Dame Judi Dench, the 91-year-old Oscar-winning actress, has confessed to a childhood prank involving a dead rat and a neighbour's letterbox. In an interview with the BBC's This Natural Life podcast, she revealed that she once pushed a dead rat through a neighbour's door on behalf of her brothers, who had lost cricket balls to the same garden.
Childhood Mischief
Speaking to host Martha Kearney, Dame Judi described the incident as 'a terrible story.' She explained that her brothers frequently batted cricket balls into a neighbour's garden, but the neighbour, Miss Lazenby, never returned them. 'The boys used to play cricket in the garden, and they used to be always batting the balls over into the other gardens, and there was a lady called Miss Lazenby, and she never ever would throw the ball back, or give us the balls back,' Dame Judi recalled.
One day, her brothers found a dead rat in the barn and wrapped it up. They asked Judi to deliver it. 'Judi, will you just go round and put this through Miss Lazenby's door?' she remembered them saying. 'So I did go and squeeze it through Miss Lazenby's door. Miss Lazenby was rather red about it saying, “please give us our balls back.” We wrote this message, it was tied on the dead rat.'
When asked if the prank succeeded in retrieving the balls, she replied: 'Probably not.' The incident resulted in her brothers being forbidden from playing cricket again.
Acclaimed Career
Dame Judi Dench is one of Britain's most celebrated actresses, with a career spanning over six decades. She won an Oscar for her role as Queen Elizabeth I in the 1998 romcom Shakespeare in Love. Other Oscar-nominated performances include Mrs Brown, Chocolat, Iris, Mrs Henderson Presents, Notes on a Scandal, Philomena, and Belfast. She has also earned a Tony Award, two Golden Globe Awards, four British Academy Television Awards, six British Academy Film Awards, and seven Olivier Awards.
In 2024, she suggested she had quietly retired due to poor health, stating at the Chelsea Flower Show: 'No, no, I can't even see!' She has age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which causes gradual eyesight deterioration.
Family Background
Dame Judi grew up in York with her older brothers Jeffrey and Peter. Jeffrey, a prominent theatre figure with the Royal Shakespeare Company, died in 2014. Peter worked as a GP in York and died in 2017. Dame Judi credited Jeffrey for inspiring her acting career, telling The Times in 2014: 'I'd never have thought of being an actress if it wasn't for Jeff.' She added that she disliked when people asked Jeffrey if he was related to her, as acting was his idea first. She also noted that her family did not own a television until the Queen's Coronation in 1953.
