Judi Dench is opening up about her continued struggled while losing her vision due to advanced macular degeneration (AMD).
The Oscar-winning actress, age 88, joined “The Graham Norton Show” in an episode airing Friday when – joined by Hugh Jackman, Michael B. Jordan, Eugene Levy, Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas and Pink – she shared that reading scripts and learning her lines has become an “impossible” uphill battle since being diagnosed with AMD in 2012.
“It has become impossible and because I have a photographic memory,” she said. “I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines but also tells me where they appear on the page.”
She added that due to her photographic memory, memorizing lines never used to be a hurdle for her. “I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them,” she said. “I could do the whole of ‘Twelfth Night’ right now.”
Currently promoting the new film “Allelujah,” which is based on Alan Bennett’s 2018 play set in a geriatric ward, Friday’s “Graham Norton” isn’t the first time Dench has spoken about her troubling vision loss. While AMD doesn’t cause blindness, the common condition does impact the middle part of people’s vision and can make facial recognition and reading particularly impaired. To overcome it, Dench will have friends of her repeat her lines to her until they’re memorized, she told the Guardian in 2021.
“You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult,” Dench said. “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. So I have to learn through repetition, and I just hope that people won’t notice too much if all the lines are completely hopeless!”
