Dame Judi Dench says she can't read or write anymore due to health condition

Dame Judi Dench has opened up about no longer being able to read or write due to her failing eyesight.

The 87-year-old sits down with Louis Theroux in the next episode of his interview series and discusses her advanced macular degeneration, which can make simple tasks difficult.

"I went to a dinner a few weeks ago, a rather important dinner," she recalls, as per The Sun.

"It was so dark that I said to my partner David, who was next to me, 'Have I anything on my plate?'

"He said, 'Yes'. I said, 'Does it need cutting up?', so he said, 'Yes' and I said, 'Would you do it?'

"He cut it up and handed something to me on a fork and that's the way I ate it.

"I don't know if I finished it, I don't know what I did. I probably scooped it all up and over the side of the plate for all I know."

Dench has been acting since the '50s, starring in the likes of the James Bond series, Shakespeare in Love, Chocolat and Philomena, picking up buckets of awards along the way.

And despite the challenges brought about by her diminishing vision, she has no plans to retire just yet.

"I don’t want to retire," she says. "I'm not doing much at the moment because I can't see. It's bad.

"But I've got to teach myself a new way of learning.

"I have a photographic memory so a person saying to me, 'This is your line' . . . I can do that. And I have many people who can help me.

"I'll teach myself a way, I know I will. So long as I don't trip over doing it."

BBC

Elsewhere in the interview, we can look forward to Dench telling Theroux to 'f**k off'.

When asked by Metro's Adam Miller if any of his interviewees surprised him and changed his preconceptions about them, Theroux admitted that Dame Dench had because of her 'unwillingness to accept sort of a widely acknowledged national treasure status'.

Theroux continues: "When I say, 'You’ve been described as a national treasure', she says f**k off in a friendly way.

"You get the feeling from her that she is someone who never wants to rest on her laurels and actually, every time she goes out to do something of any depth, it’s a kind of a struggle because she's out to prove herself again and along with that is a degree of insecurity about whether she’s good enough which makes her so extraordinary."

Theroux's interview with Dame Dench is set to air next Tuesday, 1 November and you can catch it on BBC 2 or BBC iPlayer.