Neither conventionally beautiful nor unspeakably plain Dame Judi’s pert and gamine features beneath the trademark short crop have probably

Neither conventionally beautiful nor unspeakably plain, Dame Judi’s pert and gamine features beneath the trademark short crop have probably contributed to her longevity as a screen actress. Not having the built-in obsolescence of the screen beauties and starlets of her day, she went for character roles from an early age. But after a dispiriting year in art school she followed her brother Jeffrey to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, fulfilling her former English mistress’s idle and condescending prophesy later recollected by Antonia Byatt, “You know, Judi will probably be content to dabble her pretty feet in amateur dramatics.”She made her professional debut as Ophelia to John Neville’s Hamlet at the Old Vic Company where she got her first bitter taste of criticism from Kenneth Tynan – “a pleasing but terribly sane little thing” – and was subsequently dropped from the US tour of the production. Her mother was more fiery, once throwing a vacuum cleaner down the stairs at a sales rep. At The Mount School in York, where she was in the same year as the novelist AS Byatt, she embraced the Quaker faith, attracted by its lack of dogma and ordained priests.Having made her acting debut as a snail in a play at junior school, she felt no stirrings towards the dramatic arts as a profession, preferring the more hands-on creativity of art and design. Moreover, she will skip from stage to screens both large and small and back again with the agility and enthusiasm of a young girl. You don’t get to survive for 45 years in the business without hard graft.

And Dame Judi is one of the hardest grafters around.Judith Olivia Dench was born in York on 9 December, 1934, to a fearsomely vivacious Irish mother, Olave, and a garrulous GP father Reginald, who was the company doctor at the Theatre Royal in York.Dame Judi’s mercurial personality derives from her parents: her father was legendarily amusing and a fine storyteller. It isn’t easy to give those performances.”It is remarkable that she still pushes the limits of her versatility. She’s a tragedienne of great distinction (Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth), a comic actress of renown (A Fine Romance, Shakespeare in Love), can sing the socks off a canary (Cabaret, A Little Night Music) and is a jolly good sport (The Morecambe and Wise Show and 007’s M) She can do classical and modern and all points in between. Duh!Dame Judi has been nominated for her title role in Mrs Henderson Presents, the producer of which is her long-time friend Norma Heyman.

“Judi adds a dimension to Mrs Henderson that makes you adore this woman in spite of the fact that she is an absolute cow,” Heyman says. “Her performance also acknowledges that sexual chemistry doesn’t diminish with age The trouble is that we expect her to be great all the time It’s a bit unfair. Fairly sensible people seem to lose all sense of proportion when Brits look like making a splash at the Academy Awards: witness Radio 4’s Eddie Meyer asking Dame Judi what she was going to wear for the ceremony within seconds of being told that she would be starting rehearsals for a new production of Hay Fever at the time and might find it difficult to attend. And so it is with the eternally impish Dame Judi on whom acting laurels have been bestowed almost annually since she began in the profession.
The other recently touted notion that there is some kind of deadly battle between her and fellow Oscar-nominee Kiera Knightley is also, I suspect, the fabrication of some industry spin-doctor who noticed that they appear as arch enemies in Pride and Prejudice. Judi may be 71 and a Dame of the British Empire but there is little in her manner to suggest the Lady Bracknellish attributes that either fact might imply. Any septuagenarian who makes the likes of Hollywood hard man Vin Diesel turn up at her stage door with a bouquet to beg her to appear in his new action blockbuster is clearly cooking with gas for several generations of film-goers more youthful than her own. That Judi Dench has been turned down for US television chat shows because of her advanced years is, frankly, risible Damn the demographics, darling.

As for the summer: “My personal wish is that everyone should say Germany was a good host.” And that if England meet up with them again, it should be as late as possible once more.LIFE & TIMESBorn: 11 September 1945, Munich, West Germany.Nickname: The Kaiser.Position: Sweeper.Club career: Bayern Munich 1958-77 (European Cup ‘74, ‘75, ‘76; Cup-Winners’ Cup ‘67; Bundesliga ‘69, ‘72, ‘73, ‘74; West German Cup ‘66, ‘67, ‘69, ‘71); New York Cosmos ‘77-80, ‘82-83; SV Hamburg ‘80-82.International career: 103 caps, 14 goals; World Cup winner ‘74 , finalist ‘66; European Championship winner ‘72, finalist ‘76.Managerial career: West Germany 1984-90, World Cup winner ‘90, finalist ‘86; Marseille 1990; Bayern Munich 1994, ‘96.Awards: European Footballer of the Year ‘72, ‘76.. But that was a different Germany, a divided country, east and west. “Sepp Blatter’s expression is: ‘Football can make the world better’, and it’s true. We started this tour in Asia, in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and had a tremendous success. In Angola, civil war for 30 years, but football brings together these enemies. It was fantastic to see.” Nearer home, too: “In Africa they asked why we want to host the World Cup again, after 1974.

Now they have four weeks and it will help.”The other factors confirmed by Korea’s success in reaching the semi-finals were his admiration for Guus Hiddink – “one of the best coaches in the world, he must be a genius to do a double job with PSV and Australia and be successful” – and an appreciation of football’s power for good throughout the world. “My personal feeling is that it was an exception for the South Korean team in 2002, who played fantastic football in front of the home crowd, and that it won’t happen again. It is a clever move from Fifa to stop all the leagues on 14 May so that all teams have time to prepare themselves.”At the last World Cup, clubs played until almost a week before and then the World Cup started in Korea and Japan. You saw the result, for all the great players, it was a disaster. .”Not that he is expecting any shocks along the lines of the last World Cup, especially given the results from the African Nations’ Cup, which suggest that the best teams from that continent will not be at the finals. Then you can meet Brazil in the semi-final and that’s very difficult To be beaten by Brazil is not a disaster.