Dame Judi Dench talks to her writing partner Brendan O’Hea about her new memoir and seven decades on stage and screen.
Dame Judi Dench, M in the James Bond films, talks about her new memoir at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in Covent Garden on Sunday 6 December 2026. Her friend and writing partner Brendan O’Hea joins her.
Dench was born in York in 1934 and trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She made her professional stage debut as Ophelia at the Old Vic in 1957.
She won an Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love, and she has played Queen Victoria and Iris Murdoch on screen. Her career on stage and screen now spans more than seventy years.
Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? covers her years with the great names of British theatre. It also takes the reader into the garden and home she built with her late husband, the actor Michael Williams.
The afternoon at Drury Lane is her second London date, after the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 29 November.
O’Hea is an actor and director. He and Dench wrote Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent together, published in 2023.