Judi Dench is struggling to read her scripts these days.
The 88-year-old tells Graham Norton on his talk show Friday that she can no longer see to read scripts to learn her lines.
Dench says, “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.
“I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them. I could do the whole of ‘Twelfth Night’ right now.”
Dench previously revealed she’d been diagnosed with the degenerative eye condition, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), that affects the middle part of your vision.
She spoke about the diagnosis in an interview with Louis Theroux last year, Hello! reported.
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When asked how bad her condition was, Dench replied, “Bad. Bad enough. Bad enough in that you’re quite fuzzy. You’re just a tad fuzzy.”
Theroux then questioned whether the diagnosis made Dench want to step back from her career, to which she insisted: “I don’t want to retire. I’m not doing anything much at the moment because I can’t see.”
She added of how she’d been managing to learn lines at the time, “I’ve got to teach myself a new way of learning. I’ve realized that I need to know where it is on the page. I’ll teach myself a way. I know I will, as long as I don’t trip over doing it.”
