‘Oh God, I can’t bear it’: Judi Dench says Cats film was ‘a waste of goodwill and talent’
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Dame Judi Dench has long made her feelings clear about Cats, the doomed 2019 adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. In an interview the year after release, she said she had so far declined to watch the movie – in which she played wise moggy Old Deuteronomy – and described the orange fur coat she had to wear as looking like “five foxes fucking on my back”. In her forthcoming memoir, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? Dench reflects further on her involvement in the movie, which was universally panned and whose director, Tom Hooper, has not made a film since. “Oh God, I can’t bear it,” she writes in the book, “and [Lloyd Webber] had waited so long for it to be made. What a waste of all that goodwill and talent. “I understand the critics were rather hostile to the film. I never saw the final cut so I can’t judge. All I’ll say is nobody sets out to give a poor performance or make a bad film.
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