Versatility and elegance define stage, screen legend

"Layers, I play lots of layers"
    Esme Allen [Act 1, "Amy's View]

When Judi Dench made the above remark early in "Amy's View," the David Hare play with which she stormed Broadway this spring, it seemed as if the entire audience could be heard giving its assent.

For over 40 years, Dench -- or Dame Judi as she became in 1988 courtesy of the Queen's honors list -- has been brilliantly peeling away layers in nearly 80 plays. But over the last few years, Britain's best-kept thespian secret has at last widened her audience, abetted no doubt by her inimitably throaty M in the last three Bond films.

It's 1999, though, that will be remembered as Dench's annus mirabilis, the winning year in which -- within the space of 10 weeks -- she first took home an Oscar for "Shakespeare in Love" and then a Tony for "Amy's View."

In the spotlight

Dench at 65 is belatedly alerting the world to a fact Britain has long known: As a performer, she is virtually without peer.

And she is equally loved beyond her work.

"Judi's a sort of saint, really," says Ian Holm, her friend and colleague of 38 years who first worked with the actress in the early '60s at the Royal Shakespeare Co. and just has finished co-starring alongside her in the Working Title-HBO-BBC telefilm, "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells," She's constantly giving, giving, giving; doing things for people."

As if to illustrate the point, Geoffrey Palmer affectionately recalls preparing to dislike Dench before they began their BBC sitcom, "As Time Goes By," which starts filming its eighth series in January. "I got so fed up with being told, 'She's a saint' and 'lovely' that I was kind of ready to hate her because of this awful thing of being oversold," he says. Instead, notes the thesp, who also appeared in 007 pic "Tomorrow Never Dies" and played Ponsonby to Dench's Oscar-nommed Queen Victoria in "Mrs Brown," "I think of Judi as a great friend; everybody who's ever worked with her thinks they're great friends, and they are. She's a kind of goddess."

That's why a nation that can be ambivalent toward its countrymen's success (just ask Emma Thompson for proof) wholeheartedly has relished Dench's newfound renown.

Britain's beloved

It's not just that Dench occupies a place in Blighty homes, through her TV work, and in the classical pantheon, through her lifelong commitment to the stage; she has a genuine hold over Britain's hearts, but in a way that is never sentimental and cloying -- Dench is far too accomplished a mischief maker.

"She's terrible; she's a great joker," says Jeremy Northam, who played Dench's stepson in "The Gift of the Gorgon," a 1992 Peter Shaffer play with which Dench never really felt at ease.

The British Theatre is rife with stories of Dench as cut-up, like the one about the end of the run of the Royal National Theatre's "A Little Night Music" when she opened her robe to American co-star Laurence Guittard to reveal a body stocking adorned with the words, "Yank, go home."

The antics would count for nothing were they not pressed into the service of a discipline that Dench prefers to do rather than explain, as if articulating her artistry would be to drain it of all life.

It's absolutely like a pressure cooker she explains. "So you have to batten everything down and keep it all close. Gradually, something sifts through and comes up to the top, and goes, "Whoosh!" And that's the beginning of what you have to work with."

The United States first discovered her unerring truthfulness in a wholesale way during the success two years back of "Mrs. Brown," a project initially intended for TV that ended up on the large screen in no small measure because of Dench's star performance. Although she lost the Oscar, victor Helen Hunt's gracious acceptance speech made it clear that Dench after a fashion had won, with Hunt paying elaborate tribute to her senior colleague.

Dench's trophy a year later prompted a curtsy from presenter Robin Williams and was followed directly by such a rapturous reception on Broadway that, remembers Dench, "It all seemed dreamlike; it was just heaven. One wonderful evening, I came out and there was the Fonz (Henry Winkler); well I didn't know where to put myself."

Ian Holm saw the play -- and the audience reaction to it -- on Broadway so is well-placed to voice the question everyone is asking; "Where does Judi go from here? It's amazing," says Holm. "She's done everything; she'll continue to do everything."

For the moment, by Dench's admission, family must come first, given the recent diagnosis that the actor Michael Williams, Dench's husband of nearly 29 years, has cancer.

The star's availability permitting, John Calley at Sony wants "Amy's View" director Richard Eyre to film Dench in a biopic of Iris Murdoch, the English novelist who died in February of Alzheimer's disease at 79.

"I admire her enormously," Calley says of Dench's aptness for a project that remains as-yet unwritten, "I think she's a great, great artist."

In addition, "Mrs. Brown" exec producter Douglas Rae at Ecosse Films talks of pairing Dench and Matt Damon in an older woman-younger man romance set in New York; British TV writer Michael Chaplin is writing a screenplay for Dench on spec.

Whatever happens, Britain now has no choice but to share Dench with the world. "It's about time somebody outside the rather narrow sphere of American theatregoers who've made it over to London knew about her," says John Madden, director of both "Mrs. Brown" and "Shakespeare in Love."

But is she ready to be an international star? "Look, she can handle it," Eyre states. "There are very, very few things Judi is unable to handle."