Judi Dench John Mills, and is president of Questors Theatre, Ealing. In May 2006, she became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). She was also patron of Ovingdean Hall School, a special day and boarding school for the deaf and hard of hearing in Brighton, which closed in 2010, and Vice President of The Little Foundation. Dame Judi is also a long-standing and active Vice President of the national disabled people's charity Revitalise. Dench is an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. In 1996, she was awarded a DUniv degree from Surrey University and in 2000–2001, she
Judi Dench went to Nova Scotia, Canada, almost immediately after Williams's funeral to begin production on Lasse Hallström's drama film "The Shipping News", a therapy she later credited as her rescue: "People, friends, kept saying, 'You are not facing up to it; you need to face up to it', and maybe they were right, but I felt I was – in the acting. Grief supplies you with an enormous amount of energy. I needed to use that up." In between, Dench finished work on Richard Eyre's film "Iris" (2001), in which she portrayed novelist Iris Murdoch. Dench shared her role with Kate