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Judi Dench: My Failing Eyesight Is a Pain in the Butt

The actress says her photographic memory let her memorize scripts—but now she has trouble seeing.

Actress Judi Dench says her failing eyesight from macular degeneration is making it hard for her to learn her lines and find the right spot on stage. The 88-year-old said on The Graham Norton Show that she has a photographic memory that made memorizing scripts a cinch, but now she can’t read off the page. “It has become impossible and because I have a photographic memory, I need to find a machine that not only teaches me my lines, but also tells me where they appear on the page,” she said. “You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult... I’ve had to find another way of learning lines and things, which is having great friends of mine repeat them to me over and over and over again.”