Judi Dench has revealed her sight loss has become so advanced she needs a guide when she leaves her house.
The veteran actress, 90, first revealed in 2012 she is suffering with macular degeneration in her eyes, which can cause permanent and rapid central vision loss, and is the number one cause of vision loss in people over 50.
Judi has now shared a bleak update on her condition, admitting on the new episode of Trinny Woodall’s Fearless podcast: ‘Somebody will always be with me. I have to now because I can’t see and I will walk into something or fall over.
‘I’m always nervous before going to something.
‘I have no idea why… I’m not good at being on my own at all, nor would I be now.
‘And fortunately, I don’t have to now because I pretend to have no eyesight.’
Judi Dench has revealed her sight loss has become so advanced she needs a guide when she leaves her house
The veteran actress first revealed in 2012 she is suffering with macular degeneration in her eyes, which can cause permanent and rapid central vision loss
During a 2021 event for the London-based Vision Foundation, Judi opened up about how she struggles to read scripts due to her rapidly fading vision.
She said: ‘You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult.
‘I’ve had to find another way of learning lines and things, which is having great friends of mine repeat them to me over and over and over again.
‘So I have to learn through repeтιтion, and I just hope that people won’t notice too much if all the lines are completely hopeless!’
Judi also told The Graham Norton Show about how she battles to memorise lines as she used to rely on her pH๏τographic memory.
She added: ‘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.’
It comes after Judi cast doubt over the future of her film career amid her battle with age-related macular degeneration of her eyes.
Judi has now shared a bleak update on her condition, admitting: ‘Somebody will always be with me. I have to now because I can’t see and I will walk into something or fall over’
The veteran actress has not acted on the big screen since 2022’s Allelujah, limiting her screen appearances in the past few years to documentaries, where she appeared as herself.
And in May, she admitted that she has no future projects in the pipeline while struggling with her ailing sight.
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Asked if she has any plans for more acting jobs, Judi told a journalist at the Chelsea Flower show: ‘No, no, I can’t even see!’
But towards the end of 2022, she had refused to give up and insisted she wouldn’t be retiring anytime soon – despite admitting the condition even then was ‘bad’.
She told Louis Theorux on his BBC show: ‘I don’t want to retire. I’m not doing much at the moment because I can’t see. It’s bad.
‘I have a pH๏τographic memory so a person saying to me, ”This is your line…” I can do that .’
Around the same time, Judi revealed that while out for dinner with her partner David Mills, he had to cut up her food for her as she couldn’t see it on her plate.
‘He cut it up and handed something to me on a fork and that’s the way I ate it,’ she explained.
