At 91, Judi Dench revealed that her vision loss is preventing her from continuing to act and she can’t even read The actress spoke about how the illness has changed her life and makes it difficult for her to recognize faces She won an Oscar and shone for more than seven decades, but today she faces a harsh reality: “I can no longer do a play”

“I can no longer be on a stage. I can no longer do a play. I can no longer make a film. I can no longer read”.

Those were Judi Dench’s words, at 91, in an interview with Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, and the sentence landed like a blunt blow. The actress who inhabited the roles of Juliet, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra—the same actress who played M in eight James Bond films—admitted that her eyesight no longer allows her to do so.

The culprit is age-related macular degeneration, a disease that attacks the part of the retina responsible for central vision. Dench made it public in 2012, and since then the deterioration has continued: in 2023, she said she could no longer read scripts or memorize lines, and in December 2025, she said she saw faces “through a fog”, even up close. Sometimes she approaches strangers, thinking she knows them, and only realizes her mistake when she is already greeting them.

But there is something that remains intact. Although she can no longer read them, Dench said she is besotted with Shakespeare’s sonnets: “I am besotted by the sonnets, I just love them”. She said you have to adapt, make compromises, and carry on without thinking about it too much. The interview took place ahead of the publication of her memoir, written with director Brendan O’Hea.