Judi Dench says her eyesight is almost gone, and she is still turning the material of a long career into a memoir with Brendan O'Hea. In a CBS News interview on November 8, 2026, the 91-year-old looked back at a stage-to-screen life that began in 1957 and still shapes the stories she tells now.
Her memoir, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, came out of what she called a series of conversations with O'Hea. That format fits the subject: Dench is not packaging old publicity notes, but revisiting the moments that marked her work, from theater to film and the friendships around them.
Old Vic Theatre to Mrs. Brown
1957 was the start of the record she is now revisiting, when Dench began her stage career as Ophelia in Hamlet at London's Old Vic Theatre. Forty years later, she said, her first starring film role came in Mrs. Brown. That gap is a reminder of how slowly a screen career can crystallize even for someone who would later become one of the most recognized actors in film and theater.
Eight Academy Award nominations and one Oscar for Shakespeare in Love sit beside eight James Bond films as M. Dench said she preferred theater to film, and her explanation was practical, not sentimental: on stage, a group can keep improving a performance every night, while film stops at cut. That preference explains why the memoir reads less like a victory lap than a working notebook.
“Every single thing wrong”
One producer once told her, “I'm sorry,” he said, “you have every single thing wrong with your face.” Dench said she walked out and returned to the Old Vic Theatre, a choice that now lands as more than a good story. It is the kind of rejection that could have flattened a lesser career; instead, she turned it into fuel, and the film work that followed gave her eight Academy Awards nominations.
Her eyesight now brings an added strain to the memoir’s publicity push. Dench said her vision is almost gone because of macular degeneration, yet she was still joking through Bananagrams: “Don't expect any vowels, because I've got them all.” When she added, “It's tricky if you're playing with an almost-blind person,” the line carried the kind of dry control that has always made her interviews feel like extensions of the roles.
Brendan O'Hea and the memories
O'Hea, who worked with Dench on the book, said, “It was all there, and I think when you read about the childhood and your faith, your Quakerism, I think that is what's kind of probably shaped you.” Dench answered with the kind of family-first shorthand that often tells the larger story faster than any chronology: “And being part of a happy family” and “How lucky.”
The memoir also reaches into the personal archive. Dench said she planted trees in memory of friends and family at her home in England, including a crabapple for Maggie Smith, and she remembered Michael Williams with “Yes, and a sense of humor, and daftness.” She also recalled being “completely dumbstruck” when Sidney Poitier walked in after he knocked on her door.
The book’s value is in that range: the working life, the private losses, and the blunt recollection of how a performer survives both praise and dismissal. Dench has already lived the résumé; Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? turns that résumé into evidence, and the next questions are the ones the book itself still holds back on the page.
