Judi Dench is Determined to Continue Acting Despite Her Deteriorating Eyesight

Dame Judi Dench has no plans on slowing down.

While participating in an online event for the Vision Foundation, the 86-year-old Oscar winner opened up about her determination to continue acting despite her deteriorating eyesight.

“You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult,” Judi said via The Guardian. “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!”

Judi also said that losing her eyesight has provided her with some funny acting moments.

“I was doing the ‘Winter’s Tale’ with Kenneth Branagh a couple of years ago, playing Paulina,” Judi recalled. “And after we had been running for three weeks or so at the Garrick he said to me — I have a long speech at the end — he said: ‘Judi, if you were to say that speech about eight feet to your right, you’d be saying it to me and not to the pros.’ I rely on people to tell me!”

Despite losing her eyesight, Judi is trying to look at things with a positive mindset.

“It does enable you to do one thing and that is that you have to get very close to people before you can recognize who they are,” Judi shared. “During lockdown, I made a film and I was up close addressing people wearing masks during rehearsals, nothing to do with any scene I’m in. It’s kind of exquisite if you can do that and that’s the good side of it, and you have to look at that side of it.”

The condition of Judi‘s sight hasn’t stopped her from finding work. She recently booked a role in a biopic about one of her former co-stars!