Flash points where player meets part

JUDI DENCH

“Mrs. Henderson Presents”

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JUDI DENCH swears the airplane wasn’t supposed to take off.

About halfway through “Mrs. Henderson Presents,” the film’s titular character, played by Dench, climbs into an open-cockpit airplane. The plane was only supposed to taxi back and forth in front of director Stephen Frears’ cameras -- to “run along the runway a bit,” as Dench says.

Yet in an echo of Howard Hughes, who turned his planned Spruce Goose photo op into a brief but memorable flight, the pilot of Dench’s Gypsy Moth gunned the biplane’s engine, and they zoomed into the sky over Henley-on-Thames.

“You can’t just keep running along the runway in a plane -- you just can’t. It has to go up in the air,” Dench says. “That was terribly exciting. I never thought I would do that -- fly in an open plane like that. But all of that [flying in the movie] was me.”

Given that she doesn’t really do much acting once airborne, it’s an odd sequence for the 71-year-old actress to cite as one of her favorites in “Mrs. Henderson Presents.” And yet, it’s one of the film’s singular scenes, a moment in which character and actress throw the same caution to the wind.

Mrs. Henderson, as the fictionalized biography tells us, has recently lost her husband in pre-World War II England. She easily could keep quite busy doing nothing. “She would have been well able to become a part of the London elite and sit around and spend a lot of money,” Dench says.

But this well-heeled widow has other plans. She does indeed do some spending, but rather than throwing garden parties, Mrs. Henderson buys a London theater. Under manager Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins), the Windmill Theatre is soon showing nonstop revues. When the format’s popularity begins to wane, Mrs. Henderson concocts even more compelling Windmill Theatre programming: posing young women in various states of undress all across her stage.

Before the clothes can come off, though, Mrs. Henderson must persuade the English censor, Lord Cromer (Christopher Guest), to back off. It’s a one-sided duel.

“I adore the scenes with Christopher Guest,” Dench says from Prague, Czech Republic, where she is playing the spy M in the next James Bond movie, “Casino Royale.” “Because you kind of know from the moment she walks in that he has not got a hope. He’s not got a hope. She must have been a nightmare -- an absolute nightmare. But there is something indomitable and wonderfully spirited about her.”

One of Dench’s -- and the film’s -- greatest tests was to allow a little vulnerability to crack Mrs. Henderson’s unyielding facade. That tenderness is brought to light in two story threads: her unrequited love affair with Van Damm, and her mothering of the Windmill Theatre’s actresses. Having lost a son (killed in World War I) and a husband, Mrs. Henderson didn’t possess the vocabulary of modern-day psychology to convey her heartache, but Dench tries to communicate her character’s loneliness in just a few gestures and lines of dialogue.

After being barred from her own theater by Van Damm, Mrs. Henderson broods in bed, sipping tea. “The man’s a monster. I want nothing to do with him,” she says to a friend, even though she means precisely the opposite.

Told she should consider a sneak attack, Mrs. Henderson’s face brightens like a young child’s. In the next few scenes, she twice slips into her theater, once as an auditioning performer dressed in a bear suit.

Donning that huge, furry costume and flying over the countryside weren’t the only physical errands Dench undertook in the making of the film. Soon after her husband is laid to rest, Mrs. Henderson decides to go row a boat -- a scene performed again by Dench rather than a stand-in.

“I’ve always been able to row a boat. It’s like a bicycle, isn’t it?” Dench says. “Once you row a boat, you know how to do it. What’s difficult is doing it in a fur coat and high-heeled shoes, and Stephen Frears saying, ‘OK, let’s go again. And again. And again. And again.’ ”

-- John Horn