Speaker 1: Welcome to Ruthie's Table four, a production of iHeartRadio and
Speaker 1: adamized studios.
Speaker 2: Name. Judy Dench is not just a national and international treasure,
Speaker 2: She's an interplanetary treasure if there is life on Mars.
Speaker 2: They're talking about her most recent performance. Judy is a
Speaker 2: woman of warmth, a woman of wit. A friend tells
Speaker 2: a story that when he mentioned to Judy hadn't seen
Speaker 2: the royal family, Judy replied, tell me when you're coming,
Speaker 2: and I'll be sure to overact for you. After record
Speaker 2: this conversation, Judy's having lunch in the river Cafe. We
Speaker 2: are planning to definitely overcook for this woman. A friend.
Speaker 2: I admire respect and adore.
Speaker 3: Goodness on the mains while we've got these beautiful, really
Speaker 3: sweet grapes at the moment, which passed so well with
Speaker 3: the grouse.
Speaker 2: And there's turbot and sea.
Speaker 4: Bears, oh my worm monsfish.
Speaker 2: You can have everything. We have had people come and
Speaker 2: order everything on.
Speaker 4: The and did they stay for a month or per
Speaker 4: a month? Yeah? Yeah, a month? Yeah.
Speaker 2: I always say a recipe is half science and half poetry,
Speaker 2: and so we're going to skip the science and read
Speaker 2: the poetry. How about that.
Speaker 4: Yes, well, I would love to have read a recipe
Speaker 4: or even given you a recipe, but we'll come to
Speaker 4: that data. But you are talking to the worst cook
Speaker 4: in Britain. And I wasn't a sonnet about food, But
Speaker 4: I just know. This is one poem, but it's Hilaire Belloc,
Speaker 4: and it's about Henry.
Speaker 2: King, Henry King, Henry King.
Speaker 4: Here he goes. The chief defect of Henry King was
Speaker 4: chewing little bits of string. At last he swallowed some
Speaker 4: that tied itself in ugly knots inside. Physicians of the
Speaker 4: utmost fame were called at once, But when they came,
Speaker 4: they answered, as they took their fees, there is no
Speaker 4: cure for this disease. Henry will very soon be dead.
Speaker 4: His parents stood about his bed, lamenting his untimely death.
Speaker 4: When Henry cried with latest breath, Oh, my friends, be
Speaker 4: warned by me that breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea are
Speaker 4: all the human frame requires. With that, the wretched child expires.
Speaker 2: The wretched child. So as he worke of this poem,
Speaker 2: he was quite a lectural Bellock, wasn't he. He liked
Speaker 2: to tell everyone what to do, and children how to
Speaker 2: be polite.
Speaker 4: It's rather sad. He was rather grim. I think that Bellock, well,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 2: There's a message, right, don't snack? Is that the message?
Speaker 4: Or you might don't snack?
Speaker 2: What was it like growing up? We grew up in Yorkshire.
Speaker 4: I did. I was born in York. My brothers were
Speaker 4: born in Lancashire. My mother was from Dublin, my father
Speaker 4: from Dorset and who went to Dublin. And recently in
Speaker 4: the last year I found out that my mother's side
Speaker 4: of the family is Danish and goes back to somebody
Speaker 4: who worked at Elsino in fact Son and was there
Speaker 4: when Shakespeare's first company went over there. I was brought
Speaker 4: up during the war. I was five when the war
Speaker 4: broke out, and we were very lucky because my pa
Speaker 4: was a doctor and he used to visit all the
Speaker 4: farms all around York as well as York itself, and
Speaker 4: everyone used to say, Oh, do have a chicken, Do
Speaker 4: have goose? Do have a duck? We were really lucky
Speaker 4: and that way we had we always had food and things.
Speaker 4: And that's also where we had sixteen cats, because there
Speaker 4: was nobody else in the neighbors sixteen cats. We did
Speaker 4: sixteen because nobody wanted their.
Speaker 2: Pets, you know, they all need them.
Speaker 4: Put them out, But they all came round to our place.
Speaker 4: It was a triumph.
Speaker 2: And who would cook the food? Would your mother? Would
Speaker 2: you sit down to family meals?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 2: Or how many would you have siblings? Who did?
Speaker 4: Two brothers, two brothers older than me? But and we
Speaker 4: always had the house full of friends. Meals were a
Speaker 4: great thing. I'm always trying to say. Now, you know,
Speaker 4: do enjoy sitting down at the table and not looking
Speaker 4: at the phone if possible?
Speaker 2: What was it like the meal time at your house?
Speaker 2: Was there always a discussion.
Speaker 4: And always singing, singing, a lot of singing. My ma
Speaker 4: playing the piano. My father could recite the whole of
Speaker 4: more Darthur. My brother Jeff, who was an actor long
Speaker 4: before me and at Stratford, used to know reams of
Speaker 4: Shakespeare and it was a kind of I think that
Speaker 4: was in the family very much before that. People used
Speaker 4: to be able to I mean I remember sitting on
Speaker 4: the stairs and hearing friends who were invited around, and
Speaker 4: somebody singing and playing the piano, and you know, you
Speaker 4: couldn't miss the arts.
Speaker 2: So when you think of your early meals, you think
Speaker 2: more of the performance.
Speaker 4: I think only of family meals round the table, and
Speaker 4: it was a family thing that you wouldn't miss because
Speaker 4: that's when you got to actually discuss things and talk
Speaker 4: about things.
Speaker 2: Who would cook?
Speaker 4: My mom would, or we had a wonderful person called Sissy.
Speaker 2: What did she cook? Because your actually has a very
Speaker 2: definite regional food.
Speaker 4: It was course, it was mostly what you could afford
Speaker 4: to get. And I remember there was a market in
Speaker 4: New York, a wonderful market. You'd go around and people
Speaker 4: would come in and they'd have a chicken in a basket,
Speaker 4: you know, all prepared for cooking and things. And I
Speaker 4: mean I could get the rations for five people when
Speaker 4: I was six. I could easily go and carry the
Speaker 4: rations which were so minimal for everybody. But I never
Speaker 4: remember Ruthy being hungry or thinking, gosh, you know, I
Speaker 4: wish there was more of this. I don't remember that.
Speaker 4: We were red really lucky.
Speaker 2: And your father didn't go away. He was he was
Speaker 2: away in the First World War.
Speaker 4: He was he was a hero. He got the military
Speaker 4: Cross and bar he got do you know where he was?
Speaker 4: He was in Arras and then because of a knee
Speaker 4: injury that he'd got, he was sent home to have
Speaker 4: and that way he got he was not at Passiondale
Speaker 4: was just fantastically well lucky is not really the word.
Speaker 2: And so for your father to have been in the
Speaker 2: war and then come home.
Speaker 4: I know, it was an extraordinary thing. And I knew,
Speaker 4: I knew about his record, but I didn't know it
Speaker 4: was quite so illustrious, which it was.
Speaker 2: And do you think that do you think your parents
Speaker 2: wanted to be actors or to be singers or part
Speaker 2: of their nature?
Speaker 4: No, my father there was an amateur group in New
Speaker 4: York called the Settlement Players. My power and were part
Speaker 4: of that. Mammy never wanted to act, which she was
Speaker 4: wonderful seamstress and could make costumes and things like that.
Speaker 4: And then when it came to the mystery plays the
Speaker 4: miracle plays, when they were done for the first time,
Speaker 4: Daddy played and asked the High Priest and we were
Speaker 4: a lot of us were auditioned by Martin Brown. I
Speaker 4: were to quake a board in school in York, and
Speaker 4: we were, we made angels, we were, We had a
Speaker 4: wonderful time, wonderful time.
Speaker 2: You remember the first auditions that would have been what
Speaker 2: age was your first.
Speaker 4: Wee It wasn't really an audition. They just came and
Speaker 4: said you, you, you, you, and you.
Speaker 2: And when did you know that that's what you wanted
Speaker 2: to do?
Speaker 4: What I wanted to do, not ages, not for not
Speaker 4: until fifty three, because I wanted to be a designer,
Speaker 4: stage design, stage designer. But I was taken to Stratford
Speaker 4: by my parents and saw Michael Redgrave in Leah, and
Speaker 4: I can remember seeing this set which completely changed my idea.
Speaker 4: During your holidays at school, I had assisted Voit, the
Speaker 4: designer York rep, painting sets for him, and I only
Speaker 4: really understood plays by three acts. You know, you design
Speaker 4: one act and then the curtain would come down. You
Speaker 4: change a few things and we'll go on. But for
Speaker 4: Lear at Stratford, it was the most phenomenal set that
Speaker 4: never changed. It was a huge flat disc that revolved
Speaker 4: with a rock in the middle of it that was
Speaker 4: the throne or the cave or nothing had to be changed.
Speaker 4: The whole boy was kind of continuous, and that I thought, no, goodbye,
Speaker 4: York Art School, I'm going to try for Central.
Speaker 2: When you went on these theatrical journeys with your parents,
Speaker 2: you went to Stratford, you went to the theater in
Speaker 2: New York, would you go to a restaurant before or after?
Speaker 2: Was that part of the evening? Was that part of
Speaker 2: the experience.
Speaker 4: It was partly, but probably. We were always in a rush,
Speaker 4: always in a rush to get things on time. But
Speaker 4: there was a restaurant that we used to that used
Speaker 4: to be the most enormous street to go to outside York,
Speaker 4: and we used to cycle there.
Speaker 2: This would be post war.
Speaker 4: This would be that was post war. Yes, but we
Speaker 4: all had bikes, so that was the greatest. And go
Speaker 4: to a restaurant simply wonderful. It's called the bider we
Speaker 4: It was wonderful. It was wonderful food. I mean, not
Speaker 4: investigated in any way, not in any way.
Speaker 2: And so what are the dishes of your childhood that
Speaker 2: you remember that? Did you have Yorkshire pudding?
Speaker 4: We did have. I tell you something. Tell me we
Speaker 4: used to have at school. I used to try and
Speaker 4: stay away on a Tuesday because they used to do
Speaker 4: Yorkshire pudding with treacle. Now even now that's that was
Speaker 4: really so.
Speaker 2: It was a dessert, or they served the treacle Yorkshire
Speaker 2: pudding with beef.
Speaker 4: It's so disgusting that it was always on a Tuesday.
Speaker 4: And I used to feign illness on a Tuesday, and
Speaker 4: on about the third or fourth Tuesday, Mama said, this
Speaker 4: is something about school. This is not to do with illness.
Speaker 4: And it was the Yorkshire pudding with a tree school
Speaker 4: that was at my prep school.
Speaker 2: But that's food was important to you. Food mattered.
Speaker 4: It didn't matter because of course during the war, of course,
Speaker 4: it was just something to sustain you. And as I
Speaker 4: say it, because of my power visiting right around in
Speaker 4: the country, we were just so lucky that we had
Speaker 4: enough to eat, but so many people didn't know.
Speaker 2: I often think that when people are very critical of
Speaker 2: food in Britain in the fifties or even the sixties,
Speaker 2: Britain had come out of a war, They came out
Speaker 2: of rationing, they came out of kitchen gardens where people
Speaker 2: didn't have food. And to go from that to you know,
Speaker 2: grand cuisine or to cooking, it seems so unfair to
Speaker 2: criticize a nation that had suffered food wise to being
Speaker 2: critical of you know, the way they cooked.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: So I feel it must have been very tough.
Speaker 4: Yes, it was. It was just a question of giving
Speaker 4: you something that filled you, yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But also I mean, I love the idea of
Speaker 2: your mother cooking a goose, or cooking duck, or cooking
Speaker 2: the food that was getting.
Speaker 4: We grew on the vegetables, grew the vegetables in the
Speaker 4: garden and next door it was the most wonderful pear tree.
Speaker 4: And my brother and I Jeff, the younger of my
Speaker 4: two brothers, used to get a rake and rake the
Speaker 4: pears off the tree into the garden. Yeah, it was
Speaker 4: quite a lot of peary.
Speaker 2: What would you do legal? What would you was illegal?
Speaker 2: Was it because it wasn't your tree? Okay? There? What
Speaker 2: would you remember what your mother would cook with the pears?
Speaker 2: Which is stud them or would you have I.
Speaker 4: Think she would, yes, I think she would studio or
Speaker 4: we just let them, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, delicious fruit pears, aren't they do? Still like them?
Speaker 4: I like pears. I quite like pears. Yeah, I've got
Speaker 4: a picture of you in the garden actually recently.
Speaker 2: What's your garden like? Did you have a garden? I
Speaker 2: have a beautiful crowd.
Speaker 4: Yes, I grew trees, mostly trees. There were lots of
Speaker 4: different trees. But we have some apples and one of
Speaker 4: them is a russt, which is very nice. And we have,
Speaker 4: as I say, these pear trees. We had a wonderful
Speaker 4: green gage tree, but it came down in a storm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, gageous, very very British green cages. So doing the menus,
Speaker 2: Eliza had a blank sheet of paper. She came in
Speaker 2: the morning. It's ratter like your house. You go on
Speaker 2: the fridge, you see what's there, you see what's been ordered.
Speaker 2: You've sort of also, you know, we're always thinking about
Speaker 2: what I always think, what would I want to you
Speaker 2: for lunch today?
Speaker 4: You're not coming to my house fridge? And I begged
Speaker 4: you are.
Speaker 3: I was so excited to make this beautiful clam taggerini,
Speaker 3: which I know Ruthie's is one of Ruthie's favorite pastors.
Speaker 3: Where we cook the bongolay in advance with garlic and
Speaker 3: parsi stalks in chili, and then we pick all the
Speaker 3: clams out of their shells and reduce the white wine
Speaker 3: and the olive oil and the butter, and then we
Speaker 3: toss that through fresh handk tagerini, which is one of
Speaker 3: my favorite things that I've ever had at a.
Speaker 2: Ri of a cafe.
Speaker 3: And we've also got this amazing slow cooked pheasant and
Speaker 3: partridge sauce which is a ragou that we make with
Speaker 3: lots of different wildbirds at this time of year, and
Speaker 3: we put chestnuts and mince panchatta in and that's really wonderful.
Speaker 4: Now we're really talking.
Speaker 2: We do write our menu every day.
Speaker 4: It makes it special and exciting, which is what a
Speaker 4: restaurant should be and isn't very much.
Speaker 2: When you left this Mother's wonderful family of theater and
Speaker 2: cooking goose and sitting around the table and singing songs
Speaker 2: and having friends over, it sounds so warm and so inclusive.
Speaker 2: What was it like when you actually then came to
Speaker 2: London and food wise? Were you're on a budget? Did
Speaker 2: you have to cook it out? What did you do?
Speaker 4: I've never had never I had to tell you a
Speaker 4: story that when I was awarded the O B E
Speaker 4: and my agent at the time had been in Central
Speaker 4: with me, Julian Belfridge. He came down to lunch and
Speaker 4: I gave him lamb cutlets. I made an enormous effort.
Speaker 4: He finished them, and whatever I gave him I can't
Speaker 4: remember for a dessert. And he sat back and he said, well,
Speaker 4: I'll tell you something, Judy. He said, you didn't get
Speaker 4: the ob for cooking. Nothing like having a support of
Speaker 4: It's good to be told, isn't it. It's good. There
Speaker 4: was a time what did.
Speaker 2: You eat there? You are going to.
Speaker 4: When we were old that when we got well, when
Speaker 4: we got to central, Oh, it was it was glorious.
Speaker 4: We used to go to it was somewhere in Kensington
Speaker 4: High Street. But we used to also go to a
Speaker 4: restaurant called a Capernina in Soho and that was the
Speaker 4: greatest treat.
Speaker 2: So that was Italian food.
Speaker 4: That was Italian field. It was absolutely and it was affordable.
Speaker 2: You could do so they're on a student budget.
Speaker 4: Just about just about it. But it were nice to
Speaker 4: be taken there. I must stay. That was an enormous treat.
Speaker 2: Do you remember a kind of multicultural restaurants? You remember
Speaker 2: Indian because a lot of you know, the cheapest food,
Speaker 2: certainly when I came in the sixties was Greek, Indian, Chinese.
Speaker 4: I mean that was a huge treat to be able
Speaker 4: to eat, you know, to eat Chinese and as say, Italian,
Speaker 4: and it was a real luxury. And suddenly to be
Speaker 4: able to go to go or be taken to somewhere
Speaker 4: and you have the luxury of really the choice of
Speaker 4: things to have to eat, and you know, I'll never
Speaker 4: take that for granted.
Speaker 2: I don't think were you ever hungry as a student?
Speaker 2: Did you were the days?
Speaker 4: I don't ever remember that.
Speaker 2: You probably had a grant to do the days when
Speaker 2: they know I didn't have a grant.
Speaker 4: I lived in QA Queen Alexandra's house, which is right
Speaker 4: by the Albert Hall where Central was, and so all
Speaker 4: that was I don't know my phone.
Speaker 2: They did, they did. That's good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we were lucky.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and suddenly started getting roles at the National Theater.
Speaker 4: I went straight to the VIC. But I mean I've
Speaker 4: never been I've never been a good cook, or even
Speaker 4: any cook of any kind. So you I have tried.
Speaker 4: I have tried. I can do two things. I can
Speaker 4: make white sauce and I can make gravy. Oh well
Speaker 4: that's pretty good. I'd say, that's all I can do.
Speaker 4: But I used to at the VIC. Alec McCowan was
Speaker 4: at the VIC at the same time as me, and
Speaker 4: he used to live in the King's Road but three
Speaker 4: minutes from my flat. We used to have Sunday lunch
Speaker 4: together and he used to cook and he used to always,
Speaker 4: I mean, it would be a very usual thing. We
Speaker 4: were in the importance together. And you know we knew
Speaker 4: each other frankly, but he used to send me a
Speaker 4: little note saying, would the gravy Queen or the white
Speaker 4: sauce Queen come on Sunday and have lunch? And he
Speaker 4: did all the rest.
Speaker 2: You were at the old Fake Who are the directors
Speaker 2: that you?
Speaker 4: Oh, Michael Bentley, Michael Bentle at the VIC and Doug
Speaker 4: his seal and oh it was house in days. I
Speaker 4: loved it and I despite having had not very good
Speaker 4: notice Isophilia, which is my first part. I remember Michael
Speaker 4: Bentel said, he said, we'll just get over these notices.
Speaker 4: He said, you will get better. And he said, I'll
Speaker 4: go on employing you and you can play small parts
Speaker 4: and walk on, but you can stay at the VIC.
Speaker 4: And you know that that was such. I was so lucky.
Speaker 4: And then the National and then Nottingham Playhouse with Johnny Neville,
Speaker 4: Who's Hamlet. When I went to the VIC and we
Speaker 4: took he was we were the very first company to
Speaker 4: ever go to West Africa.
Speaker 2: Do you remember that very well?
Speaker 4: I remember it very well. Indeed, there's set plays were
Speaker 4: Twelfth Night, mac Beth and Arms and the Man. What
Speaker 4: was the audience young children, young people at school, and
Speaker 4: the British Council was the British Council.
Speaker 2: And do you remember the culture of food there?
Speaker 4: I do?
Speaker 2: I do. The food was the.
Speaker 4: Food a kind of stew, probably are quite meat based,
Speaker 4: might well have been which which actually is a question
Speaker 4: I also like to ask.
Speaker 2: Would when you act, when you're in a play, do
Speaker 2: you eat before?
Speaker 4: Do you know after?
Speaker 2: You need to tell me about you you're in a play.
Speaker 2: You might be doing a matinee.
Speaker 4: And sometimes think you're lucky for it. Do you get
Speaker 4: to eat in the play?
Speaker 2: I know you have a story about that, but if
Speaker 2: you're if you might not be eating in the play.
Speaker 2: So there's a day you're in a play in the
Speaker 2: West End or at the National or at the Old Vic,
Speaker 2: and you wake up in the morning and you know
Speaker 2: you have a matinee and you have an evening performance.
Speaker 2: Judy Dench, what would you what would your day be like?
Speaker 4: In terms of I probably I probably I'd have coffee
Speaker 4: in the morning or tea. I wouldn't eat very much.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't eat much before. I'd eat just something before
Speaker 4: mattering it not much, not lunch, and mostly eat afterwards.
Speaker 2: After the evening performance or after the matinee.
Speaker 4: After the evening before.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a very I like going to see a
Speaker 2: friend of friends I have in the theater and then
Speaker 2: going out. They always like to go out for dinner afterwards,
Speaker 2: and there's some joyousness.
Speaker 4: Is dinner after It is wonderful as long as you
Speaker 4: don't have a match the next day. Do you know?
Speaker 4: That's tricky, But I'm in the luxury of doing do
Speaker 4: shows and knowing you're going out to dinner afterwards. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's just glorious.
Speaker 2: And then other nights you would just go home and
Speaker 2: crash or did was there a kind.
Speaker 4: Of home and crash? Probably? Probably?
Speaker 2: I always say that there's sort of links between the
Speaker 2: theater of a restaurant and the theater of the theater.
Speaker 2: You know that we have a kind of curtain up
Speaker 2: at a certain time, and then there's the performance, and
Speaker 2: then there's after the performance. And if I do an
Speaker 2: evening I can sometimes do a night where the curtain
Speaker 2: goes up. I use somebody walks in and you're ready
Speaker 2: and you know it's going to be a great night,
Speaker 2: or you just know sometimes even just by the way
Speaker 2: the first table sits down, or the way, perhaps one
Speaker 2: of the chefs is coming a bit late, or they
Speaker 2: seem a bit tired, that maybe it's not going to
Speaker 2: go so well. And then sometimes the one that the
Speaker 2: ones that you think won't are the best nights, and
Speaker 2: sometimes the ones you think won't are not the best nights.
Speaker 2: But there's a kind of both a kind of feeling
Speaker 2: of energy after the performance and also exhaustion.
Speaker 4: Do you think it's terribly similar? It's very very similar.
Speaker 4: And some of the nights when you want it to
Speaker 4: go well, I don't know whether this applies to well,
Speaker 4: it never applies to your restaurant does definitely not when
Speaker 4: I've ever been here. But you know, it's the night
Speaker 4: that it doesn't go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you don't know why?
Speaker 4: Do you know?
Speaker 2: Sometimes have the same script, you can, you know, the
Speaker 2: same the same actors, the same set.
Speaker 4: And there's no explanation for why. It's all that's the
Speaker 4: excitement of it.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and eight, the living room in our
Speaker 2: home was transformed into a magical space, not by painting
Speaker 2: the walls a different color or hanging a work of art,
Speaker 2: but solely due to Dame Judy Dench walking in for
Speaker 2: two hours. She captivated one hundred people telling stories, singing songs,
Speaker 2: reciting Shakespeare, all in her unmistakable voice and beautiful demeanor.
Speaker 2: We were all there to raise funds for the North
Speaker 2: Wall and Outreach Arts Lab project close to Judy's heart.
Speaker 2: I remember that when you did that performance at our house,
Speaker 2: and it was part of a whole series that we
Speaker 2: did of giving performances and then we each chose a charity.
Speaker 2: I think that night you chose the Arts Project and
Speaker 2: I did med santumand and we did one with Ian
Speaker 2: McKellen and Rafe. But I remember, as I said, was
Speaker 2: the magic in the room. But I also remember that
Speaker 2: you found it kind of intimidating.
Speaker 4: I had to walk downstairs, remember I had to come
Speaker 4: upstairs and say okay, and then Richard Ire had to
Speaker 4: come upstairs, and I thought, I have Judy chepstairs, who's
Speaker 4: performed in front of thousands of people in the nation.
Speaker 2: And then and then you came down and there were
Speaker 2: you know, a hundred people who were only there to
Speaker 2: see you, maybe even fewer, maybe eighty or sixty, and
Speaker 2: it was quite overwhelming. And remember that.
Speaker 4: I do remember walking down the stairs and George Fenton
Speaker 4: playing the pian George Fenton. I can't remember what I sang.
Speaker 2: Okay, well I found the invitation and the title of
Speaker 2: the evening was These Foolish Things, Yes, And I was
Speaker 2: wondering if you're saying that, I think you know that
Speaker 2: song I do and.
Speaker 4: The lipstreak these remind me of you. But I sang
Speaker 4: something else and I can't remember because I remember sing
Speaker 4: it a lot of box with George.
Speaker 2: I did you yeah, yeah, And we did some singing
Speaker 2: with Richard Aire. Do you remember used to sing And
Speaker 2: one night we got a piano and we sang around
Speaker 2: the piano and it was so it's something. It's one
Speaker 2: of the great things to do in.
Speaker 4: Life, isn't it, well, singing around a piano.
Speaker 2: Yeah, should we do that? We should really really love
Speaker 2: Let's do it. I have a piano in my house.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 2: We have a night and have something delicious, organize really lovely.
Speaker 2: What is the play when you said you had to
Speaker 2: cook on you had on stage?
Speaker 4: Do you know when the paycock? Oh, it's wonderful play
Speaker 4: case another play but where I had to cook for
Speaker 4: Norman rod Away. She cooks a sausage for him to
Speaker 4: eat and half while people who say, you know he's
Speaker 4: eating that sausage and it's not cooked. It's simply there
Speaker 4: isn't time for her to cook that sausage.
Speaker 2: So you actually put a raw sausage in a frying pan?
Speaker 4: Yes, oh, yes, so then we pre cooked the sausage.
Speaker 4: Well we're cheating a bit here, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Is that the only play where you've actually cooked on?
Speaker 4: Probably?
Speaker 2: We've talked about theater, What about film sets? What about Bond?
Speaker 4: Sent Me Anywhere? Kept me in a little room at
Speaker 4: the back. And I once said to Barbara and Michael,
Speaker 4: I said, you know, you go to such glamorous places,
Speaker 4: and all I am, I'm in that office at the
Speaker 4: back all the time. So the next time, the next
Speaker 4: film we made, I can't remember which one it was,
Speaker 4: we were at Stowe's school and they gave me a
Speaker 4: trailer my makeup and everything, which had Innsbruck written across
Speaker 4: the side. And Barbara said to me, you can never
Speaker 4: complain again. Every day you're going to every day to Innsbrook.
Speaker 4: I did get to Panama, to Panama which one that was?
Speaker 4: Do you know which Bond takes place in Panama?
Speaker 2: I remember there was.
Speaker 4: I did eight of them because Specter I just did
Speaker 4: a morning which was just me giving him the message
Speaker 4: on the television or on his machine, so I can't
Speaker 4: remember which one it was.
Speaker 2: What about did you ever do you ever remember being
Speaker 2: on a set where you ate, Well.
Speaker 4: They gave you something, but you don't kind of go
Speaker 4: in a way feel like it. You know, afterwards, it's
Speaker 4: quite a different.
Speaker 2: Directors don't like stopping for lunch. If you talk to
Speaker 2: people who have made independent movies or small movies, theyways
Speaker 2: say that stopping for lunch stops the kind of process.
Speaker 4: And you know, even in the mind of any kind
Speaker 4: of rehearsal, it's not. The treaty is to know you're
Speaker 4: going in the evening something that's the greatest treat to
Speaker 4: look forward to. You know.
Speaker 2: The question that I ask everyone is the food is
Speaker 2: what we eat to sustain ourselves, and food is what
Speaker 2: we cook when we want to impress someone or share.
Speaker 2: It's also something we find comfort in food. And so
Speaker 2: name Judy Dench, what is your comfort food?
Speaker 4: Comfort food mashed potato and some really good gravy, onion,
Speaker 4: gravy and mashed potato. I quite like down.
Speaker 2: Thank you, It's been a wonderful time with you, and
Speaker 2: now we'll go have some lunch in the River Cafe.
Speaker 1: The River Cafe Look Book is now available in bookshops
Speaker 1: and online. It has over one hundred recipes, beautifully illustrated
Speaker 1: with photographs from the renowned photographer Matthew Donaldson. The book
Speaker 1: has fifty delicious and easy to prepare recipes, including a
Speaker 1: host of River Cafe classics that have been specially adapted
Speaker 1: for new cooks. The River Cafe Look Book Recipes for
Speaker 1: cooks of all ages. Ruthie's Table four is a production
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