(Photo: Getty Images)
Dame Judi Dench has spoken candidly about why she made relatively few movies until later in her career.
The actress told The Sunday Times that she was put off film roles when she auditioned for a well-respected director in the 1960s. "He was perfectly nice," Dench recalled. "But at the end he said, 'You'll never make a film. You have the wrong face.' And I said that is fine, I don't like film anyway. I want to go back to the theater."  
In her usual sensitive fashion, Dench was too polite to mention the director by name. Though she appeared in just over a dozen films from the 1960s to the 1980s, she mainly focused on TV and theater work in that period. In fact, her first lead movie role didn't come until 1997, when at age 63 she portrayed Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown. 
"He was brilliant, Billy," Dench said of her Mrs Brown co-star, Sir Billy Connolly. "Well, he is brilliant. I could watch Mrs Brown again. But there are a lot of my films I haven't seen. Maybe I will one day, when I've forgotten a bit more about them."
Given that movies weren't her priority for so long, it's especially impressive that she has since carved out such an impressive big screen career. Earlier this year, she earned her eighth Oscar nomination for her performance in Kenneth Branagh's Belfast. She won an Oscar once, in 1998, for Shakespeare in Love.
Are you surprised Dame Judi Dench took so long to land her first lead movie role?