Dame Judi Dench Says Vision Loss Keeps Her Out of the Public Eye

Dame Judi Dench, who turned 90 last month, will no longer be attending events as a party of one. The Oscar-winning actor recently shared that her deteriorating eyesight has advanced to the point where she is unable go out in public on her own.

“Somebody will always be with me,” she said on Trinny Woodall’s “Fearless” podcast. “I have to now, because I can’t see and I will walk into something or fall over.” Dench first revealed in 2012 that she had age-related macular degeneration (AMD), telling Reuters in a statement at the time, “I do not wish for this to be overblown. This condition is something that thousands and thousands of people all over the world are having to contend with. It’s something that I have learnt to cope with and adapt to – and it will not lead to blindness.”

Speaking about her condition now, Dench says that she now has “no eyesight” and requires a companion. “I’m always nervous before going to something,” she said of walking red carpets. “I’m not good at that at all. Not at all. Nor would I be now. And fortunately, I don’t have to be now,” the legendary actor added.

More than a decade after her initial diagnosis, Dench said that due to her worsening vision, it had “become impossible” to remember lines. “You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult,” she said on an episode of The Graham Norton Show in February 2023. “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.”

Dench recalled one instance where, while starring in a West End production of The Winter’s Tale, her costar Kenneth Branaugh told her, “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 [proscenium].” Added Dench, “I rely on people to tell me!”

But the actor, whose last credited onscreen film work is in 2022’s AppleTV+ holiday comedy, Spirited with Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, has not publicly disclosed plans to retire. In July 2023, Dench told The Daily Mirror’s Notebook magazine that while it feels “ghastly” to be “so dependent on people” to learn lines, she wants to work “as much as I can.”

Dench said then that she has an “irrational fear of boredom,” and even got a tattoo that says “carpe diem,” or seize the day, on her wrist at age 81: “That’s what we should live by.”