Judi Dench has revealed a surprising admirer who used his wiles to convince her do a film with him.
That smooth operator was none other than Vin Diesel.
“He came to see me at the Haymarket Theatre to ask if I’d be in The Chronicles of Riddick,” the actress shared in her new memoir Is It Too Late To Make A Run For It?
“Before he arrived, he sent me such a massive bunch of flowers. They couldn’t get them up the stairs to my dressing room… They were easily the length of a kayak. And as wide.”
The grand display worked and the Dame was cast as Aereon, an Elemental who calculates odds to prophesize the future with shocking accuracy.
“I’m cheap as chips, me. Far too easily wooed,” she jested.
“You can’t say no to a man like that, can you?”
The Fast and Furious alum is not the only one whose won the Dame over with a thoughtful gift.
She also shared that Kenneth Branagh once surprised her with “the most wonderful embroidered handkerchief.”
That present was to playfully incentivise Dench to take a role in Branagh’s film Murder on the Orient Express.
“He must’ve known that’d make me say yes; he’s so sneaky. But then I’d do anything for Ken.”
She went onto star as Russian Princess Natalia Dragomiroff, one of the main characters in the classic Agatha Christie whodunnit.
Dench revealed too in the book that she herself had given some fanciful gifts in her time.
She shared that the playwright, David Hare, “once asked [her] to make him a cushion with something rude written on it.”
Hare said he looked forward to having a giggle when his mother came to see it, knowing she’d remark on the “charming cushion” while not being able to read it clearly.
Dench, who is an avid cross-stitcher, did not disappoint.
“I remember doing that – it was very complicated – a swirl pattern. But if you studied it closely, it said, ‘F*** off.’”
Hare isn’t the only one whose witnessed such elegant profanity from the Dame.
In an interview with Premiere Magazine, Matthew Macfadyen and Keira Knightley -who worked with Dench on Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice- also noticed her savviness with cushions.
“She just sits there and she embroiders and you think: ‘Oh, that’s so nice! It’s Judi Dench. It’s so quaint; she’s embroidering a cushion,’” Knightley recalled.
“And you go: ‘What are you embroidering?’ And [it says]: ‘F***!’”