Mekishana Pierre is a news writer at Entertainment Weekly. She has been working at EW since 2025. Her work has previously appeared on Entertainment Tonight and Popsugar.
Dame Judi Dench is opening up about her worsening eyesight as she lives with age-related macular degeneration.
During a recent appearance on ITV with longtime friend and fellow actor Ian McKellen, Dench said she “can’t see anymore”, and can no longer watch television or read. “You don’t [see me on camera anymore] because I can’t see,” she explained. “I’ve got, you know, that thing.”
When McKellen, who starred in Macbeth with Dench some 50 years ago, joked that they could see her, the Oscar-winning actress conceded the point, adding, “Yes, and I can see your outline and I know you so well. But I can’t recognize anybody anymore.”
Dench, 90, went on to admit that she can’t see the TV and “can’t see to read.”
McKellen then jokingly asked Dench if she goes up to “total strangers and say, ‘Lovely to see you again,'” to which she laughed and responded, “Sometimes!”
Dench disclosed her diagnosis in 2012, telling the Daily Mirror, “I can’t read scripts any more.”
“Somebody comes and reads them to me, like telling me a story. It’s usually my daughter or my agent or a friend, and actually, I like that, because I sit there and imagine the story in my mind,” she added. “I’ve got what my ma had, macular degeneration, which you get when you get old.”
According to the Cleveland Clinic, macular degeneration affects central vision. “This means that people with macular degeneration can’t see things directly in front of them,” the clinic explains, adding that the disease is age-related and most commonly found in people over 50.
Dench previously spoke about how she’s dealt with the condition in support of the Vision Foundation, a sight-loss charity.
“You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult,” she said. “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.”
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She recalled one instance where, while starring in a West End production of The Winter’s Tale alongside Kenneth Branaugh in 2015, he told her, “Judi, if you were to say that speech about eight feet to your right, you’d be saying it to me and not to the [proscenium].”
She added, “I rely on people to tell me!”
Despite needing assistance for most aspects of her life, Dench has been vocal about persevering as she navigates her reduced workload since her diagnosis. During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show in 2023, she said she used to memorize her lines via her photographic memory.
“I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines but also tells me where they appear on the page,” the Philomena star said. “I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them. I could do the whole of Twelfth Night right now.”
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