Judi Dench calls Cats 'a waste of goodwill and talent' in new memoir

Dame Judi Dench has called Cats, the 2019 film adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, "a waste of goodwill and talent." The verdict appears in her forthcoming memoir, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?

Dench writes that the film's makers had honourable intentions, but that the elements "didn't coalesce." It's her most considered statement yet on a movie she has plainly disliked for years.

What did Dench actually say about Cats?

The memoir isn't her first swipe at the film. In an interview the year after release, Dench said she had so far declined to watch the movie at all. She played Old Deuteronomy, the wise cat at the story's centre.

Her sharpest memory was costume-based. She described the orange fur coat she had to wear as looking like "five foxes fucking on my back."

That line, quoted verbatim in the source, carries the actor's voice: blunt, funny, and unbothered by decorum. It sets the register for the new book's longer reckoning.

Why does this film still matter?

Cats was universally panned on release in 2019. Tom Hooper directed it, and he has not made a film since.

That's the mechanism worth naming. A commercially aimed, star-studded adaptation of a beloved stage musical failed so comprehensively that its director — whose previous work included major prestige releases — has been absent from cinemas for years. Dench's memoir adds the inside view: goodwill existed, talent existed, and the result still collapsed.

Her phrase "didn't coalesce" is doing quiet analytical work. It doesn't accuse anyone of bad faith. It suggests a production where the parts never locked together — the polite version of the foxes line.

What does this change for the memoir?

For readers, it signals that Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? won't be a guarded, publicist-approved stroll through a career. Dench is willing to name a prominent failure and describe her own part in it with undecorated language.

For the Cats afterlife, it adds one more entry to a uniquely public pile of disavowals. A film universally panned in 2019 has now drawn a second, book-length rejection from one of its own leads — six years on, with no sign of the actor softening.

The memoir, forthcoming from Dench, will tell readers whether the foxes were the worst of it, or just the beginning.