Judi Dench has spoken out about her struggles with age-related macular degeneration, saying she can no longer “see on a film set anymore”.
The Oscar-winning actress previously revealed that she was diagnosed in 2012 with the condition, which affects the middle part of a person’s vision, and said it had become “impossible” to read scripts earlier this year.
Now, she has spoken out about how her eyesight has continued to deteriorate further.
Dench told the Sunday Mirror magazine Notebook: “I can’t see on a film set anymore. And I can’t see to read. But you just deal with it. It’s difficult if I have any length of a part. I haven’t yet found a way. Because I have so many friends who will teach me the script. But I have a photographic memory.”
In 2019, Dench also told the Radio Times, she had had to give up driving because of her eyesight, calling it “one of the most traumatic moments” of her life.
She also highlighted that she can no longer read the newspaper, books or do the crossword.
In a 2021 interview with The Guardian, Dench revealed that she asks her friends to help her with lines by reading them out aloud to her.
“You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult,” she said at the time. “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 repetition, and I just hope that people won’t notice too much if all the lines are completely hopeless!”
AMD usually affects people in their 50s and 60s, but does not cause total blindness.
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