Dame Judi Dench has revealed a very personal tribute to her friend and fellow actress Dame Maggie Smith, who died in September aged 89.
Dame Judi plants individual trees in memory of friends who have died and, on the day of Dame Maggie’s funeral, her gardener found the sapling planted for her fellow acting dame had borne fruit.
“Joe, who works for me, came in and he had one little crab apple,” Dame Judi told the BBC.
“And so I had it in my pocket at her funeral, which was a very nice thing to have,” she said, in an interview recorded for the TV tribute Maggie Smith at the BBC, to be broadcast on 28 December.
The pair had been friends from the moment they first met in a dressing room at The Old Vic theatre in 1957.
Over the decades they worked together on both stage and screen, most notably in 1985’s A Room With A View, 2004’s Ladies in Lavender, The Best Exotic Marigold Ho
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