It’s no coincidence Dame Judi Dench starred in Cats... she has a passion for felines – and many other creatures
WORDS: ALISON JAMES IMAGES: SHUTTERSTOCK
As the most treasured of all our national treasures – a tag she dislikes but simply cannot escape – it’s a given that Dame Judi Dench is one of our finest actresses – if not the finest of them all.
She has in her possession an Academy Award, a Tony, six British Academy Film Awards, four British Academy Television Awards, seven Laurence Oliviers and countless other nominations .
She also has a passion for the Bard and in her recently published book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent, she opens up about every Shakespearean role she has played throughout her long, illustrious career.
What is less well known about Dame Judi, however, is her passion for cats and the profound part they’ve played in her life since childhood.
The biggest clue came four years ago when she played Old Deuteronomy in the 2019 film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash-hit musical Cats.
“I suppose it starts with the fact that when I was a child growing up in York during the war, we had sixteen cats,” chuckles the 89-year-old star of stage and screen. “Yes, sixteen! My pa was a doctor for people not just in the city itself but also the outlying areas which included quite a few farms.
“Sometimes, he’d be given a chicken or a duck to bring back for us to eat. Food was so scarce at the time and we were terribly lucky. The cats in the area soon got wind of this, having been fed the scraps, and so that’s how we ended up with sixteen.”
Dame Judi feels that animals have much to teach children about life.
“It’s such a good thing for children to have them around,” she continues. “It makes them very, very much aware of the responsibility that comes with caring for creatures – the experience of having cats, a dog, a hamster or whatever.
“When my grandson Sammy was small, he had a pet rat. It’s about understanding something different and how caring for animals is terribly important. And if you start with a child with a pet and you teach your child those things, then with any luck that child will go on all his or her life to care about the wellbeing of animals.”
Dame Judi feels it’s not just children who benefit from contact with animals.
“We all do. Recently, I went to see a friend who was very, very ill, and on her bed was a wonderful cat who just wandered about and was allowed to jump u
