Judi Dench husband Michael Williams was very ill when Robin Williams stepped in during a steep walk in Scotland. Dench says the encounter, set out in her forthcoming memoir Is It Too Late to Make a Run For It?, stayed with her for years. The moment sits between grief and courtesy: a brief offer of help during a lung cancer battle.
Scotland hill walk
Nearly 30 years earlier, Dench wrote that she was staying at Billy Connolly’s Scotland home with Michael Williams when “One evening there was a big party in the woods with a ceilidh and a bonfire.” She added that “Michael was very ill at the time and I could see him flagging, so we said our good nights and began walking up this very steep hill.”
Dench wrote that “Robin Williams appeared beside us and offered to help, but Michael said he could manage,” before Robin Williams replied, “Well, I think I’ll ride shotgun anyway”. For a memoir excerpt, that line does real work: it shows how a small gesture can carry weight when illness is already setting the terms of the night.
Robin Williams and Judi Dench
Dench’s recollection is not a one-off connection. She worked with Robin Williams in 1996’s Hamlet, and he later presented her with the Oscar for best supporting actress for Shakespeare in Love in 1999. Those earlier professional ties explain why the exchange on the hill lands as more than a passing encounter; there was already a shared history between Robin Williams and Judi Dench before the memoir put this scene in print.
She wrote, “I’ve often thought about that moment — Robin’s sensitivity and understanding, just offering to be there, gently supportive, without imposing himself.” That wording gives the episode its edge. The offer was casual, but the setting was not: Michael Williams was battling lung cancer, and Dench was describing the kind of help that arrives without making a scene of itself.
Is It Too Late
Michael Williams died on Jan. 11, 2001, at the age of 65, while Robin Williams died in 2014 at 63. Dench and Michael Williams had married in 1971, so the memoir is doing more than reopening a memory; it is placing a long marriage, a serious illness and a brief act of support into the same frame.
Tuesday’s release of Is It Too Late to Make a Run For It? will be the first public record of this account in Dench’s own words. Readers looking for the sharpest line in the excerpt do not need a grand lesson from it. They need the plain one: in a night shaped by illness, Robin Williams chose to stay with them for the climb.
