Judi Dench has revealed that her pet parrot calls her a “slut.”
The Oscar winner, 89, shared her African grey parrot Sweetie’s name for her in an interview with the U.K.’s Sunday Times published on Sunday, December 1.
“We had a long chat just now. You shouldn’t ask what she says. She says: ‘You’re a slut,’ ‘you’re a slag,’” Dench told the outlet.
“She has said ‘Boris Johnson’ but she didn’t get that from me,” she added, referring to the former British prime minister. “She listens to the radio. My God, she’s funny though. She’s very, very funny. Everybody should have a parrot or a myna bird. Their voices are absolutely incredible.”
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Dench, best known for her roles in the James Bond movies starring Daniel Craig, Shakespeare in Love, Mrs Brown and more, spoke with the Times to celebrate her 90th birthday on December 9.
“It’s just that you get a bit nervous when everybody says 90. I don’t want to think of 90 much, I’m going to think about [turning] 29,” she said.
“I think you’re lucky to be 90,” Dench continued. “My two great, great friends, Barbara Leigh-Hunt and Maggie Smith, have just dropped off the bough in the last four weeks or so and that’s not good. I’m able to at least get from A to B and walk about and, golly, I’ve got a great deal to be grateful for.”
Having acted for nearly seven decades, Dench has slowed down her career in recent years due to her ailing eyesight. Dench first revealed in 2012 that she was diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration.
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“It’s disconcerting when you’ve had quite good hearing all your life. If your eyes give up and your ears give up, I dread to think what’s going to happen next. Never mind, onward and upward,” Dench told the Sunday Times.
In a February 2023 appearance on the U.K.’s The Graham Norton Show, Dench said her deteriorating eyesight had made it difficult for her to read and memorize scripts.
“It has become impossible,” the actress said. “And because I have a photographic memory, I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines but also tells me where they appear on the page.”
The Cats actress went on to say that she previously had no problems learning entire scripts quickly. “I used to find it very easy to learn lines and remember them,” the U.K. native recalled. “I could do the whole of Twelfth Night right now.”
