Screen legend, 91, recalls the insult she never got over

Judi Dench has revealed the brutal thing a Hollywood producer told her before her film career had even started: that her face was all wrong.

The Oscar winner, 91, was about 23 when she was invited to meet "a big Hollywood producer at his office near Hyde Park," she writes in her new memoir, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?

He stared at her, then delivered his verdict.

"Quite a looker"

He was "very polite" about it, she recalls, according to Entertainment Weekly.

"I suppose that was the era when you had to be quite a looker," she writes.

She left politely, and was relieved to get back to the Vic and the theatre. "When I started out at the Vic, very few people aspired to work in cinema," she writes.

But the words stuck. "Well, I've remembered it, haven't I? What a giveaway," she says. "Maybe that's why I'm so unsure of myself in films."

"It's something I never really got over because I knew it was true," she adds, though she says she has since reconciled herself to it.

And the producer? "I won't tell you who said it," she writes. "Dead now."

He was spectacularly wrong. Dench went on to more than 100 film and TV roles, including Skyfall and the rest of the James Bond films, and won the Oscar for best supporting actress in 1999 for playing Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.

The bouquet at the stage door

The memoir also reveals how one action star talked her into a sci-fi film.

Vin Diesel came to see her at London's Haymarket Theatre to ask her to join The Chronicles of Riddick, Variety reports. He sent flowers first, and they were too big to carry up to her dressing room, so they had to stay at the stage door.

They were "easily the length of a kayak. And as wide," she writes.

It worked. She played Aereon, an elemental ambassador who guides Diesel's Riddick, in the 2004 film.

"You can't say no to a man like that, can you?" she writes. "I'm cheap as chips, me. Far too easily wooed."

Kenneth Branagh won her over with a smaller gift. For his 2017 Murder on the Orient Express, where she played Princess Natalia Dragomiroff, a role she admits to mixed feelings about, he gave her "the most wonderful embroidered handkerchief" with her character's initials on it. She called him "so sneaky," and said she would do anything for him, even play "a mat on the floor" in Three Sisters. Once she learned who else was in the film, including Olivia Colman, Penélope Cruz, Johnny Depp and Derek Jacobi, she couldn't refuse.

Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? is out now.