Judi Quotes

I tend to look somewhere other than the media for my definition of what is beautiful. Is that a heavily retouched 18-year-old or a 40-year-old on that front cover? I don`t think so; nobody looks like that. I look at people such as Helen Mirren or Judi Dench, these amazing women who look great, but they look like their age, and I think why would anyone want to lower themselves to look like an alien? Sex appeal is all about confidence, and that comes from self-knowledge.

Judi Dench and Ian McKellen taught me how to work hard and respect the theatre.

Jude is the most incredibly level person. Generous, understanding. All the things I`d have to work very hard at, Jude is like that all the time. I would love to be like that. And working with Jude you have to try to remember that you ought to be like that. (on her friend Judi Dench)

(From Movieline magazine April 2002) People like Susan Sarandon have paved the way and our window of opportunity expands incrementally year by year. Obviously the kind of roles I`m offered are different than before, but I feel like the roles have only gotten more interesting. I want to grow up to be Judi Dench or Ellen Burstyn. The older we get, the less we work, but look at the work just those two women are doing. It gets deeper.

In the next film, Riddick is going to go to the underverse. Riddick will act with new elementals. Not air elementals (as Judi Dench`s character is) but fire and water. It`ll come full circle in C3 when he must return to Furia.

I want to do something where I play Judi Dench`s younger sister or daughter.

I always think you should be totally frivolous as much as you can, and then take the work seriously when it has to be taken seriously. As long as you can keep that balance going, it`s good fun. If it`s only frivolous it`s not fun - it would drive me potty. On Iris, I`d never worked with Judi Dench before, but it was wonderful to realize that we worked in exactly the same way. Foolish for most of the time, then focusing on the work, clicking into it very quickly and naturally. There were a lot of laughs. Otherwise it could have been torture. Two months of being grueled.

(Ball is one of the few musical comedy artists to have distinguished himself equally as an interpreter of both Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim, who would seem to be polar opposites as songwriters.) I`m very lucky that I`ve gotten to work with both of them, ... I was in Andrew Lloyd Webber`s 50th party concert at the Albert Hall. That same year I was in a special show called Hey, Mr. Producer , a celebration of Cameron Mackintosh`s work. There was a Sondheim section, and Cameron asked if I`d be part of it. I`d already recorded `Losing My Mind` from Follies , which is one of my favorite songs of Steve`s. But I hadn`t yet done a particularly traditional treatment of it. Steve said he wanted me to do it absolutely straight, the way it was heard in the original show, which I was delighted about. And he worked with me on it--just him, and me, and a pianist in a tiny room, for an hour-and-a-half master class on this song. I came away knowing every nuance; why he wrote everything that he did; why every note was in its place; why the phrasing was like this--can you imagine how thrilling that was? And he is so articulate in explaining his work; you can be under no illusion why something is there. When you have that understanding, that is when his work opens up to you. Of course, they put me between Judi Dench singing `Send in the Clowns` and Bernadette Peters doing `Being Alive.` You try holding your own in that company!