“How do you feel about getting old?” asked Ed Bradley, one of the announcers on the CBS show “Sixty Minutes.” The person he was interviewing, Judi Dench, answered in one word: “Awful.” Then she added, “There is nothing good to be said about getting old.”
When Ed Bradley responded with a cliché, “It’s better than the alternative,” his guest smiled wanly and grudgingly agreed, “well, yes.”
Dame Judi Dench, a diminutive 67-year old British actress, has loomed large in notable films of late. She has played both Queen Victoria, in “Mrs. Brown,” and Queen Elizabeth I in “Shakespeare in Love.” More recently, she has scored a big success in “Iris,” taking the title role of Iris Murdoch, the British novelist who died in 2000. This latter performance has earned her a nomination for the Academy Award as best actress and, by the time this column appears, she may have won the award itself.
Despite this dazzling success, Judi Dench expresses anxiety about her future as an actress. She told Bradley how hard it is for women to get offered desirable roles after a certain age. Approaching 70, she can see herself coming to the end of her career, presumably long before the end of her life.
Perhaps she feels other fears, these provoked by playing Iris Murdoch on screen. In that role, she portrayed memorably a woman who, in her last years, was afflicted by Alzheimer’s Disease. From having been a master of the written word, perhaps the best English novelist then alive, she lost the ability to write anything at all.
I will not soon forget this film and the way Dench conveyed Iris’ plight, her expression becoming increasingly vacant as things became more and more incomprehensible to her. Jim Broadbent, who played Iris’s husband John Bayley, also gave a magnificent performance, at least as fine as Dench’s. His face had to register a broader range of emotions than she did as he coped with the tragedy of his beloved wife’s disease. With great skill he showed the conflicting feelings he experienced, stretching all the way from tenderness to rage.
Before turning to films, Judi Dench enjoyed a distinguished career as an actress on the stage. “Sixty Minutes” showed a clip of her singing and dancing in Cabaret, one of her many roles. In this latter performance she displayed a versatility that must have surprised viewers who know her only from her films. At first sight, Dench does not seem physically suited to this kind of stage role, but apparently she carried it off well.
Returning to her comments about growing older, I find them sad. And yet, like most people my age, I know what she means. A few weeks ago, a friend whom I have known since age fifteen entered a extended care facility. Alzheimer’s Disease had made it impossible for his wife to care for him any longer at home. Realizing that my friend Jack, when young among the most brilliant students I have ever known, and later distinguished in his career as a lawyer, has suffered the loss of coherent brain functioning – – all this has made me sad indeed.
Why was Jack singled out among my contemporaries to endure this frightening disease? How have the rest of us, thus far at least, escaped this plague? Why could not the inevitable cure have been found before Jack came down with the devastating illness?
No one knows the answers to these questions, of course. They are more the cries of our hearts than they are rationally posed questions issuing from our minds. But this particular disease, and others also devastating await many of us; we know how foolhardy it is to express easy optimism about growing older. We elders have reasons enough to be pessimistic about our prospects.
Yet, to find nothing at all good about getting old strikes me as extreme. I find it sad if Dench really holds this view. Granted that for her the looming prospect of losing her brilliant career with all its achievements, its excitement, and the celebrity that goes with this kind of work, can surely get her to feel wary of her future. But nothing good?
Even in a week when bodily life has been burdensome, I much value the psychic richness of later life. So many precious memories, such a range of extended family relationships, numerous valued friends and associates – – these qualities of my life strike me as distinctively different from what I knew earlier.
And the spiritual resources available in later life, leisure to take care of one’s soul and appreciate the wonder of it all, varied opportunities to continue the great search for truth, for insight, ultimately for God. Surprisingly, in a long life, this often turns out to be the best time for this reaching within and outside as well.
Richard Griffin