To most people, Judi Dench is one of the United Kingdom's most beloved actors, not to mention one of the country's most esteemed legends of stage and screen. However, to those who know her much better, she's absolute filth and a menace to society.
Just don't call her a national treasure, though, because she fucking hates that term. Unfortunately, being an Academy Award, two-time Golden Globe, ten-time Bafta, seven-time Olivier Award, and Tony-winning icon with six decades of titanic performances across theatre, film, and television makes the tag an inevitability.
Dench often comes across as a demure dame who looks like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, but that's far from the truth. Sadly, she's had to give up her preferred on-set pastime of making foul-mouthed and remarkably profane embroideries for her co-stars, but anyone who was lucky enough to receive one should know they're in the possession of a collector's item.
The veteran also once passed a note to a complete stranger asking if they fancied a shag during a performance on stage, and she wasn't even embarrassed by it. That's Dench in a nutshell; she's one of the best to ever do it and an all-time great in every sense of the world, but, at the same time, she refuses to drag her mind out of the gutter, which Lesley Manville discovered first-hand in the most embarrassing circumstances.
One of the most renowned performers of her own generation, Manville and Dench shared a cast in a 1989 production of The Cherry Orchard. The former played Vanya and the latter played Madame Ranevskaya, and when they weren't required to be in the same scene together, the James Bond stalwart was up to no good.
When it was put to Manville during an appearance on The Graham Norton Show that Dench has a reputation for being naughty, she had a completely different view. "Naughty?" she incredulously asked. "That woman should be locked up!" Why? Because there are no limits on her bad behaviour.
"There's a moment in The Cherry Orchard where my character was onstage on their own, for a short time," she explained. "Judi Dench is in the wings, trying to make me laugh, trying to corpse me. And she's, how can I put this, she's pretending that she's being pleasured by somebody. From behind."
To make matters worse, as Manville was at pains to point out, she'd only recently had her first child, so, in her words, "My pelvic floor wasn't quite what it should be." You can probably guess what happened next, but just in case you didn't, she was trying so hard not to laugh at Dench pretending she was being pleasured from behind that she pissed herself in front of a packed auditorium.
If you thought things couldn't get any worse, they did, since the stage was sloped to improve the audience's view and the actors' visibility. That meant, as if Manville wasn't embarrassed enough already, she had no other choice but to "watch my piss trickle down" towards the front. You know what, maybe she's right, and it's time for Dench to get locked up for her antics.