Judi Dench Reveals How Snake Encounter Left Her Unable to Perform

Dame Judi Dench once screamed so intensely that she lost her voice, leaving her unable to speak for 48 hours.

On Sunday, February 16, The Guardian unveiled an anecdote from the 90-year-old actress' upcoming BBC documentary, Roleplay, about the terror she felt when encountered with the slithering serpents. "I'm a person who is frightened of a worm because one jumped inside my sandal when I was a little girl, and we couldn't get it out," she explained, adding that snakes were far more frightening than worms.

Dench was playing Cleopatra to Anthony Hopkins' Marc Antony in a stage performance of Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra in 1987. This production, much to her shock, required her to hold a live snake for the scene in which the Egyptian queen commits suicide after the death of her lover.

Though the snakes she would use during the play were only Garter snakes, which are not poisonous and present little danger to humans, she recalled telling her late husband Michael Williams about her fear. "He said, 'Jude, you know what you should do. Give them names," Dench recalled in the documentary.

Although naming the snakes as if they were pets made her more comfortable with them, the Shakespeare In Love actress was not prepared for a surprise encounter with one of the reptiles. She explained that after her character's death scene, she was carried offstage in the air by her castmates. "One night, the boys taking me kept hissing," she said. "I was wondering what on earth was going on. Then, back on stage at the very end of the play, the snake fell out of my wig as I did my bow." Somehow the snake, which was supposed to be placed "into a sack behind her throne," had ended up in her wig. Dench recalled being "so scared I lost my voice for two days."