British icons dish in ‘Tea With the Dames'

The women of this film's title are not just any dames. Friends and colleagues Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith are actors both legendary and still active (although Ms. Plowright, at 88 the eldest of the group, has been largely sidelined by blindness).

For the simple idea of sitting them all at a table and turning on a couple of movie cameras, the director Roger Michell should get a royal commendation himself.

“Tea With the Dames” features these women not just serving up refined dish but frankly comparing notes on the fears and anxieties of an actor's life.

“On my way to the theater I always think, ‘Would you like to be run over now, or in a massive car accident?'” Atkins says. “And I only just about come out on the side of ‘No.'” Her friends nod in emphatic agreement.

It's the first time the four actresses have shared the screen, though all but Atkins appeared in the 1999 film Tea with Mussolini as the “Scorpioni”, a group of artsy English grandes dames whose stinging wit made them the scourge of pre-war Florence. There are echoes of that here; one almost feels sorry for fluffy Notting Hill director Michell, a rabbit among the scorpions. His meek attempts to steer the conversation don't always go down well. Might Dame Judi perhaps say something on the subject of ageing? “F--- off, Roger.”

One minor revelation is learning that Smith's main influence as a young actress was Kenneth Williams. Watching clips of her mimicking his Carry On drawl, it makes perfect sense; both are irresistible raconteurs. Dench may be granted the most screen time here, but Smith has the best one-liners. When she played Desdemona to Olivier's Othello, he accidentally knocked her out: “It was the only time I saw stars at the National Theatre.” She's never watched herself in Downton Abbey, and has no plans to - despite being given the six-series box set. “I won't last long enough to see the wretched thing, will I?”

Brought up in the theater, they all swear their film careers were more or less afterthoughts. Speaking of acting and staging trends, they weigh the worth of trying to apply naturalism to Shakespearean verse. They speak of how they were sometimes belittled and sometimes delighted by the men in their lives.

In a rare moment of vulnerability, all four admit they still feel afraid each time they perform. But as Dench puts it: “Fear is petrol.”

I would not have minded a bit if the dames were given twice the amount of time this trim film allowed.