Opening up about her long-running health battle with her eyes, Dame Judi Dench has admitted her sight loss is now so advanced she needs a guide when she leaves her house.
Dame Judi Dench’s sight loss is now so advanced she needs a guide when she leaves her house.
The veteran actress, 90, first revealed in 2012 she is suffering with macular degeneration in her eyes, which can cause permanent and rapid central vision loss and is the number one cause of vision loss in people over 50.
She has now given a bleak update on her condition, admitting on the new episode of Trinny Woodall’s ‘Fearless’ podcast: “Somebody will always be with me. I have to now because I can’t see and I will walk into something or fall over.
“I’m always nervous before going to something.
“I have no idea why… I’m not good at being on my own at all, nor would I be now.
“And fortunately, I don’t have to now because I pretend to have no eyesight.”
During a 2021 event for the London-based Vision Foundation, Judi opened up about how she has been battling to read scripts due to her rapidly fading vision.
She said: “You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult.
“I’ve had to find another way of learning lines and things, which is having great friends of mine repeat them to me over and over and over again.
“So I have to learn through repetition, and I just hope that people won’t notice too much if all the lines are completely hopeless!”
Judi also told ‘The Graham Norton Show’ about how she battles to memorise lines as she used to rely on her photographic memory.
She added: “I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines but also tells me where they appear on the page.
“I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them. I could do the whole of ‘Twelfth Night’ right now.”
Dame Judi Dench’s sight loss so advanced she needs guide when she leaves house
