Dame Judi Dench has recalled the time she lost her voice after a lifelong fear of snakes came home to roost while she was performing on stage.
For a while, that helped, with Dame Judi coming face to face with the snakes while playing Cleopatra, who dies by suicide via snake poison in the play.
Dame Judi landed a part in a production of William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra—a production that involved using live snakes during the performance.
According to a post from the National Theatre’s Facebook page in May 2020, one of the snakes apparently ‘took a turn’ on a different night and chomped on a prop man.
To get over her fear, Dame Judi told her husband Michael Williams, who died in 2001, to come up with a plan to humanise them and make them seem friendlier.
