2006’s NOTES ON A SCANDAL saw Cate Blanchett’s Sheba, a wealthy bohemian art teacher, start an ill-advised affair with a student. All of that might’ve been okay if it weren’t for her wizened old colleague Barbara, played flawlessly by Judi Dench, and developing some frighteningly maternal, carnal passions of her own.

Barbara is the quintessential, hardened old history teacher, described perfectly by one of her colleagues as ‘a battle axe’. She lives alone and is razor sharp, keeps a cat and chain smokes, deftly and coolly flicking ash from butt after butt. Her dismissive and aloof narration, the spoken word of her John Doe-esque diaries, is scathing in its candour.  She collects shelves and shelves of diaries, all of them a vessel for her closeted racism and her feelings for anyone she considers beneath her;  a fairly inclusive list. When she first meets Sheba’s Down’s Syndrome affected son she refers to him as ‘The Court Jester’.   At the end of her first dinner with Sheba and her family, when her spirits are on high, she gleefully sticks a gold star sticker on that day’s entry: ‘A gold star day!’ she exclaims.

Her magnanimous revulsion is non-discriminatory and is born of years of loneliness and rejection…

Her voiceover allows us a first person insight into her calculated and deliberate mind. She approaches human relationships with the foresight and planning of a chess player: she is always four moves ahead, and perfectly willing to make the difficult choices. She is a spectator: just as we watch and study nature, she has spent years studying other people and learning their ins and outs. But she’s not racist, or prejudiced against any particular group of people.  Her magnanimous revulsion is non-discriminatory and is born of years of loneliness and rejection. You can imagine a youth of repressed sexuality, with hours spent poring over books while her abilities to relate to other humans slowly shrivelled. Even her twisted “love” for Sheba is born of snobbishness. She’s like a sex-starved Mother Superior driven to quiet, contemplated madness out of both infatuation and contempt. An unnerving scene shows Barbara gently stroking Sheba’s arms, overpowered by her barely concealed sexual frustration.

It’s impossible not to be won over by her brilliantly eloquent disregard for everyone she sees…

In another actress’s hands Barbara might have been wholly unlikeable, but Dench makes her compelling and magnetic. It’s impossible not to be won over by her brilliantly eloquent disregard for everyone she sees. Her warm, calculated voice makes the viewer light up every time it returns to gently loose venom. And it’s not only her in vitriol that Dench makes her irresistible, but in her sparse moments of weakness and humanity as well. Dench’s ability to tower over everyone on screen, dwarfing even the statuesque Blanchett, and then to suddenly shrink and become helpless and vulnerable, is incredible.

In secondary school, I had a history teacher who very much reminds me of Barbara (although not when it comes to intense feelings of matriarchal lust, of course). She was whip smart and rarely suffered fools; she possessed a sharp, dry wit and a smoker’s cough that she’d been working on for years. I suppose this must be why I like Barbara so much. She’s a perfectly drawn character. Her malignancies are disquieting, but they are purely human and born of a lifetime of repression and solitude; played with masterful skill in what is surely one of Judi Dench’s best screen performances ever.

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