87 years old, as she is—but it’s nothing serious, she assures me. With a floral scarf wrapped around her neck, her white hair neatly cropped, the acclaimed star of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Philomena, looks in fine fettle when we connect over Zoom.
These past months, the biggest issue Dench has experienced, like so many of us, is psychological. “The thing about COVID is that it mucked up the rhythm inside me, I feel,” she says. “I don’t know what the outcome of that will be. But it’s a curious, odd, and unsettling feeling.” She pauses for a second. “Hopefully, we’ll get back to some kind of, well, normality… or something approximating normality.”
For an actress who has been performing
