Dame Judi Dench has hinted that her glittering 60-year acting career could soon be ending.
While attending the Chelsea Flower Show in London last week, the Oscar-winning actress was asked if she had any upcoming projects in the works.
“No, no. I can’t even see,” Dench responded, according to Deadline.
The Tony winner, 89, was diagnosed with advanced macular degeneration in 2012 and has since been open about her ongoing vision loss.
AMD is a common condition and the leading cause permanent and rapid loss of vision in older adults, according to the National Institutes of Health.
A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2019, 19.8 million Americans aged 40 and older were living with AMD.
During an appearance on “The Graham Norton Show” last year, Dench admitted that she has been finding it harder and harder to read scripts and learn her lines — adding that it used to be something she found very easy.
“It has become impossible and because I have a photographic memory,” she said at the time. “I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines but also tells me where they appear on the page.”
Her photographic memory often came in handy when memorizing scripts.
“I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them,” she said. “I could do the whole of ‘Twelfth Night’ right now.”
And in 2021, the “Shakespeare in Love” actress revealed 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,” Dench 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,” she added.
While she doesn’t have any projects in the pipeline at this time, Dench nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in “Belfast” in 2022.
She also made an appearance in Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds’ 2022 Christmas movie “Spirited,” as well as the comedy “Allelujah” in which she starred that same year.
