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Dame Judi Dench – whose career has spanned seven decades – has said she is no longer able to act due to her worsening eye condition.
The Oscar-winning actor, 91, was diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in 2012, and it has increasingly made everyday activities immensely difficult and posed heartbreaking obstacles to her profession.
She opened up about the condition in a new interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, stating: “I can’t be on stage. I can’t do a play anymore. I can’t do a film anymore. I can’t read anymore.”
Dench, who stressed the importance of radio in her life, said: “You’ve got to adjust to all that, and make allowances for it. and just get on and don’t think about it too much.”
The actor also said she sometimes approaches people and “gives them almost a hug” before apologising when she gets closer as she realises they’re not who she thought they were. She added that she could not see interviewer Emma Barnett’s face “at all”.
She also expressed sadness over not being able to see the colour blue, telling Barnett: “They said this summer was absolutely sensational with bluebells; I couldn’t see one. But I know what my trees look like, and part of it is in my memory and part of it is about hopefully what I can make out.”
When asked about her views on aging, the actor, who has released a new memoir, commented: “There’s nothing to say for it at all. [I] don’t think about it too much.”
This isn’t the first time the esteemed star of stage and screen has spoken about her eyesight problems. Speaking to the Sunday Mirror magazine Notebook in 2023: “I can’t see on a film set anymore. And I can’t see to read. But you just deal with it.
“It’s difficult if I have any length of a part. I haven’t yet found a way. Because I have so many friends who will teach me the script. But I have a photographic memory.”
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In 2019, Dench said she had had to give up driving because of her eyesight, calling it “one of the most traumatic moments” of her life.
“It was absolutely appalling,” she said at the time. “But I just know I’ll kill somebody if I get behind the wheel of a car now.”
AMD is an eye disease that can blur an individual’s central vision. According to the National Eye Institute, age-related macular degeneration “happens when aging causes damage to the macula – the part of the eye that controls sharp, straight-ahead vision.” The disease does not cause total blindness.
Dench is considered one of the greatest actors of all time.
In her new memoir, Is It Too Late to Make a Run For It? , Dench, who won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love in 1999, shared candid insights on James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, which she said she found “more challenging” than the others she starred in as M, and also addressed the ill-fated screen version of musical Cats.