Sixty years after her father died, Judi Dench went back to the house in York where she grew up, and found it covered in scaffolding. A builder waved, knocked on the door, and the owners invited her in. Up the narrow stairs, past the half-landing lavatory with the same door it had in her childhood, to the attic bedroom whose skylight had let a small girl watch the night sky. The family who now live there had redecorated, but they had kept two of the pictures she was allowed to draw straight onto the plaster as a child, one of them probably the ferret from a Saki story. Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? by Judi Dench opens on that visit, and the scene sets the terms for everything after: the past is still there, a little smaller than remembered, and someone has to let her back in.
A Life Told Across the Kitchen Table
The person doing the letting in is Brendan O’Hea, the theatre director who shares the copyright and who has spent three decades as her friend. The memoir is built as their conversation, his questions set apart from her answers, and the decisive choice is that he is not a polite interviewer. When she claims she never lies, he reminds her of the years before search engines when she would leave the room with her phone, consult an all-knowing friend in Scotland called Morag, and return with answers she had invented. When she rails against a cartoon elephant that frightened her as a child, he takes the other side and gets sworn at. These exchanges give Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? by Judi Dench a texture most celebrity memoirs lack, because the subject is being contradicted on the page.
The same informality lets her family arrive as characters rather than credits. Her mother, a fiery Dubliner, once hurled a new vacuum cleaner and all its attachments at the man who came to service it. Her brother slurped down her junket at the tea table eighty-odd years ago, and she remains furious about it. An African Grey parrot with a smoker’s laugh insults the cleaner. None of this is necessary to the story of a career. All of it builds the voice, and the voice is the reason to stay.
The Craft, Told Sideways
The richest material, though, is about acting, and it rarely announces itself. Stephen Sondheim, giving her half an hour on A Little Night Music, showed her that “Send in the Clowns” is built from short questions and silences because the character is too angry to sustain a long phrase, a note any actor would kill for. After a visit to Inveraray Castle, she found her Lady Bracknell in the Duchess of Argyll, despite Peggy Ashcroft having warned her off the part. Preparing to play Iris Murdoch, she drove past the novelist’s Oxford house, saw an open upstairs window and a dusty car left unlocked with the keys in it, and took that carelessness as the key to a whole marriage.
Her principles come through these stories rather than over them. She will not suggest rewrites to a writer, because the script is the writer’s. She dislikes directors who forget the names of extras. And she prefers to be told a story than to read it, and admits she agreed to at least one miserable play by not reading it first. Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? by Judi Dench is better on the theatre than on the cinema, which she treats with a wary amusement, and her ease in a rehearsal room is plain even when the subject is a fiasco.
Friendship, and What Outlives It
Grief is never given a chapter of its own in Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? by Judi Dench, which is exactly why it lands so hard when it arrives, usually at the end of a funny story and without any warning at all. The pages on Maggie Smith run from their first meeting at the Old Vic in 1958, through decades of competitive mischief, to The Breath of Life, when Smith, piqued that Dench would not go with the play to New York, quietly killed her laughs for a night and then telephoned to apologise. The friendship ends where friendships do. After Smith’s death, Dench carried an apple from a tree she had planted for her in her pocket to the funeral, and the book lets that detail sit without comment.
There is the same restraint in the Philomena pages. At the wrap party, when a short edit of the film was shown, the real Philomena Lee sat behind her, and when the film reached the car carrying her small son away from the convent, Dench felt the woman’s hand tighten on her shoulder, and can no longer recall anything that was on the screen.
The chapter on ageing is the bluntest in Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? by Judi Dench. She calls getting old hell, refuses the word retirement and loathes being called a national treasure. Her sight has failed so far that friends read her lines to her until she has them by heart, and her hearing is going too. It is not a brave-face chapter. It is an angry one, and the anger is a form of appetite.
Too Late to Make It Tidy
The format that gives the book its life also sets its limits. O’Hea sometimes prompts a story he plainly already knows, and the seams of the interview show in the occasional sudden recollection that sends a chapter sideways. Because the chapters run by theme, readers who want her career in order, with dates and context, will have to assemble it themselves from fragments scattered across costume, food and royalty. And O’Hea’s own commentary, admiring and well informed, occasionally runs longer than the moment needs. None of these faults is serious, but together they mean the book is better dipped into than read in a sitting. Readers should expect strong language, bawdiness, bereavement, illness and suicide, all handled with care.
The Run for It Judi Dench Never Made
O’Hea and Dench have done this before: their earlier conversation book worked through the Shakespeare roles of her life one at a time, and this one turns from the parts to the person. Born in York in 1934 to a doctor and a wardrobe mistress, she performed as a teenager in the revived York Mystery Plays before drama school in London and the Old Vic. Screen fame came late. Her first Oscar nomination was for Mrs Brown, when she was in her sixties, and all of her eight nominations came after sixty.
The UK edition from Michael Joseph appeared on 22 October 2026 and the American one from St. Martin’s Press on 3 November, so Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? by Judi Dench is out now in both countries. In 2024, she was among the first women admitted to the Garrick Club, an honour she says will be hard to enjoy without her husband, a longtime member.
Final Thoughts
The book is generous, funny and much less guarded than its subject’s public reserve might suggest. Read Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? by Judi Dench for the craft and the friendships, and forgive it the meandering.
For another actress writing frankly about growing older in public, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old by Brooke Shields makes an unexpectedly good companion. The Steps by Sylvester Stallone shows the opposite approach, one tight stretch of a career told in strict order. And Miriam Margolyes’s This Much Is True shares the bawdiness and a cheerful refusal to behave.
The house in York was smaller than she remembered. The drawings on the attic wall were exactly the right size.