Dame Judi Dench deserved the Best Actress Oscar for "Notes on a Scandal"
Monday, November 22, 2021 at 12:00PM
by Matt St Clair
Dame Judi Dench is an international treasure. The legendary actress currently has seven Oscar nominations under her belt, having won once in Best Supporting Actress for her role as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (recently discussed right here at length). Should the stars align, she might add an eighth nomination to her record for her role as the lovable Granny in current Best Picture frontrunner Belfast. Even at 86 years-old, and with her deteriorating eyesight, Dench is still going strong, managing to get quality roles in an industry notoriously unkind to actresses when they reach a certain age and whose names don’t rhyme with Beryl Deep.
Astonishingly, Dench didn’t become an official Academy darling until she reached her 60’s. Up until she joined the James Bond franchise as M in GoldenEye, and earned her first Oscar bid for Mrs. Brown in ‘97, Dench was more of a theater mainstay while working sporadically on film. Yet since that one-two punch, she's been a consistent movie presence with Notes on a Scandal being a high water mark. She deserved to win her the Best Actress Oscar that year...
In the 2006 drama Dench plays Barbara Covett, a schoolteacher nearing retirement who’s unpopular, to say the least, with both students and fellow faculty members. When art teacher Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) joins the staff, Barbara latches on and starts a friendship. That friendship morphs into an opportunity for control once Barbara catches Sheba having an affair with an underage student. Through blackmail and gaslighting, Barbara aims to get Sheba caught up in her web for her own personal reasons.
Besides the role of Barbara being a major departure from Dench’s niche of sophisticated period piece women, and her seamless ability to go from piteous to spiteful within moments, another thing that made Dench deserving of the trophy is how rare it is for actresses to win for roles like this. As previously noted in my “complicated woman” piece back in April, AMPAS has a rough history when it comes to rewarding leading actresses for playing schemers or villainesses; Louise Fletcher, Faye Dunaway, and Kathy Bates are the rare exceptions to Oscar's unwritten "likeability" rule.
It’s even rarer to see an actress over 60 being recognized for playing a lesbian villainess. While it isn’t made explicit, it’s still clear through the way she gazes at her, and how Sheba eventually confronts Barbara over her diary entries written about her in the big climactic showdown, that the infatuation Barbara has for Sheba runs deeper than friendship. An infatuation that led to debate over the film’s revival of the “predatory lesbian” trope.
Ultimately, even with Dench’s performance being a rare chance to reward an older actress for a wickedly complex role, fellow Dame Helen Mirren ended up sweeping her way through the season for her work as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen. Mirren was her usual brilliant self but portraying famous icons shouldn't equal automatic awards sweeping (and it often seems to).
Notes on a Scandal is based on a novel by Zoe Heller and is not a true story. Judi Dench has the more daunting task of interpreting a fictional characterization through her own imagination rather than relying on audio recordings or archival footage of the person she’s playing to fall back on the way actors playing real people do. Dench still is building a character from the ground-up and she does it masterfully.
Thankfully, Dench does have a trophy on her mantle, but in a more just world, Notes on a Scandal would have been her crowning moment.
Notes on a Scandal is now available to rent on Amazon Prime and other services...
2006, Best Actress, Judi Dench, LGBTQ+, Notes on a Scandal, Oscars (00s)
Reader Comments (18)
I wish I could have engineered a 3-way tie between Dench, Mirren and Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada that year. They are all so brilliant, and Streep and Dench would be winners in many other years.
She definitely deserved it more than she did for Shakespeare in Love!
I'd be ok with her winning for this. Mirren and Streep were very good, but not over-the-moon phenomenal where it would've been a tragedy if they'd lost (the narrative for both was partially due to longevity in any case.. Mirren had never won, Street hadn't in decades).
I LOVE YOU. I'VE ALWAYS TOLD IT!!!
Absolutely should have won though Streep is a very close 2nd and is now to overuse a word Iconic the other 3 my other 3 nominees Gyllenhaal,Cruz and Winslet.
The only time her sexuality is alluded to is one of my favourite scenes in the film with her sister at bedtime and well played by Julia McKenzie.
And Mirren could have win years later with THE LAST STATION
It is known.
I don't believe in ties but what a threeway - Dench acing the thriller/creepy/menacing vibes in her best performance, Streep giving us a comic performance for the ages and Mirren acing a biopic and making her the quintessential queen for years to come.
I would have given it to Dench with Streep close behind and Mirren, Winslet and Cruz worthy winners in other years. But ask me tomorrow and that might change.
She's very good in this, but for the top prize I'd still favor Mirren or Streep.
Judi is so good here, and she plays Barbara's despicability brillantly, never shying away from it. I also think she does a great job playing out Barbara's unrealized urges. A lesser actress would have telegraphed that more.
I do think if she were a man she would have been frontrunner/would have won for this role. Voters love men like this, but have real difficultly with difficult women.
That aside, though, 2006 is one of the best line up for Best Actress in recent memory, if not one of the all time line-ups. All of these women, all winners, are firing on all cylindors and it's easy to see why Mirren won. She gave a strong performance in a film the academy loved, and she didn't yet have a statue. For a year this competitive, that's enough.
Dissenting view: And the Oscar should have gone to...Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal. That was clearly a co-lead, not a supporting role, and she was magnificent, worthy of her own write-up. #teamsheba
Dench was indeed wonderful, but I'd still rank them:
1. Cruz
2. Mirren
3. Dench
4. Streep
5. Winslet
I usually love Winslet, but I recently returned to LITTLE CHILDREN and couldn't stand most of it. I think it's her weakest nominated performance.
Judi Dench is great in this film - but la Blanchett was definitely best in show.
I've become increasingly annoyed by Dame Dench's acting choices lately. She's the absolute worst part of Belfast, an otherwise excellent film.
Mirren did not do anything phenomenal in the Queen, but, in the veins of Julie Andrews’ Mary Poppins, they just had to give it to her due to the hysterical campaign.
This really was Judi’s crowning achievement and she was also cast against type!
YES
I love the last pic. That whole scene with Phil Davis is mesmerizing. Makes me think of one of those documentaries with lions waiting to rip a deer apart or something.
Cruz gets my vote!
I'll never forget seeing this in the theatre. You could hear a pin drop.
Unrelated, but the boyfriend I saw it with dumped me the following weekend. LOL.
Peggy Sue - what a great way to describe that scene!
Mirren is overrated in The Queen.
Winslet is forgettable in Little Children.
The Oscar, very clearly, should've gone to either Streep or Dench.
I also agree that Blanchett was phenomenal in Notes on a Scandal. People who claim that this is "Dench's movie" are delusional.
I watched this with my niece. We were both mesmerized by Dench. Afterwards she turned to me and said, "No wonder you and Mum like her so much".
I think that reaction beats winning an Oscar any day.