#Anglo Amalgamated

[chernobog13]

When you ate a bunch of those brownies the hippie chick at work brought in and now you're paranoid AF.

[screamscenepodcast]

Completing Anglo-Amalgamated Production's "Sadian trilogy," it's CIRCUS OF HORRORS (1960) from director Sidney Hayers! Starring Anton Diffring, Jane Hylton, Kenneth Griffith and Erika Remberg, this film makes your hosts wonder... what's up with circuses?

Context setting 00:00; Synopsis 13:42; Discussion 24:01; Ranking 39:42

[aturinfortheworse]

I read a fair number of recipes on the ten thousand interchangeable recipe blogs that exist, and often they say something like "This recipe is a family favourite!" or "This a crowd-pleaser" etc. and I roll my eyes a little bit every time because of course they are, it goes without saying! People like food! Nearly any special-occasion home-cooked meal is going to be popular.

But there is one recipe, one cake, that has recontextualised all those comments for me and now actually I think those bloggers might be wrong about what a family favourite is. It sure as hell isn't Interchangeable Chocolate Cake No. 7.

I'm telling you this because I need you to know the seriousness of the power I am going to bestow on you. And hey, maybe your friends and family have different preferences than mine do. Maybe you need to find another recipe to fill this role. But you must know that there's a recipe out there, and not even a particularly alluring one or a particularly difficult one, which people will bring up in unrelated conversations to you four years later.

If I so much as say the word cake, my family all turn to face me like a pack of hungry wolves. Even the ones that don't like food!! Health nuts and people who simply don't enjoy eating and people with no appetite and people I have no goddamn memory of ever having cooked for, all of them come up and say to me "Hey remember that cake-" I asked my brother and his girlfriend what foods they're looking forward to, when they return home after three years in Japan, and they say "You know that cake?"

It doesn't sound particularly appetizing. I only made it the first time because it was gluten free and I had a bunch of lemons. Please don't let the name inform your opinion here. This is a fairly fast and simple cake that requires no special equipment and people will literally never stop asking you for it.

It's not even my favourite cake! I'd rather have basque burnt cheesecake, which is harder and more expensive to make and consists almost entirely of fat and sugar but still manages to be a little savoury... But people want the weird corn one.

To be fair, this is the only cake that'll make me dip my fingers into boiling sugar without regret.

[imkeepinit]

Movie poster by an unknown artist for the American release of the 1959 Anglo-Amalgamated film Horrors of the Black Museum. The American release featured “HypnoVista,” a thirteen minute prologue with a hypnotist.

[chasingshadowsblog]

"I've seen suffering in the darkness. Yet I have seen beauty thrive in the most fragile of places." - History, Culture and Identity in Cartoon Saloon's Irish Mythology Trilogy

Written accounts of Irish history and culture only begin to appear from the 5th century onwards and what came before we are left to piece together from archaeological remains whose meanings and motivations we can only guess at. What is clear, though, is that during that broad stretch of time between the Early Mesolithic and Late Iron Age, a distinctly Irish identity had been established and cultivated through by the craftsmen, artists, hunters, foragers, farmers and warriors that populated the country through their housing, weaponry, metalworks and stone monuments. The development of the Christian church throughout the Early Medieval period brought its own beauty to the art and architecture of the country, but also adapted its culture to suit the needs of an integrating religion and sites and ceremonies of pagan worship were amalgamated into the Christian calendar. Following this were Viking raids, Anglo-Norman settlement, English conquest, plantation, oppression, rebellion, famine and civil war. From the Early Medieval period to the present day Ireland has experienced an almost constant shift in leadership and identity with little time in between for the dust to settle. Culturally, a "Celtic Revival" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries sought to re-invigorate the arts and history of Celtic Ireland (a broad, problematic concept in itself) as an expression of nationalism and to bolster a distinctly Irish artistic and literary identity. All of this is to say that wading through Ireland's history of social upheaval, religious and political conflict, and loss and confusion of identity is no mean feat. To take those threads and conjure up original stories for modern audiences, embracing the suffering and celebrating the beauty, is impressive. To do it three times is witchcraft.

In their films depicting Irish history, culture and mythology, animation studio Cartoon Saloon have approached their stories with a respect for the past, both fact and fiction. By evoking the artwork, legends and real history of Ireland's past and combining it with their own fresh, unique visual style, Cartoon Saloon brings some much needed authenticity and vibrancy to the depiction of Ireland in mainstream culture. Absent are the twee figures of backwards island folk or the commercialised idolatry of a St. Patrick's Day parade. What we get instead is something more personal, recognisable on the surface to every child and adult who learned about Fionn, the Fianna and fairy circles in primary school and with nuggets of information and visual cues for explorers of Ireland's broader history.

"I can't tell you which parts of this story are true and which parts are shrouded by the mists." - The Secret of Kells and the line between history and mythology

Set roughly in the 9th century AD The Secret of Kells is the earliest depiction of Irish culture in the trilogy. This period saw the introduction of Christianity and the eventual integration of the religion among the native Irish, a relatively smooth transition when compared to later events as noted by historian Jo Kerrigan: "And so the people of Ireland combined the new ways with the old…not bothering too much that the names had changed." Although the main character, Brendan, comes from a Christian monastery and carries those beliefs, The Secret of Kells does well to capture this balance between a new religion and old beliefs with the inclusion of Aisling and Crom Cruach, and without dismissing them as a childish or archaic. "Pagans. Crom worshippers. It is with the strength of our walls that they will come to trust the strength of our faith." The threat of Viking raids is what spurs Abbot Ceallach's desire to build a wall around his monastery, but, underlying his actions is another aspect of a monk's work - converting the natives. In The Secret of Kells the abbot's wall not only protects them from invaders but cuts them off from the forest beyond - the domain of shape-shifters, wild animals and pagan temples, a world that Brendan can only glimpse through a crack in the wall. A staple of the entire trilogy is this depiction of wilderness in some form and its association with Ireland's symbolic wilderness and pagan ancestry. When Brendan enters the forest for the first time it is dark and frightening until Aisling, an ethereal Sídhe figure who can shape-shift into a wolf, shows him how to navigate it. Brendan's fear is eliminated and Aisling quickly becomes his friend, each amused and fascinated by the other.

Hidden throughout Brendan's trek in the forest are old, moss covered ogham stones and stone circles, allusions to native practices, but deeper in, the colour palette changes from bright greens and natural browns to a wash of dark greys and black when Brendan stumbles across a temple to Crom Cruach (a deity who, in Irish mythology, is eventually destroyed by St. Patrick). Aisling tries to warn him away, "It is the cave of the Dark One," but Brendan dismisses her worries, "The abbot says that's all pagan nonsense, there's no such thing as Crom Cruach." At the sounding of the deity's name, black tendrils emit from the cave and pull on Aisling as she stops them reaching Brendan. Later, Brendan returns to the cave to steal Crom's eye - a magnifying crystal that will help Brendan and Brother Aidan with their illumination. In a beautifully animated sequence Brendan battles Crom Cruach in his cave by trapping him in a chalk circle and stealing his eye. Crom Cruach is depicted as a never-ending snake (in a geometric pattern reminscent of both pre-Christian art and the knotwork of Christian manuscripts) possibly in reference to the 'snakes' (demons) banished from Ireland by St. Patrick. What's most fascinating about this sequence is that Brendan experiences it at all. Although the experience is supernatural it is never implied as anything other than real. Brendan is a committed monk in training who will spend his life in service to the monastery and creating the Book of Kells; even after meeting Aisling and battling Crom Cruach he never questions his faith or his elders and when he returns to the monastery with the eye no one disputes the story of how he came by it, "You entered one of the Dark One's caves?" At this time, at the edge of a growing monastery and with a direct reference to the abbot's desire to convert the natives, there is still space for pagan ideas to exist. Whenever Brendan is punished by Abbot Ceallach it is for disobedience not a lack of faith. Similarly, Aisling using Pangur Bán's spirit to free Brendan has an effect on the real world. There's an argument to be made that this is a film and anything can happen, but for problems to be solved by magic, the way Aisling frees Brendan, firm world-building rules must be established; in this world, 9th century Ireland, spaces exist in which otherworldly figures reside and actions beyond the mortal realm occur and these spaces exist alongside this film's version of civilisation, the monastery.

"I have lived through all the ages, through the eyes of salmon, deer and wolf." As an animated feature, there is a lot the film can tell us through visuals alone, and The Secret of Kells does a wonderful job capturing an Ireland in transition. The prologue opens with a close-up image of the Eye of Crom with abstract shapes swimming around it, followed by a glimpse of Aisling hiding in a tree as she narrates over these images in an eery whisper. Following these we see a salmon, deer and wolf, three animals important to Irish mythology, identity and history; the salmon, related to The Salmon of Knowledge, represents mythology, the deer is the national animal of Ireland, and wolves (in the world of Cartoon Saloon) represent its wildernes and history (the elimination of the wolf population became more active in Ireland during times of English occupancy, a theme that is explored more deeply in Wolfwalkers). Even the waves crashing around Iona as Brother Aidan escapes morph into wolves, futhering their symbolism as something wild and dangerous, yet they are never associated with the Viking raiders; the wilderness is as equally affected by change as the people are. The monastery is littered with Iron Age motifs existing alongside Early Christian imagery. Spiral motifs occur in trees and plants, in the ropes that bind the wall's scaffolding together, and circular, semi-circular and zig-zag shapes continue to appear with knot-work patterns and religious figures - even the snowflakes during the raid are strands of knot-work. The monastery itself is accurate to the period with its round tower, beehive shaped structures (called clochán) and the town growing around it, while outside its walls Brendan crosses a stone circle. We even see a game of hurling, the ultimate unifying bridge between pagan and modern Ireland. The walls of the abbot's cell are covered in his own drawings of plans for the monastery's construction. These are exquisitely detailed and clearly a plan for the future but drawn in a style that cannot escape the past; zig-zags, spirals, circles, semi-circles, dots, triangles, sun and star motifs and something that looks like an alignment chart. The style is evocative of the insular La Tène that preceded the arrival of the monks in Ireland; a combination of abstract and geometric, seemingly random, but clearly symbolising something greater.

"You must bring the book to the people." In their last interaction as children Aisling helps Brendan recover the pages of his manuscript as he flees the Vikings. In this gesture Aisling aids Brendan on his religious journey - during the montage later on she even guides him home. Faith never comes between these two, their relationship is one of mutual curiosity and sharing their differences. In Irish mythology, female figures (particularly shape-shifting ones) are often symbolic of Ireland itself and to have the support of these figures is, for kings and heroes, a mark of validation. At this time, these two worlds still live alongside each other and Aisling is allowed to support Brendan's work as a monk while maintaining her own natural way of life. Although Brendan's final journey home shows the spread of Christianity across the country we get one final image of Aisling, changed to her human form in a flash of lightning, that shows us she hasn't disappeared just yet. Brendan, now an adult, returns to Kells and although Abbot Ceallach is old and sick, the monastery stands strong and Brendan brings with him the completed Book of Kells, ready to continue the abbot's work.

"This wild land must be civilised" - Wolfwalkers and the taming of Ireland

Set in 1650, Wolfwalkers occurs roughly 800 years after The Secret of Kells and presents a vastly different universe. The monks' Christianisation of the natives was a far more gentle affair and one founded in a desire to educate people. Ireland under the Lord Ruler (a stand-in for Oliver Cromwell) is a world of service, punishment and fear. By chopping down trees and employing hunters to cull the wolf population the Lord Ruler is attempting to 'tame' the countryside and, most importantly, the people themselves. References to "the old king" and "revolt in the south" place us, historically and politically, in the Cromwellian Conquest, when Cromwell was sent to Ireland to quell uprisings against the newly established English Commonwealth. Heavy stuff and this is a simplification of a period of major conflict in Ireland but Wolfwalkers impresses on us the feeling of living under the thumb of an active oppressor on a much smaller, more personal scale. The Lord Ruler wants the people of Kilkenny afraid and complacent so that they support his efforts to cull the wolves and cut down their forests. Although the wolves pose no threat to the city, people have been made to fear them, resilting in the loss of their connection to the forest outside the town walls. Any reference to a world ouside of the current mode of conduct is cause for immediate punishment and suppression. Even Bill and Robyn, loyal English citizens, are punished. When one of the woodcutters talks of "pagan nonsense" he is confined to the stocks and Robyn is forced to work as a maid in the castle when she does the same. When Bill fails to cull the wolf population (and control his own daughter) he is stripped of his rank as hunter and forced into the role of soldier, robbed of the little freedom he had.

"This once wild creature is now tamed, obedient, a mere faithful servant." Although this line is spoken in reference to Moll, held captive in a cage in her wolf form, it is the human characters who suffer the most from this ideology - even the nameless background characters are confined to the walls of the city. What comes to mind when hearing this line is Robyn in her maid's uniform, once lively and imaginative, now returning home with lines under her eyes after a long day of hard, monotonous work, and Bill, shackled at the neck and forced to march behind the Lord Ruler's horse ("we must do what the Lord Ruler commands"). Although Moll is held captive too, it is in the form of a humongous wolf; she is locked away in the Long Hall for fear of the danger she represents because the Lord Ruler is aware of how poweful she is and so he must keep her locked up to show the people of Kilkenny just how much control he can wield, quelling any potential notions of power they might have held in themselves. In the case of Moll, Robyn and Bill, each time they are held captive by the Lord Ruler their captured bodies submit to the wolf form to escape: Moll uses its strength to break free of her chains, Robyn leaves behind her human body to launch an attack against the soldiers with the rest of the pack, and Bill, who had no idea what being bitten by Moll would do to him, submits to a primal instinct within him to protect his daughter and attacks the Lord Ruler. The Wolfwalkers are able to draw on this power but the people left behind in Kilkenny have no such escape.

"What cannot be tamed, must be destroyed." The ending of Wolfwalkers is bittersweet. Robyn, Médb and their parents are safe after defeating the Lord Ruler and his soldiers and ride off, not quite into the sunset, but onto horizons new. "All is well," Bill and Robyn tell each other and the family appear content, but, before now, leaving the forest was not on the agenda; leaving the forest meant retreating from a threat, as Moll desperately wanted Médb to do, and this is still the case. Médb wanted to save the forest, but, after everything that's happened, the family are no longer safe on the borders of the town. Robyn, Médb, Bill and Moll all save each other but they can't save their home and their retreat from Kilkenny is just that - a retreat. The Lord Ruler may have been killed but that doesn't mean the end of his conquest. Historically, this period saw Ireland amalgamated into the Commonwealth and Irish Catholic landowners ousted by English colonists, as well as a high level of deforestation and the elimination of the wolf population. By having the family leave their home, together and with a bright sky and grassy hills ahead of them, Wolfwalkers' coda balances the narrative conventions of a story by giving the viewers their satisfying ending without sanistising the history it's based on.

"Remember me in your stories and in your songs" - Song of the Sea and loss:

If Wolfwalkers is the taming of Ireland then Song of the Sea is Ireland tamed. Set roughly in the 1980s it is the closest depiction of a modern Ireland in Cartoon Saloon's ouevre. In contrast to The Secret of Kells and Wolfwalkers, which represented Ireland's native identity in the forest, here it takes the form of (drumroll) the sea, but while those other films depicted the battle between the wilderness and civilisation Song of the Sea depicts its defeat. The last of the Sídhe live in hiding in a rath disguised as the centre of a roundabout and use a sewage system to get around. In their diminshed forms, Lug, Mossy and Spud also resemble more closely what we might think of as 'fairies' in Ireland today, not the imposing figures of mischief and chaos the Sídhe really are in mythology. Still, Lug, Spud and Mossy wear torcs, brooches and earrings of gold and strewn about their home are ogham stones and hurls; in a nice marriage of modern and ancient tradition, they play the bodhrán, fiddle and banjo, singing a version of the Irish language song 'Dúlamán'. Only in this one pocket in the middle of the city do different aspects of traditional Irish culture survive.

All throughout Song of the Sea we see iconography of modern Ireland. Conor drinks a pint of Guinness (unlabelled but unmistakable), the front of the pub he sits in is decorated in proto-typical Irish pub fashion. On the wall in Granny's house sits proudly a picture of Jesus with the Sacred Heart lamp as she warbles along to the classic Irish children's song, 'Báidín Fheilimí'. Ben and Saoirse take refuge in a shrine to a holy well with a rag tree outside that is bursting with religious iconography as well as a toy sheep. Symbols that are as much a part of the national identity as those pre-historic and mythological ones. There are also references to the assimilation of pop culture outside of Ireland in a Lyle's Golden Syrup tin, the Rolling Stones poster on Conor's old bedroom door and Ben's 3-D glasses and cape, an emulation of a superhero costume. These images are, ultimately, harmless but have overtaken their native counterparts. Although we see statues of the Sídhe in the background, these are not shrines but detritus, and they lie forgotten, covered in plants and moss, in the company of bags of rubbish and old televisions. The diminishing of one era of Ireland's history to make way for a newer more powerful and modern identity is just one kind of loss that is portrayed in Song of the Sea, but each character experiences their own version throughout. The loss of Bronach that has affected Ben and Conor; the potential loss of Saoirse as she grows sicker; the loss of Mac Lir that drove Macha to such despair she literally bottled her emotions and those of others until they turned to stone. All of this comes to a climax at the end of the film when these tragedies are laid bare. As in Wolfwalkers the greater connotations of this theme are presented on a smaller scale: Ben and Conor's pain by the loss of Bronach.

Ben and Conor are representative of the human world and so suffer her absence more visibly than Saoirse who approaches her mother's world with curiosity and ease. In contrast, Ben, although he misses Bronach, rejects the sea (her home and symbolic identity) and his sister, a physical as well as spiritual reminder of what's been taken away from him. He turns his back on his past as much as he mourns its loss. We see it less obviously in Conor who wallows in his own memories and grief and tunes out Ben's references to his mother "It's as though I've been asleep all these years. I'm so sorry." Ben's grief is more expressive compared to the inwardly focused Conor and even towards the end of the film when Ben is trying to help Saoirse, Conor brushes over his insistence that only her selkie coat can save her. It's only when Saoirse is finally wearing the coat and wakes up from her sickness that he finally engages with Ben on the subject of Bronach, "She's a selkie, isn't she? Like Mam." "Yeah." (Which looks like a weak conversation written down but it's the happy smile on his face and the emotion in his voice that give the single word weight). "Please don't take her from us." During the film's final sequence, when Saoirse sings her song and wakens the sleeping Sídhe, Bronach returns but only to take Saoirse away. With tears in her eyes she begins to lead Saoirse along until Ben and Conor stop her, not forcefully but pleadingly, "she's all we have." All they have is Saoirse, all they have is a thread connecting them to Bronach's world and their memories of her.

"All of my kind must leave tonight…" As the Sídhe are wakened by Saoirse's song we watch them rise joyfully to form a glowing processional in the sky as they make the journey across the sea to their home. This scene is so beautifully animated and so filled with a sense of magic and wonder that we are charmed into believing this is a good thing. The Sídhe are returned to their noble forms and going to their home "across the sea"; they fill the sky with a warm, mystical light, but they are taking that light and their magic with them. As Bronach quotes in the film's prologue, "Come away, o human child, to the waters and the wild, with a fairy, hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." This is a world that can no longer bear the force of two identities. Unlike The Secret of Kells where Brendan and Aisling were allowed to live alongside each other without compromising their beliefs or ways of living, Bronach, a spiritual being, is forced to leave, while Ben and Conor have no choice but to stay and Saoirse, who walks both worlds, is made to choose between them. Although this is a happy ending it is still being depicted on a personal level. On a grander scale, the country has lost something that isn't coming back and this is depicted as a relief for the ones leaving it behind. On the other hand, Saoirse's decision to remain shows that, in small pockets of the country, the magic remains.

It is fitting that Song of the Sea, as a representation of modern Ireland, draws on loss; Ireland has been experiencing loss on a grand scale for centuries. Although the march of progress is mostly positive, in some cases it has altered our respect and interest in the past. Today there is a nihilism attached to Irish heritage; the spirituality that is associated with airy fairy hippies dancing naked in a moonlit field; the language that is almost universally despised by every secondary student forced to grapple with the Tuiseal Ginideach; its disappearing and continually exploited ecological landscapes; traditions and tales that grow more twee and archaic with every tourist bus that passes by; the preservation of archaeological sites in frequent battle with the progress of industry. In the interest of leaving behind the worst of our past we are at risk of losing the best. The writer Manchán Mangan suggests that this desire to forget lies in the pain we feel when we consider our history. Some, like Conor, try to push all reference to this pain out of their lives, others, like Ben, divert their pain into misplaced anger. Mangan cites the Famine as a source of generational pain and its effect today on our use of the language, but really it can be attached to many events and periods of time, "English was the future; Irish would only bring suffering and death." This is a sentiment that carries through to this day; despite encouragement from schools, local councils and the government, Irish remains a least favourite subject for most people who dismiss it as unuseful for success in the wider world. By proxy, anything to do with the notion of "Irish", the language, history and culture, is old-fashioned (suffering and death) while success and the future lie outside of the country. Mangan goes on to suggest that only by confronting the pain of our past can we unlock an ability in ourselves to engage more fully with our identity, "We might stop blaming our failure to learn on teachers, or the education system, or Government policy, and realise that we have no difficulty learning any other subject…" Ben and Conor are given the opportunity to say goodbye to Bronach before she leaves, allowing them to carry on with their memories of her and the last strand of their connection to her as represented by Saoirse. More and more people today are looking to Ireland's past, ecology and language for whatever it is they need or want to find. It isn't necessary to convert to paganism and live on the shores of the Connemara coastline to achieve this connection, but actively disengaging from your past can only hurt more than it can help. In their respective stories Brendan does not compromise his beliefs but still builds a friendship with Aisling, while Robyn and Bill integrate fully into Médb and Moll's world. There is no right way to engage with this side of our history and identity, but in contrast to Ben and Conor, Brendan and Robyn have balanced and fulfilling relationships with their native counterparts - the threats to their world come from outside sources. Ben and Conor were stuck in their pain over Bronach's loss and it is only after getting to see her one last time that helped them to move on and heal. Conor tells Bronach that he still loves her, he will carry his love and memories of her forever; Ben lets Saoirse into his life and is able to move past his grief and fears of the sea. Here, the threat of loss and destruction in modern Ireland comes from within, and can only be treated by engaging with the past - its rich heritage and tragic history - and moving on with all of the wisdom and experience it provides.

[brokehorrorfan]

Circus of Horrors will be released on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray on October 29 via Kino Lorber. The 1960 British horror film features reversible artwork.

Sidney Hayers (Burn Witch Burn) directs from a script by George Baxt (The City of the Dead). Anton Diffring, Erika Remberg, Yvonne Monlaur, Donald Pleasence, Jane Hylton, and Jack Gwillim star. Anglo-Amalgamated (Peeping Tom) produces.

The film is presented in 4K (SDR) from a 2018 scan of the 35mm original camera negative. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio Commentary by Film Historian David Del Valle

Theatrical Trailer

TV Spots

A deranged plastic surgeon (Anton Diffring) takes over a traveling circus, then transforms horribly disfigured young women into ravishing beauties and coerces them to perform in his three-ring extravaganza. But when the re-sculpted lovelies try to escape the clutches of the obsessed doctor, they begin to meet with sudden and horrific “accidents.” Now the trapeze is swinging, the knives are flying, the wild animals are loose – and “The Grisliest Show on Earth” is about to begin.

Pre-order Circus of the Dead.

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

I’m afraid I’ve come more and more around to the opinion that Rowling is the kind of author who simply doesn’t think. So to look for an analytical interpretation of anything in the series is probably an exercise in frustration. She paints what is intended as impressive word pictures — essentially vignettes — mainly on the basis of how they are supposed to push your buttons and make you feel, without ever considering how they are supposed to fit together. This sometimes produces a considerable emotional impact, if you are at all sensitive to that kind of jerking around, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense. And sometimes they just plain backfire. Quite a few of these issues are still slowly coming into focus. And one of the sharpest is the awareness that the world Rowling assembled is simply a lot bigger than the narrow-focused, smug, anglo-centric view of it she gave us. Because when you come right down to it, it becomes clear that she never really intended to build a solid secondary world to put her story in. She simply didn’t do the groundwork. Instead, she has ended up with this weird amalgamation that she threw together — which is highly detailed in some areas, and only vaguely sketched in elsewhere with several great gaping holes where you least expect them, to fall right out of the story through. But, back when she first assembled this pretend world, she used the best possible materials available. She mined folklore, and classic (written) tales that have been pretty fully absorbed by the culture, as well as ancient myth, and symbolism that has been around for centuries, she mimicked the authentically traditional “tropes” of how stories are put together and how they work, and she did it with a free hand. But I’m no longer convinced that she did it all consciously. I think she slung a lot of them together because they just “felt” right together. Sure, sometimes she tweaked them before she deployed them, or renamed them, or trivialized the hell out of them, but she hardly ever invented anything new. Most of her elements already existed. The only thing in the Potterverse that is really original are some of her combinations. And, of course, the Dementors. Consequently, as I say, she ended up with something that is a lot bigger than she is. And which upon first encounter comes across as a lot more erudite than she probably really is too, because all of the elements she used to build it came already equipped with their own baggage, and a whole pre-existing collection of associations which all originally led someplace. And most of them are so widely known and/or so universal that even with a 2nd or 3rd-rate education, you are able to recognize them, and are at least somewhat aware of what those particular elements usually mean. And the components are all thoroughly documented, so you can readily find out what the original source meant if you are at all curious. But that doesn’t mean that she ever intended to use any of that material. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is certainly bigger than the shallow, petty, and mean-spirited viewpoint that she keeps pushing into the foreground and expecting us to use as a lens.

via Red Hen's restrospective review of Deathly Hallows, 2008

[gurumog]

Carry on Cleo (1964) Anglo-Amalgamated Dir. Gerald Thomas

Sid James as Mark Anthony David Davenport as Bilius

[barkingbonzo]

Julie Christie in Darling directed by John Schlesinger, 1965

Darling is a 1965 British romantic drama film directed by John Schlesinger from a screenplay written by Frederic Raphael. It stars Julie Christie as Diana Scott, a young successful model and actress in Swinging London, toying with the affections of two older men, played by Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. The film was shot on location in London, Paris and Rome and at Shepperton Studios by cinematographer Kenneth Higgins, with a musical score composed by Sir John Dankworth.

The film premiered at the 4th Moscow International Film Festival on July 16, 1965, and was released in cinemas in the United Kingdom on September 16 by Anglo-Amalgamated. It became a critical and commercial success, grossing $4.5 million, and received five nominations at the 38th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won in three categories: Best Actress (for Christie), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Costume Design. It also won four BAFTA Awards: Best British Actor (Bogarde), Best British Actress (Christie), Best British Screenplay and Best Art Direction (Black-and-White)

[animeandcatholicism]

Radical Ideas

I always laugh when people say that someone is their "brother" or "sister" due to their ethnicity and for lack of a better term "race". It's so dumb because one, just because you share a language and a history does not make you somehow kindred and have inviolable bonds. I have more in common with people from the Midwest and the South than I do from my ancestral lands, the majority being Germany, Ireland and the British Isles in general.

The people who are of Slavic descent in These United States might share a common tongue with their distant relatives but not much else, maybe some religious and cultural practices but besides that. Even Hispanics and Latinos in the US who have family in their mother country, maybe one or two generations removed are different than how they would have been twenty, thirty years ago.

It's just weird that people become so insecure and fall into tribalism when it does not really benefit them or others to be like this. It really does not to try to be in one way in the home and one way in public, accept that you're going to both loose and gain traits from cultural exchange, it's a part of human culture that has been happening since ever. As long as humans have existed, cultural exchange and really change has existed. Trying to conserve something that simply doesn't exist or to propagate it, is extremely dumb.

For example, it's weird to have all African Americans embrace each other as one big "family" not only because they often and conveniently exclude groups like the North Africans like Egyptians and the Copts since they're "just Arabs" but, the collective history of all of these various cultures is so vast and complex that someone from Chad, another from Nigeria and finally someone from Ethiopia don't really have a baseline except, they're all from the African Continent. Their: culture, religion, languages and so much more are so distinct, that they're cousins in a general sense not siblings. Sure, geographic regions like how Europe has geographic regions (the Nords, Francs, Anglos, Slavs of all sorts) but, not this weird cope of a unified identity (I mean if the Island of England has England, Scotland, Wales and the Cornish, plus the fact that no one in England can really decide where the North starts and the South ends there's no way you have larger populations of larger land masses agreeing on a singular unified identity).

I believe this to be both a consequence of diaspora of various minorities and also a certain insecurity when attempting to affirm their own unique cultural identity. For example, I have a friend who's a Filipino and when he was living in Westminster, California (which is where a bunch of Asians of all stripes have settled initially as refugees) now have amalgamated into this weird monoidentity buuut, it's unique only to Westminster, it does not exist in the larger US or even the international community. When I lived in the Twin Cities, I worked at the postal service and again the Twin Cities are a big place for the relocation of refugees and asylum seekers. But, the Hmong stuck with the Hmong, the Ethiopians with the Ethiopians, Tibetans with Tibetans, ect. This was with the first and second generation and probably with the third generation things start to break down and they will integrate with the general population of the area, it's simple ethnographic trends. The only way you prevent this is with groups like the Amish where they simply refuse to integrate or they're just stuck in a relatively isolated area. In a rapidly connecting world people are going to adapt and you can't just set up these arbitrary barriers to make yourself feel special, then you'd be no better than those weird people wanting an ethnostate.

[kemetic-dreams]

HISTORICAL IGBO TIMELINES:

STONE AGE -MIDDLE AGES.

This is the period dating 1.2million years to 3000BC , the era of homo-erectus found within the areas of ugwuele uturu following the discovery of Archeolean hand axes and stone tools in caves. Clay pots dating 3000BC were recovered at Afikpo and Opi iron slags .Details of this era is buried in archeology .

EARLY HISTORY:

8th-9 th AD : Kingdom of Nri begins with Eze Nri Ìfikuánim.

1434 AD: Portuguese explorers make contact with the Igbo.

1630 AD : The Aro-Ibibio Wars start.

1690AD: The Aro Confederacy is established

1745AD : Olaudah Equiano is born in Essaka, but later kidnapped and shipped to Barbados and sold as a slave in 1765.

1797AD : Olaudah Equiano dies in England as a freed slave.

1807 AD : The Slave Trade Act 1807 is passed (on 25 March) helping in stopping the transportation of enslaved Africans, including Igbo people, to the Americas. Atlantic slave trade exports an estimated total of 1.4 million Igbo people across the Middle Passage

1830 AD : European explorers explore the course of the Lower Niger and meet the Northern Igbo.

1835 AD: Africanus Horton is born to Igbo ex-slaves in Sierra Leone

1855 AD: William Balfour Baikie a Scottish naval physician, reaches Niger Igboland.

MODERN HISTORY:

1880–1905: Southern Nigeria is conquered by the British, including Igboland.

1885–1906: Christian missionary presence in Igboland.

1891: King Ja Ja of Opobo dies in exile, but his corpse is brought back to Nigeria for burial.

1896–1906: Around 6,000 Igbo children attend mission schools.

1901–1902: The Aro Confederacy declines after the Anglo-Aro war.

1902: The Aro-Ibibio Wars end.

1906: Igboland becomes part of Southern Nigeria (the beginning of our problem)

1914: Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria are amalgamated to form Nigeria. (escalation of our problem)

1929: Igbo Women's War (first Nigerian feminist movement) of 1929 in Aba.

1953: November Anti Igbo riots (killing over 50 Igbos in Kano) of 1953 in Kano

1960: October 1 Nigeria gains independence from Britain; Tafawa Balewa becomes Prime Minister, and Nnamdi Azikiwe becomes President.

1966: January 16 A coup by junior military officers takes over government and assassinated some country leaders. The Federal Military Government is formed, with General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi as the Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Federal Republic.

1966: July 29 A counter-coup by military officers of northern extraction, deposes the Federal Military Government; General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi is assassinated along with Adekunle Fajuyi, Military Governor of Western Region. General Yakubu Gowon becomes Head of State.

1967: Ethnoreligious violence between Igbo Christians, and Hausa/Fulani Muslims in Eastern and Northern Nigeria, triggers a migration of the Igbo back to the East.

1967: May 30 General Emeka Ojukwu, Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, declares his province an independent republic called Biafra, and the Nigerian Civil War or Nigerian-Biafran War ensues.

1970: January 8 General Emeka Ojukwu flees into exile; His deputy Philip Effiong becomes acting President of Biafra.

1970: January 15 Acting President of Biafra Philip Effiong surrenders to Nigerian forces through future President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Biafra is reintegrated into Nigeria.

References:

Understanding 'Things Fall Apart' by Kalu Ogbaa

Wikipedia

Image Credit: Ukpuru, Pinterest

[mariacallous]

Nigella’s lemon polenta cake is also really good and great for those with gluten sensitivities

[the-occult-lounge]

•~❉᯽❉~•─ Part 2 ─•~❉᯽❉~•

⚝ All witches or magickal practitioners are wiccans.

》 This is the most in accurate thought process to ever sweep through the mundane communities. Wicca is a fairly new practice and is an amalgamation of old world magicks from many different cultures. Wicca was founded in the 1900s and became popular due to the Gardnerian Wicca sect in the 60s. Some Wiccans do not use the term witch, most witches do not use the term Wiccan. All magickal practitioners define theirself differently and the majority are reconstructionalists of cultures that are FAR older than Wicca, in fact before calling someonw a Wiccan or a Witch it is best to ask how the practitioned identifies themself within their practice.

⚝ Witches are female and Wizards and male.

》 A practitioner can be any gender or no gender. To force such a binary thought process onto magick is confining and incorrect. Anyone can practice magick no matter their pronouns. Again, ask the practitioner what they wish to be called in their line of practice. Do not push your thought process onto someone else's ideologies. Instead of you are curious, ask questions before assuming the answers.

⚝ Every practitioner follows The Wheel of the Year.

》 The Wheel of the Year is a Wiccan creation that has taken holidays from older Celtic, Nordic and Anglo-Saxon cultures to create a celebratory timeline. As previously stated not all practitioners are Wiccan and thus The Wheel of the Year is not a part of everyone's practice. You will find those who are not Wiccan may adhere to the wheel but you will also find practitioners who have created their own celebrations. The equinoxes are typically celebrated in most reconstructed cultures, however there are far more holidays within each specific culture than a wheel could ever hold.

In a community such as the Occult, it is common for those who are not members to not understand the nuances of what Occult Community Members truly believe. It is our job to correct the wrong information and to forge ahead in helping those outside our circles to understand. We should never add to the flames of judgment but provide a safe space to give knowledge correctly to those willing to listen. To learn more, visit us at The Occult Lounge Discord.

[thepierheadjump]

Joan of Arc Couldn't Ride a Horse

My father is Catholic, my mother agnostic, and within me these two magnets war like poles casting off gravity in their urge to repel each other. As a child I became religious at my father's observance, on a whim, that because of my middle name, Joan of Arc is my patron saint. I was stunned. I came from a coastal Oregon town where we rode bikes around, chewed gum if we could get it; built forts on the beach or in the woods. Sainthood, patron saints, Catholicism, the cathedrals of France—all a new, albeit arcane magic. Tell me, as a lost and homesick 11-year old, that a radical woman on horseback is coming to lead me.

We had settled in France, and I was learning French. I knew authoritatively that she was really Jeanne d'Arc, although all I had to go on was an (ironically British) 1971 Ladybird book written by Lawrence du Garde Peach, an English actor and radio playwright who was in military intelligence during World War I. This child's book gently whitewashed the massive overlay of bubonic plague, the Hundred Years' War; virginity exams; threats of rape; the hardness of life in the 15th century.

By the time we found our way to the Rouen marketplace where she was burned I did not care if she was schizophrenic, mad, or called by God to drive the English armies out of France—I believed in her wholly, the way only a teenaged girl can believe in another teenaged girl who has been tied to a stake and burned.

Since that point my long struggle has been away from religion, letting go of the fervent superstitions of faith, to my mother's flip side, viewing religion as weak-minded, for the masses. I wanted to believe that I was smart and scientific. Then, as the slow tragedy of life drove me past that, out of a greater necessity, I began to find the similar persuasions in the way of the Tao, and in the massive, gorgeous visions of Black Elk, and in the perfunctory spiritual power of the AA 12-Steps.

Then, in a story I'm working on, one character turned to another and said: 'You know, Joan of Arc couldn't ride a horse.'

Offended, this sent me down into the research warrens, where I soon ran into the French historian Régine Pernoud and her book Jeanne d'Arc, and also five hours of the double film Jeanne La Pucelle (1994.) Pernoud cemented the deal by confessing that she had always avoided Jeanne for her mythy, overblown teenaged religious saga. However, one day she made that fatal karmic mistake of opening just the right book to just the right page, and the girl's clear treble voice rose from those documents like a mystic voice in a churchyard.

Caught up in a similar manner I found myself writing The Prisoner of the Chateau-Forte du Louvre.

The upshot of all this was that yes, of course Jehanne of Domrémy could ride a horse. Horses were such an integral part of her image that one of her chargers was put to death when she was killed. She had grown up riding her father's plough horses, and ultimately she could handle a galloping Percheron while wearing full armor, carrying a standard, and exhorting an army to follow her—to use an Anglo-French word amalgamated over La Manche—into the affray.

___________________

[djfreakfineman]

We here @macabrerecordsinc #atx are hard-core Svengooliegans @realsvengoolie Tonight Sven presents: Konga (1961) directed by John Lemont and starring Michael Gough, Margo Johns and Austin Trevor. It was shot at Merton Park Studios and in Croydon for Anglo Amalgamated, then distributed in the United States by American International Pictures (AIP) as a double feature with Master of the World. Konga was the basis for a comic book series published by Charlton Comics and initially drawn by Steve Ditko (prior to Ditko's co-creation of Spider-Man) in the 1960s. The film epitomises the B-movie in terms of illogical plot and shortcut special effects, such as a man in a gorilla suit replacing special effects. Shots of screaming people looking upwards invoke the idea that they are looking up to Konga and it is not explained how the serum changes species as well as size (chimp to gorilla). We are huge fans of All Things Sven and Totally Dig this Awesome Picture posted by the Awesome created by: @monstervision2017 and created by the Magnificent: http://www.collinsporthistoricalsociety.com and again, Please Support all Artists/ Illustrators / Profiles we Showcase and enjoy the Carnage! Everyone have a Sadistic Svengoolie Saturday and as always… Keep it Kreepy🎃🔪#freakfineman #macabrerecordsinc #horrorlife #sonofsvengoolie #svengooliesaturday #metv #monstervision2017 #konga (at U.S.A) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp8gGtcOwAQ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[whileiamdying]

Profiles

The Player Queen Why Judi Dench rules the stage and screen.

By John Lahr January 13, 2002

Photograph by Dudley Reed

In the opening sequence of “Iris,” an extraordinary film about the late novelist Iris Murdoch’s descent into the limbo of Alzheimer’s, Murdoch and her loyal man-child of a husband, the Oxford don John Bayley, are shown swimming like two plump sea lions through the murk of the Thames. They’re happy in their underwater playground, which distorts light and form and contains the sediment of ages. They float freely but are always in contact, dodging among the rocks and weeds in joyful, directionless exploration. Water was Iris Murdoch’s primal habitat; by no accident, it is also the favorite element of the woman who plays her here, Judi Dench. “There’s a wonderful abandonment you feel in water,” Dench says. “It’s very liberating. It’s like the unconscious. You’re just floating around there and trusting that you’re going to come up to the surface.”

This is not the only point of intersection between the two women: the adventure of the unknown, the salvation of the imagination, the promotion of happiness, and a lifelong inquiry into goodness are all themes in the elusive lives of both Murdoch and Dench. Sir Richard Eyre, the director and co-author of “Iris,” says that while writing the screenplay he tried to instill his sense of Dench into the character of Iris. “There was never a question of how do you bring Iris and Judi Dench together,” he says. “Essentially, the character is Judi Dench-stroke-Iris Murdoch.”

Dench, who has played both Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth I on film and was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1988, is beloved by the English public for her quintessential Britishness. “I think that in a lot of people’s eyes she is the equivalent of the Queen—she inspires such phenomenal affection,” says the director John Madden, who launched Dench’s late-blooming film career in 1997 with “Mrs. Brown.” (Significantly, last month the seventy-seven British families that lost relatives in the Twin Towers catastrophe chose Dench to read at the memorial service at Westminster Abbey.) But she and Murdoch share an Anglo-Irish heritage, and each, in her own way, is a paradoxical amalgam of propriety and wildness.

With a leafy home in Surrey, a silver Rover, a taste for simple if expensive clothes, a commitment to charities (she is a patron of a hundred and eighty-three of them), and her obbligato of drollery—what Billy Connolly, who starred opposite her in “Mrs. Brown,” calls “that light, posh, self-effacing humor”—Dench, who is sixty-seven, cuts a deceptively sedate, suburban figure. At work, however, she trolls her turbulent Celtic interior, a vast tragicomic landscape that ranges between despair and indomitability. “There’s a sort of crimson place deep within her—a fiery dark-red place that stokes all the things she does,” Connolly says. “You don’t get to see it. But you occasionally get glimpses of how tiresome she finds the doily-and-serviette crowd. You know, those English twittering fucking women—they think she’s one of them, and she isn’t.” This complexity is what Dench brings to her acting, which is nowhere more inspired than in her depiction of Murdoch. Her performance parses every nuance in the writer’s trajectory of decline—from embarrassment to bewilderment, from terror to loss, from nonentity to a final connection with an enduring life force, where, in the shuffle of dementia, Murdoch somehow finds a dance.

Dench is not much of a reader, but she has read most of Murdoch’s novels, and before filming she went so far as to sit outside Bayley’s house while he was away to absorb the shambolic atmosphere of the place. (She found his car in the driveway, unlocked and with a window open.) “I didn’t want to miss that snapshot in my mind,” she says. But her uncanny portrait emerged out of her own process, a combination of technical rigor and imaginative free fall, in which, according to Eyre, “she doesn’t put anything of herself between her and the character.” He explains, “I was really staggered at the way she transformed herself. Toward the end of the film, when Iris’s mind has gone, and you look at Judi’s face and see that implacability, the sense of peace and the absence in her eyes, that is alchemy. She didn’t go to old people’s homes. She didn’t sit and study. It’s intuitive. She’s quick. I mean, really quick.”

Except for time out to have a child and to nurse her husband of thirty years, the actor Michael Williams, who died last January of lung cancer, Dench has been performing almost constantly for four and a half decades. She appeared in the first season of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1961, and in the eighties was a founding member of Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, for which she has also directed plays. Under the auspices of the Old Vic, the R.S.C., and the Royal National Theatre, she has turned in some of the greatest classical performances in recent memory. Her Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1960 stage production of “Romeo and Juliet”; her Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by Sir Peter Hall in 1962; her Viola in “Twelfth Night” in 1969; her Lady Macbeth in Trevor Nunn’s magnificent 1976 production; her Cleopatra in Hall’s 1987 “Antony and Cleopatra”—all are exemplars of contemporary Shakespearean performance. Her work in the modern repertoire—as Anya in “The Cherry Orchard,” as Juno Boyle in “Juno and the Paycock,” as Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and as Christine Foskett in Rodney Ackland’s rediscovered fifties classic “Absolute Hell”—has also had a huge impact on English theatregoers. And Dench has inspired allegiance as well through her television career, which includes thirty-four films and two popular long-running comedy series, “A Fine Romance” and “As Time Goes By.”

“See you on the ice, darling,” she has been known to call out from her dressing room to an actor headed toward the stage. For Dench, “the crack”—the Irish term for fun—is riding the exhilarating uncertainty of the moment. To that end, she is famous (some would say notorious) for not having read many of the parts she accepts. Instead, she has someone else paraphrase the script for her. (Williams usually had this duty before he died; now it has fallen to Dench’s agent, Tor Belfrage.) “Michael said, ‘Just read that one line,’ ” Dench recalls of “Pack of Lies,” Hugh Whitemore’s successful spy story, in which she and Williams starred. “It was just one line. I read it, and I knew then that it would be all right.”

“It often seems absurd to me that a woman as intelligent as Judi could roll up at the beginning of the rehearsal not having read the play,” says Branagh, who directed Dench in his films of “Hamlet” and “Henry V” and has, in turn, been directed by her onstage in “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Look Back in Anger.” Although this method allows Dench to arrive at rehearsals with, as Branagh puts it, “the right kind of blank page to start writing on,” from a professional point of view it is also sensationally reckless. “I don’t know what it is in me, this kind of perversity,” Dench told me when I visited her at home last July. “I don’t understand it myself. I think some people think it’s an affectation. It’s thrilling, though, isn’t it? You don’t know what’s coming.”

The habit of not reading scripts has, over the years, landed Dench in a few sticky theatrical situations, such as Peter Shaffer’s turgid “The Gift of the Gorgon,” in 1992. And at first she wasn’t keen to take on her current West End outing, in a revival of “The Royal Family,” the slim 1927 Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman satire of the theatrical Barrymores, but her mind was made up for her when she received a call from the director, Peter Hall. “It’s entirely a roll of the dice, but it has to do with friends, with people I love and admire,” she explained several weeks before rehearsals of “The Royal Family” began. “So if Peter rings me up and says, ‘You ought to do this play,’ I say, ‘Sure.’ I swear before God I have not read the play.”

Dench’s risk-taking onstage is in inverse proportion to her vulnerability off it. “When I go into a rehearsal room, my coat and bag have to be nearest the door,” she said in a recent television interview. Performing, for Dench, is an antidote to chronic insecurity; it gives her, she says, what the Cockneys call “bottle”: “It’s courage. You know, like jumping into ice-cold water. If it’s to be done—do it. Go!” Recently when Trevor Nunn offered her a role at the National, she replied, “I want to come back to the National, but not in that part. Would you ask me to do something more frightening?”

Dench’s derring-do also seems necessary to keep her nearly perpetual routine of rehearsal and performance a fresh and vigorous challenge. “Her desire is to re-create each time, to reëxperience, and not simply reproduce,” Branagh says. To that end, she refuses analysis. Without preconceived notions, she tries to let the character play her. “She absolutely hates to rationalize,” Eyre says. “When you’re working with her, she’ll ask a question about a scene or a character, and when you go to talk about it, at some point she’ll say, ‘Yeah, O.K., I understand.’ She doesn’t want it spelled out. She has to find it herself.” A long time ago, when Eyre was doing a play with Dench at the National, where he was the artistic director for ten years, she left her script in the rehearsal room; the next day, Eyre handed it to her. “ ‘Oh, you look terribly shocked,’ ” he recalls her saying. “ ‘Is it because I didn’t take my script home with me?’ I said, ‘Well, I guess so.’ She talked to me about how she learned lines. The work that she does outside rehearsal is not sitting down with the script. She just sort of envisions the scene and colors it in her mind.” Dench’s method of bushwhacking through her unconscious to find the emotional core of a character is, she says, completely instinctive: “The subconscious is what works on the part. It’s like coming back to a crossword at the end of the day and filling in seventeen answers straight off.”

In one scene of “Iris,” the senile Murdoch goes walkabout in the rain on a motorway and slips and falls down an embankment into the underbrush. This is the first and only scene in the film in which Dench’s Murdoch, whose eyes are always turned inward, really sees and acknowledges Bayley. “I said to Judi, ‘You have to find a way of doing it that reconciles a sort of rationality with the fact that her brain is more or less gone,’ ” Eyre says. “That’s all she wanted to know.” When the distressed Bayley (played by Jim Broadbent) finally finds her, Dench is covered with mud and laughing to herself. Out of her solitude, her eyes come to rest on Broadbent’s face. “I love you,” she says, and with a startling glimmer of clarity Dench manages to invoke the blessing and heartbreak of a lifetime of connection.

Dench describes herself as “an enormous console with hundreds of buttons, each of which I must press at exactly the right time.” She adds, “If you’re lucky enough to be asked to play many different parts, you have to have reserves of all sorts of emotions. When I was rehearsing a part I’d never, ever, ever discuss it with Michael, because I had that pressure-cooker syndrome. If I once open that little key—pffft!—the stuff goes.”

In nature, as in art, the secret of conservation is not to disturb the wild things. Dench’s brooding talent has its correlative in her five-acre Surrey domain, Wasp Green, and in the low-slung, wood-beamed 1680 yeoman’s house where she lives with her twenty-nine-year-old daughter, the actress Finty Williams, her four-year-old grandson, Sammy, nine cats, and several ducks. The front of the house is bright, tidy, and picturesque in a Country Life sort of way; the back acres, however, have been left alone, with only a small path cut through a thicket of brambles, nettles, and wild orchids. “You have to see the back garden to understand Judi,” Franco Zeffirelli says. “She puts up a façade sometimes, but for herself she reserves a private garden. You discover there treasures that you don’t see at the front of the house.”

On the day I visited her there last summer, Dench, in Wellington boots, stepped lively on the overgrown path. “I’ve got to cut these back,” she said, swiping at the nettles. She pointed out new plantings: a black poplar to commemorate a row that had blown down the previous year; “Sammy’s oak,” a tree planted in honor of her grandson’s birth; and the place she’d chosen for “Mikey’s oak,” a sapling that was originally an opening-night present from Williams to the director Anthony Page, whose production of “The Forest” was Williams’s last acting job. “What’s important to me is continuance—a line stretching on,” Dench said. “I hate things that start and finish abruptly.”

If the wild back garden is a kind of memory theatre for Dench, the theatre itself puts her in touch with her family, which she calls “a unit of tremendous encouragement.” “All the qualities that Judi has as a person, and, indeed, as an actress, come from the very close family background,” Williams said on a 1995 “South Bank” TV biography of his wife. Dench’s love of work, painting, swimming, jokes, and especially acting are passions she absorbed from her father, Dr. Reginald Dench, a physician who served as the official doctor for the Theatre Royal in York before he died, in 1964. “I remember going visiting with him,” Dench says. “When we turned into a road, children would run and hold on to the car. That’s the kind of doctor he was. He was a wonderful raconteur. He had the most incredible sense of humor—just spectacular.” When Dench was about fifteen, on holiday in Spain, she admired a pair of expensive blue-and-white striped shoes. “Well, I think you could probably have those shoes,” she recalls her father saying. “Let’s go to lunch. We’ll discuss it.” At lunch, Dench—a fish lover—scanned the buffet of prawns and lobsters. “Daddy looked at me and said, ‘Would you like that?’ ‘Yes, please.’ So I had four big prawns and enjoyed every minute of it. Daddy said, ‘You’ve just eaten your shoes.’ ”

The Dench children—Judi, Jeffrey, who is now an actor, and Peter, who became a doctor—grew up in York, in a sprawling Victorian house, where Judi, the youngest, had the attic room and was allowed to draw on the walls. “She got her own way,” Jeffrey says. “Judi was Daddy’s Beautiful Lady.” According to her daughter, Finty, the only discrepancy between the public Dench and the private one is her temper. Her volatility is an inheritance from her flamboyant, sharp-tongued mother, Olave, who once threw a vacuum cleaner down the stairs at a representative who had called to inquire about it. “You didn’t cross her, or pow!—not hitting, but a tongue-lashing, and you stayed lashed,” Jeffrey says. Dench’s contradictory nature—with its combination of mighty spirit and “nonconfidence,” as she calls it—appears to have been forged as she tried to negotiate her mother’s combustible personality. “She loved admonishing Judi,” Trevor Nunn says of Olave. “I mean the kind of admonishment that comes from absolute worship. The privilege of being able to be the one who could put her in her place. ‘Judi, you mustn’t say that!’ ‘Judi, you’re such an embarrassment!’ ” Dench says, “She was outrageous.” In the late seventies, by which time she was having trouble with her sight, Olave had lunch with Nunn and Dench at a sophisticated, self-congratulatory Italian restaurant called the Lugger. “Olave ordered tomato soup, which came in a huge bowl,” Nunn recalls. “A waiter arrived with a little sachet of cream, with which he spelled out the name of the restaurant on the soup and then left. ‘Judi,’ Olave said, ‘a man has just come and written “bugger” in me soup!’ ”

Dench’s parents took a keen interest in amateur dramatics and, when Dench became an actress, their support verged on the overprotective. They saw their daughter in “Romeo and Juliet” more than seventy times; once, Reginald got so involved in the play that when Judi, as Juliet, said, “Where is my father and my mother, nurse?” he was heard to say, “Here we are, darling. In Row H.”

Whereas most stars seek a public to provide the attention they failed to get in childhood, Dench’s commitment to the theatrical community is, she admits, an attempt to reproduce the endorsement and excitement of her first audience—her family. She claims not to be “good at my own company.” Rather, to understand her own identity she needs to be in the attentive gaze of others—as the psychologist D. W. Winnicott puts it, “When I look I am seen, so I exist.” Dench is clear on this point. “I need somebody to reflect me back, or to give me their reflection,” she says. Ned Sherrin, who directed Dench and Williams in “Mr. and Mrs. Nobody” in 1986, says he was so aware of Dench’s need “to create a family with each show” that he added a couple of walk-ons to what was otherwise a two-person play.

Dench, who keeps a collection of Teddy bears and hearts and a doll’s house at Wasp Green, somehow contrives, as Branagh says, “to feel and be in the moment, as a child.” In the collegial atmosphere of a theatre company, she is an adored and prankish catalyst, inevitably, as her brother Jeffrey points out, “at the center.” “Eight going on sixty-seven” is how Geoffrey Palmer, her co-star in the nineties TV series “As Time Goes By,” characterizes the innocence and spontaneity she brings to the daily routine of self-reinvention. Her process—her abdication of responsibility to intuition, her need to be told the story—is not so much about being lost as it is about being held. She casts the director as her father and exhibits an almost filial devotion. “When we did ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ she did this extraordinary Titania,” Hall says. “I said to her, ‘One day, you’ll play Cleopatra. I want you to make me a promise that when you do it you’ll do it with me.’ We shook hands on it.” Hall goes on, “Twenty years later, she rang me up and said, ‘I’ve just been asked to play Cleopatra by the R.S.C. I said I was promised to you. Now, do you want to do it?’ ”

From her first sighting onstage—as a seventeen-year-old Ariel in a production of “The Tempest,” at the Mount School, in York, where she boarded from 1947 to 1953—Dench was transparently a natural. But neither Dench, who then aspired to be a set designer, nor her teachers took her ability very seriously. The novelist A. S. Byatt, a schoolmate, recalls, “I used to talk to Katharine MacDonald, the English mistress who taught her. ‘You know, Judi will probably be content,’ as she put it, ‘to dabble her pretty feet in amateur dramatics.’ ”

Dench enrolled at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama simply because her brother Jeffrey, who went there, had told her appealing stories about the place. Vanessa Redgrave, who was in Dench’s class, and who was then self-conscious and gawky, remembers being both “admiring and jealous” of Dench’s naturalness. “She skipped and hopped with pleasure and excitement up the stairs, down the corridors, and onto the stage,” Redgrave wrote in her autobiography. “She wore jeans, the only girl who had them, a polo-neck sweater, and ballet slippers that flopped and flapped as she bounded around.” The turning point in Dench’s ambition came during a mime class in her second term, when she was required to perform an assignment—called “Recollection”—that she’d completely forgotten to prepare. “I don’t remember thinking anything out,” she says. “I walked into a garden. I bent down to smell something like rosemary or thyme. I walked and just looked at certain things. I picked up a pebble, and threw it into what I imagined was a pond and watched the ripples going out from it. I looked over and sat on a swing. And I swung, you know, like you do on a swing that isn’t there. Then I walked out of the garden. That was my mime.” Her teacher, Walter Hudd, gave her, she says, “the most glowing notice I think I’ve ever had. What is more, he said, ‘You looked like a little Renoir doing it.’ I thought, Well, I think that I will enjoy what I’m going to do, hopefully get work, go for it.”

Dench graduated with a first-class degree and four acting prizes. According to her biography, the unfortunately titled “Judi Dench: With a Crack in Her Voice,” by John Miller, a notice was posted on the school’s bulletin board naming her the student most likely to become a star; and when the Old Vic offered her the role of Ophelia opposite John Neville’s Hamlet it seemed a self-fulfilling prophecy. “enter judi—london’s new ophelia—old vic make her a first-role star,” the Evening News announced. When Neville heard about his tyro Ophelia, “I blew my top,” he says. He begged the theatre’s publicity department not to hype her before the opening. “I thought, and still think, that it would have been best just to let the media discover her for themselves,” he says. Dench was more or less annihilated by the press. “Hamlet’s sweetheart is required to be something more than a piece of Danish patisserie,” Richard Findlater wrote in the Sunday Dispatch; in the Observer, Kenneth Tynan swatted her away as “a pleasing but terribly sane little thing.” At the end of the season, when the production toured America, the role was taken away from Dench. “That was a kind of dagger to the heart,” she says. “I remember John Neville saying to me, ‘You must decide what you’re doing this for.’ And I made my mind up, and I think that’s what keeps me going.” The answer remains Dench’s secret. “The only part of her that is totally unreachable for me is that she’s never told me why she’s an actress,” Finty says. “I would love to know what motivates her.”

Dench came of age just as the definitions of femininity were being rewritten, and she was an incarnation of the freewheeling, bumptious independence of the eternally young New Woman. With a cap of close-cropped hair, a strong chin, high cheekbones, big alert eyes, and a wide smile, the five-foot-two Dench cut a gamine figure onstage. Zeffirelli still thinks of her as “a kind of irresistible bombshell.” He says, “She was funny and witty and biting. You had to be very careful what you said because she would answer back promptly. She was a dynamo, this girl. She just was an extraordinary surprise, because I was accustomed to Peggy Ashcroft and Dorothy Tutin, that style of acting.”

David Jones, who directed one of the high-water marks of Dench’s TV career, “Langrishe, Go Down” (1978), remembers her quicksilver quality in Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet.” He describes her “darting—like a bird coming onto the stage and going off again. You weren’t quite aware of the feet touching the ground, this extraordinary agility of body and of mind.” Dench’s kinetic quality onstage finds different but no less startling expression in film. “She has a kind of sprung dynamic with her eyes,” John Madden says. “They don’t move gradually and settle or shift. They dart, then dart back, then settle again on the place that they just avoided looking at. It’s almost like a double take, which suggests a kind of current flowing in an opposite direction from what she is saying.”

When you meet Dench, it’s hard not to feel the engine running inside her. She’s nervy. Her fingers play across her lips; her feet tap under the table. Her lightness and quickness are very much a part of her metabolism as an actress and lend credibility to her performances. “She is the perfect Shakespearean, because the great characters in Shakespeare have fantastic speed of thought,” Nunn says. “They have speed of wit, speed of response, speed of invention of the image. That only works if the actor convinces the audience that that language is being coined by that brain in that situation.” He adds, “You live in the moment with her. There’s never a sense that she’s doing a recitation.”

Dench’s combination of insight and inspiration, charisma and cunning has made her one of Britain’s two marquee players whose names guarantee West End commercial success. (Her friend Dame Maggie Smith is the other.) Even with the drastic fall-off of tourism after September 11th, “The Royal Family” had half a million pounds in advance bookings, and, despite a tepid press, is still doing brisk business. Dench’s drawing power, for which she is paid a five-figure salary every week, plus up to ten per cent of the gross, has been greatly enhanced since the mid-nineties by her emergence as an international film star. Before being touched by what she calls “the luck of John Madden,” who directed her in both “Shakespeare in Love” and “Mrs. Brown,” Dench had not shown much interest in films, though she’d appeared in twelve. When she was starting out, she was told by an industry swami that she didn’t have “a movie face.” “It put me completely off,” says Dench, who nonetheless nearly got the starring role in Tony Richardson’s 1961 film “A Taste of Honey.” “But then I only ever really loved the stage. It’s only recently that I’ve got to like film so much.” For the last three James Bond films, Dench’s severe side has been siphoned off into M, Bond’s no-nonsense boss; and among the fifty-five awards she lists in her bio are three Oscar nominations in the past four years—for “Mrs. Brown,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “Chocolat.” (The command and wit of her seven-minute cameo as Elizabeth I in “Shakespeare in Love” earned her the 1999 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.)

Among theatre people, Dench’s popularity is a source of some curmudgeonly grousing—“If she farted, they’d give her an award,” one playwright said—and some good jokes. Eyre recounted a conversation he once had with the playwright Alan Bennett, who had seen a man wearing a heavy-metal-style T-shirt that read “Hitler: The European Tour.” They tried to imagine a T-shirt in worse taste. Recalling the thirty-nine Turin soccer fans who had been killed at a match against Liverpool in 1995, Eyre suggested “Liverpool 39-Turin 0.” “Yes, that’s ghastly,” Eyre recalls Bennett saying. “But the worst-taste T-shirt, the very, very worst, would be ‘I Hate Judi Dench.’ ”

One clue to Dench’s appeal is her husky voice, which has a natural catch in it; certain notes fail to operate. When Dench was at the Nottingham Playhouse in the mid-sixties, she had the box office display a notice that said, “Judi Dench is not ill, she just talks like this.” Dench’s sound is idiosyncratic but not mannered; it is full of intimations that, as Alan Bennett says, “open you up to whatever she’s doing” and allow various interpretations. Sir Ian McKellen, who has performed with Dench in four plays, most memorably as Macbeth to her Lady Macbeth, calls it “a little girl’s voice—the crack suggests she’s not in control.”

Another reason for Dench’s popularity is her warmth. She communicates a palpable, deep-seated generosity. “You feel somehow, even as a member of the audience, that if you were in trouble she would help you and laugh you out of it,” Hall says. Dench pays close attention to her audience. During the half hour before a show, she keeps the loudspeakers in her dressing room turned up, both to take the measure of the house and to pump up her adrenaline. “I have to hear the audience coming in,” she says. “I need to be generated by it—for the jump-off. It’s like a quickie ignition.” Once, an American student asked Dench if the audience made a difference to her; Dench replied, “If it didn’t make a difference, I’d be at home with me feet up the chimney. That’s who I’m doing it for.” “It’s a little unnerving when you’re working with her,” McKellen says. “What’s happening is that she’s making love to the audience—not making love but providing the focus of attention to an audience that wants to love. You could be wrapped in Judi’s arms onstage and acting as closely with her as possible, and she’s capable of betraying you, because her main reason for being in your arms is for the audience’s delectation. It isn’t upstaging. That isn’t taking away the focus. Her spirit is flowing, and it’s a decision she’s made that it will flow. And when I’m in the audience I want her to do that.”

In performance, Dench is a minimalist: no gesture or movement is wasted. Richard Eyre refers to what he calls her “third eye”: “It’s the ability to walk on fire and yet be completely unburnt, to be red-hot with passion and at the same time there’s this third eye that is looking down thinking, Am I doing this right?” Billy Connolly told me about filming one scene in “Mrs. Brown”: In the first meeting between the widowed Queen Victoria and her Scottish manservant, John Brown, Brown’s forthrightness catches the Queen off guard. “Honest to God, I never thought to see you in such a state,” Brown says. “You must miss him dreadfully.” In an astonishing closeup, the austere formality of Dench’s visage suddenly transforms—a cloud of grief sweeps over her and she breaks up. “Judi did that twelve times,” Connolly says. “Every time, I thought I’d really wounded her. You see me looking all bewildered. Well, I actually was.”

“Dench has a kind of glamour when she performs,” says Hal Prince, who directed her as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” in 1968 and considers her “the most effective of all the people who played the part.” Glamour—the word has its root in the Scottish word for “grammar”—is an artifice of elegant coherence; it requires distance. Dench, who is no Garbo or Dietrich, manufactures this not through stage-managed aloofness but through a natural sense of containment. David Jones says, “Her gift is to step down the throttle, so you don’t get the full impact of her passion; you just know there’s an enormous amount in reserve. It’s like a wave suspended.” McKellen observes, “She goes out, but she doesn’t always invite you in.”

On a bright July morning, Dench picked me up outside Gatwick Airport to ferry me back to Wasp Green. She arrived with a story—one that she retold three times during the day. She hadn’t known what I looked like, she said—though I later noticed on her desk a book I’d sent her with my jacket photo prominently displayed—and she’d stopped two men before I loomed up in her windshield. “I slowed down and this man says, ‘I know you. Are you with American Airlines?’ ” she said. At a stroke, she had levelled the playing field, by making herself appear just an ordinary, unrecognized citizen. The story got us talking and laughing. Disarming others is one of Dench’s great social gifts, and one of her most skillful defenses. “She was successful very young,” Eyre says. “She developed some sort of tactic that stopped people from disliking her.”

As a diva Dench is something of a disappointment. Her dislike of public display—what Branagh calls her “puritanical scrutiny of anything showy”—can be attributed at least in part to the tenets of her faith. She was introduced to Quaker practice as a teen-ager at the Mount School, and she still goes to Quaker meetings. “I have to have quietness inside me somewhere, otherwise I’d burn myself up,” she said in a recent television interview. Quakerism requires its followers to look for the light in others, as well as in themselves, and this, in a way, explains Dench’s view of acting as a service industry. “It’s a very unselfish job,” she says. “It’s about being true to an author, a director, a group of people, and stimulating a different audience every night. If you’re out for self-glorification, then you’re in the wrong profession.”

“There are a lot of people who are very willing to put my mother on a pedestal, which is a lonely existence,” Finty says. “She wants to dispute that so much that she will literally do anything for anybody.” For twelve years, Dench and Williams lived with all of their in-laws in one house, and Dench is a legendary sender of postcards and birthday cards; by Finty’s reckoning, she gives about four hundred and fifty Christmas presents a year. She once gave Eyre a wooden heart carved from a tree trunk; and, for as long as Hall can remember, on his birthday Dench has managed to have delivered—as far afield as Australia—his favorite meal: oysters, French fries, and a bottle of Sancerre. “Comes my seventieth birthday, and there’s no oysters, no Sancerre,” Hall says. “I said to my wife, ‘Well, I must be off the list.’ We had my dinner”—a party for fifty, with Dench at his side—”and there’s a Doulton china plate from Judi, specially made, with six oysters and chips painted on it.”

This hubbub of good will and connection, however, skirts the issue of intimacy. “Judi has always found safety in numbers,” says David Jones, who was involved with her briefly in his twenties. “When we were dating, I would arrange what I thought was a one-on-one meeting to go to a museum or the theatre. Quite often, I would turn up and find two other people invited. And Judi would say, ‘Isn’t it fun? They’re free! They can come with us.’ ” Some of Dench’s schoolmates, like the writer Margaret Drabble, found her buoyancy “a little Panglossian.” Even Dench’s husband, a man prone to the kind of melancholy that he called “black-dog days,” and which could stretch into months, sent up her effervescence. “With Judi, it’s bloody Christmas morning every day,” he told Branagh.

“I’m a person who off-loads an enormous amount onto people,” Dench told me. “Inside, there’s a core that I won’t off-load.” According to Finty, Dench “doesn’t like to talk about very emotional things,” but throughout our day together at Wasp Green her gallant cheer was tested by small unsettling moments. Although her charm never faltered, I was left with mixed messages, as if I had wandered into some Chekhovian scenario full of distressing secrets. Our extended conversation at a garden table on the lawn was interrupted first by a series of visitors (the mailman, a next-door neighbor, and two secretaries, each of whom got Dench’s full attention), then by phone calls from Anthony Page and Peter Hall, then by someone delivering a single pink rose (I learned later that it was from Finty—carrying on Williams’s tradition of having a single red rose sent to Dench every Friday of their marriage), then by Dench’s need to feed the herd of cats, and then by a panic over a credit card that might or might not have been stolen.

Finally, and most perplexingly, Finty, who moved back into her parents’ house when Michael fell ill, walked over unbidden with a provocative and bewildering announcement. “Your granddaughter is being played by an eighteen-year-old,” she said. Dench’s bright face collapsed. “Oh, Finty, I’m so sorry.” “It’s all right,” Finty said, with a wave of her hand. “I’m all right.” She turned back to the house, leaving her mother to struggle with her obvious disappointment. After a while, Dench said, “It’ll be for a very good reason.” Then, finally, she explained: “ ‘The Royal Family.’ She saw Peter.” Finty, who had recently finished filming in Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park,” had hoped for a part in the play.

A few minutes later, Finty came out again to say goodbye. “It doesn’t matter about that, you know,” Dench said. “It doesn’t matter.” Finty agreed. “She’s only a little eighteen-year-old, and maybe it’s her first job. Maybe she’ll be celebrating with someone and getting very excited,” she said. “Maybe you will have something else to do, you never know,” Dench said. “Never know,” Finty said, nodding. “My audition’s been cancelled on Tuesday.” There was a long, fierce silence as she exited for the second time. “It’s impossible being the child of an actor,” Dench said. A certain gravity fell across her face as she seemed to push down feelings of remorse and guilt and got on with the professional task at hand.

Onstage, Dench has found her bliss; offstage, that bliss has cast a shadow on others—on her brother Jeffrey (“There is jealousy,” he admits. “She’s had the breaks. I’m a jobbing actor. You know that niggles”), on Michael (“In some way, his heart was broken by Judi’s success,” Eyre says), and now on Finty, who seemed, in a way that neither of them quite acknowledged or understood, both to adore her mother and to wish to subvert her. A few months later, Finty told me a story that reminded me of this. While she and Dench were watching television together one night, Finty said, “Oh, I think Kylie Minogue”—the Australian pop singer and former soap-opera star—”is so talented.” According to Finty, Dench got “massively uptight. ‘Define “so talented,” ‘ she said. ‘She’s a singer, isn’t she? She looks good.’ She got really cross with me. She was, like, ‘If you think that’s talented, what are you aspiring to?’ ”

In her time, Dench has been serenaded by Gerry Mulligan from beneath her New York hotel window. She has watched, in West Africa, as, at the finale of “Twelfth Night,” people in the audience threw their programs into the air, then jumped to their feet to sing and dance for several minutes. She has clowned with the comedians Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise. She has locked herself in a bathroom with Maggie Smith to escape the advances of the English comic character actor Miles Malleson. She has refused Billy Connolly’s offer to show her his pierced nipples. As for her own nipples, she has stood in front of the camera, naked to the waist and unabashed, dabbing meringue on them. She has cooled herself on a summer day by jumping fully clothed into a swimming pool. At Buckingham Palace, she has scuttled away from the ballroom with Ian McKellen to sit on the royal thrones. In a Dublin restaurant, when Harold Pinter, a theatrical royal, barked about the tardiness of their dinner, Dench, according to David Jones, actually barked back, “Mr. Pinter, you are not in London. Would you please adjust.” She has made David Hare a needlepoint pillow as a Mother’s Day present, with the words “Fuck Off” intricately stitched into the tapestry. On the day she became Dame Judi, Dench pinned her D.B.E. insignia on the jacket of the actor playing Don Pedro in a production of “Much Ado About Nothing” that she was directing. It is a barometer of her louche and lively life that, not long after that, the first ten rows of the National’s Lyttelton Theatre heard Michael Bryant, who was playing Enobarbus to her Cleopatra, say to Dench under his breath, “I suppose a fuck is well out of the question now?”

Still, as Zeffirelli says, “She has known suffering.” At the corner of her Surrey property is a rowan tree, planted on an exact axis with the back door of the house, which, according to folklore, is supposed to protect the house from witches; it has not been able to protect Dench from the caprices of life. Soon after Michael died, in January, an electrical fault in the garage—an old barn—started a fire that gutted it to the frame. That charred skeleton is the first thing that rolls into view as you enter the property, and it stands in eerie contrast to the tranquillity behind it—wisteria by the front door, a sundial, a swimming pool, a flotilla of plastic slides and Winnie-the-Pooh toys tucked underneath the warped cantilevered timbers of the porch. Seven years earlier, Dench’s house in Hampstead had burned down and a lifetime’s memorabilia went up in flames. And in 1997, in a weird instance of life imitating art, Dench, like her character Esme in “Amy’s View,” which she was rehearsing at the time, learned that Finty, then twenty-five, was eight months pregnant and hadn’t told her. She went immediately to Eyre’s office at the National. “She stood in the doorway and just collapsed,” he recalls. “She exploded. I’d never seen that. Unbelievably painful. She was massively wounded that the person she had thought of as her best friend in the world had not confided in her the not insignificant fact of her pregnancy.” (Finty hadn’t wanted Michael, a conservative Catholic, to know that she was having an illegitimate child.) Nevertheless, rehearsals of “Amy’s View” went on. Eyre says of Dench, “Deep within her is the ethos that you don’t let people down. If you’re an actor, you go on. As Tennessee Williams says, you endure by enduring.”

On July 9th of last year, a muggy Monday, at St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, a standing-room-only crowd heard Trevor Nunn eulogize Michael Williams as a fine actor and partner. “I remember them courting,” he said, standing opposite an enlarged photo of Williams, who was five feet four and puckishly handsome. “When they got married, Mike said to me, he was in the grip of feelings ‘beyond any happiness he had ever dreamed of.’ He told me more than once that his favorite line in Shakespeare was ‘You have bereft me of all words, lady.’ Because when he was with Jude, he knew the full extent of what Shakespeare was saying.”

By the time Dench and Williams were married, in 1971, when she was thirty-six, Dench had done a lot of living. “When she likes something, she wants it like a wild animal,” Zeffirelli says. Eyre adds, “She was prodigiously falling in love with the wrong man.” One such man was the late comic actor Leonard Rossiter, who was in another relationship when they had an affair. “Some days, she’d come in and she’d had a wonderful day with him,” recalls McKellen, who was then co-starring with her in “The Promise.” “Other times, he’d have to leave early or hadn’t turned up, and she was desperate. Tears, tears, tears. She was helpless and hopeless. What I was seeing was utterly vulnerable.”

In 1969, on an R.S.C. tour of Australia, Charlie Thomas, a talented young actor with a drinking problem, who was playing the lovelorn Orsino to Dench’s Viola, died under mysterious circumstances. Thomas had been very dependent on Dench, Nunn told me. “It was a shattering situation,” he said. Williams, who was also a member of the R.S.C. and had become, in Nunn’s words, “probably more than a friend,” flew out to comfort her. “What was between them deepened enormously during that time,” Nunn says. “Mike arriving made a fantastic difference.” On that trip, Williams proposed, but Dench demurred. “No, it’s too romantic here, with the sun and the sea and the sand,” Williams remembered her saying. “Ask me on a rainy night in Battersea and I’ll think about it.” One rainy night in Battersea, in 1970, she said yes.

Williams, who came from Liverpool, had a more working-class pedigree than Dench, and he had the right combination of sturdiness and faith to both tether Dench and contain what her agent calls the “Dizzy Dora” side of her personality. “Michael was all-calming,” Dench says. By every account, they were good companions. Dench recalls, “He used to say of himself, because he was Cancerian—the crab—and I’m a Sagittarian, ‘I’m scuttling away toward the dark, and you’re scuttling toward the light. What we do is we hold hands and keep ourselves in the middle.’ ”

But, as the decades wore on, and despite “A Fine Romance,” the sitcom they starred in together in the early eighties, Williams was increasingly in Dench’s shadow. “In a sense, every one of her successes was a diminution of him,” Eyre says. Dench was acutely aware of the problem. “Judi was protective of Michael like a lioness,” Geoffrey Palmer says. “I don’t think Michael was an easy man. But the fact that all his married life he was Mr. Judi Dench—that’s difficult for any man. He used to get very low. He sat at home feeding the bloody swans while she was doing three jobs a day.” According to Dench, during these depressions Williams would become remote and “very, very silent.” She says, “I had to give an incredible amount of confidence to Michael, who was very unconfident indeed.”

On the inside of Dench’s wedding ring is inscribed a modified line from “Troilus and Cressida,” which Williams included in the first note he wrote to her: “I will weep you, as ‘twere a man born in April.” It proved to be somewhat prescient. On their twenty-fifth anniversary, Dench spoke of “just missing the rocks.” The marriage, she says, was volatile. “I throw things,” she adds. “I threw a hot cup of tea at him and his mother. And the saucer. I didn’t hit either of them, unfortunately.” Williams enjoyed spending time at the local pub. On several Sundays, when they had guests for lunch, Williams and the male guests rolled back from the pub late for the meal. “Mum’s like ‘Fine. Lock all the doors,’ ” Finty recalls. “ ‘No, he’s not coming in unless he can get through the top window.’ ” Williams and his crew climbed to their lunch on a thirty-foot ladder. And once, just before Christmas in 1983, an argument about the boiler sent Dench and Williams into such a blind fury that they refused to talk or look at each other on the long ride into London, where they were performing in “Pack of Lies.” “The air was black, and we’re bowling down Shaftesbury Avenue and not speaking and this person knocks on the window and begins to sing ‘A Fine Romance,’ ” Dench says. “We howled with laughter. Howled. I realized it very much in the last year—he was a tremendous anchor to me. A real, proper anchor.”

Just months before Williams died, the family took a trip to Aberdeenshire, where Billy Connolly had gathered some friends at his castle. The week before, Williams had asked Dench whether he was going to die, and she’d told him he was. “When Judi told me about it, she started by looking me in the eye and ended up fiddling with the cutlery, then just went very quiet,” Connolly recalls. “She went to a place in her head where she obviously feels much more comfortable and didn’t say a thing.” Connolly is a banjo player, and when Dench and Williams were in residence he and his other guests—Steve Martin (banjo), Eric Idle (guitar), the Incredible String Band’s Robin Williamson (mandolin), and a local fisherman who played the fiddle— would go to a clearing in a nearby wood, build a fire, and sit on tree stumps to play, sing, and sometimes dance into the night. Connolly has a picture of the revels, with two green wicker chairs brought into the circle for Williams and Dench. Williams is laughing and holding a large glass of whiskey. He’s looking beyond the fire at the fiddler; Dench is looking at him. “They were like young lovers,” Connolly says. “They touched all the time. The wicker chairs are still there. We can’t move them. Nobody wants to. ‘Cause it’s Judi and Michael.”

“I have a huge amount of energy,” Dench told me when we met at the Union Club in Soho for lunch in November. “Grief produces more energy, and all that needs burning up.” In the ten months since Williams’s death, Dench’s herculean workload—”The Royal Family” and three films, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “The Shipping News,” and “Iris”—had brought some of the shine back to her pale-blue, almond-shaped eyes. Her face was both animated and calm. “When my father died, it was almost like she was curiously liberated,” Finty says. And although Dench still feels “lopsided,” she said, “I just want to learn new things all the time,” and was full of news of her accomplishments in gardening, archery, and pool.

She had also learned to ride a Zappy scooter—a sort of skateboard with handlebars. Kevin Spacey, who before making “The Shipping News” told the director, Lasse Hallström, that he had two goals—“to give a good performance and to make Dench laugh”—had taught her in Central Park on his scooter, which has a turbo engine that goes up to about twenty miles per hour. “I was running along with her as she did it,” Spacey says. “People were kind of recognizing us, particularly her. Someone said, ‘Didn’t you have something to do with James Bond?’ And she said, ‘Yes, I’m his boss,’ and kept moving.” From her gold-leafed diary, Dench produced a photo of Spacey on location; he was wearing a black baseball cap with “Actor” embroidered above the visor and a sweatshirt she’d had made for him with the legend “The Caramel Macchiato of Show Business,” in honor of the coffee he’d brought her each day on the shoot. That evening, she told me, Spacey was coming to “The Royal Family.”

On performing nights, Dench leaves Wasp Green by car at quarter to five and arrives at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London at six-fifteen. Her dressing room—No. 10, on the third floor, John Gielgud’s favorite—has a blue carpet, high ceilings, an antechamber, and a gold plaque on the front door with her name on it. First, Dench reads and responds to her letters. Her next order of business is to talk with the company. “We always will check up with each other,” she says. “Essential. It makes you laugh if you see them for the first time onstage. I don’t know why. I’m on a knife edge in this play.” Her ritual for getting dressed never varies. She puts on a body stocking, then black tights and a dressing gown. She bandages up her hair and does her face and, finally, her nails. Above her is an oval mirror festooned with greeting cards; to her right, a photo of Williams; and to her left a photo of her grandson, Sammy. Beside her on the dressing table are two lucky pigs, two trolls, and a snail (a memento of her very first role, at the age of four).

After our lunch, on the way out, I mentioned to Dench that I hadn’t yet seen “The Royal Family.” She paused at the front door of the club. “Will you tell me when you’re coming in?” she said, holding out her cheek to be kissed. “And I’ll overact for you.” It was an exquisite exit. The line came so fast and was played so deftly and spoken with such warmth that, for a moment, I believed she’d never said it before. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 21, 2002, issue, with the headline “The Player Queen.”