Judi Dench can no longer see on film sets due to her macular degeneration eye condition.
The 90-year-old actress appeared on British entrepreneur Trinny Woodall’s “Fearless” podcast last week and revealed that she can’t go out alone anymore due to the disease.
“Somebody will always be with me,” said Dench. “I have to now because I can’t see and I will walk into something or fall over.”
The “GoldenEye” actress, who was diagnosed with advanced macular degeneration (AMD) in 2012, admitted that she’s “always nervous before going to something.”
“I’m not good at being on my own at all, nor would I be now,” she shared on the podcast. “And fortunately, I don’t have to now because I pretend to have no eyesight,” she said with a laugh.
AMD is a common condition and the leading cause of permanent and rapid loss of vision in older adults, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Dench has been open about her vision problems over the years, including how it’s affected her 60-year acting career.
When Dench was asked if she had any upcoming projects in the works at an event in London last May, she responded, “No, no. I can’t even see.”
In 2023, Dench admitted on “The Graham Norton Show” that she was finding it harder and harder to read scripts and learn her lines, which she said she used to have no problem doing.
The Oscar winner added: “It has become impossible and, because I have a 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.”
Dench previously revealed during a 2021 conversation with Vision Foundation that she asks her friends to help her with lines by reading them out loud to her.
“You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult,” the actress said at the time. “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!”
Dench’s career has slowed down in recent years. In 2022, she starred in the British drama “Allelujah” and made a cameo in Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell’s Christmas comedy “Spirited.”
However, that same year she was nominated for an Oscar for 2021’s “Belfast.”
