Dame Judi recalled her co-star’s complaint that she was miscast (Image: Getty Images)
Dame Judi Dench is one of the country’s most celebrated actors, with a list of credits dating back to the mid-1950s, when she starred in several plays at London’s Old Vic . But there was one co-star, she recalls, for whom she could never measure up.
Speaking to Gyles Brandreth on his podcast, the star – who celebrates her 90th birthday today (Monday, December 9) recalled playing opposite heartthrob Lawrence Harvey in Henry V at The Old Vic 1958.
said: “Larry Harvey never looked into my face.
“Larry Harvey looked about a foot and a bit above my head all the time. He would never look at me, never.”
She explained that he was trying to make a point because he thought that the part of Catherine of Valois” should be played by a taller person.”
Lawrence Harvey kept his eyes fixed on Judi’s forehead (Image: Supplied)
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Dame Judi wryly comments that she “kept trying to attract his attention” by stretching her neck, but “it never worked.”
She says that it was seeing one of her brothers in a play that sparked her love of Shakespeare: “I went to see Macbeth at St Peter’s with Peter, my oldest brother, playing Duncan. And he walked in and he said, ‘What bloody man is that?’ I thought, ‘This is for me’.”
But while Dame Judi is best known as a dramatic actress, one of her earliest theatre memories is from a comedy. When her parent took her to see the 1920s Ben Travers farce Cuckoo in the Nest, she found it so funny she had to be taken home halfway through.
Laurence Harvey died in 1973, at the age of just 45 (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
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She recalled: “Somebody hides in a blanket box at the end of the bed. Two people are in the bed and then suddenly it opens and he jumps up and he’s wearing what we call coms [{long underwear].
“I laughed so much that I had to be taken home. I made myself ill laughing.” After Judi calmed down, her mum told her that, given that the appearance of the man in his underwear would’t be such a surprise for her a second time, she would take her back to the theatre a couple of days later to try again.
She said: “We’ll go back and see what happens. So two days later we went and saw it again.”