Acting crept up on me but I don't regret it for a minute

Dame Judi Dench

The actress, who is up for an academy award for Iris, said she preferred working in theatre because there was always the chance to improve on things at the next performance.

"But with films, the finished result is out of my hands. It has been put together from another person's point of view," she added.

"I know that going to see rushes is a help but if I see what I look like I'm done for."

Speaking candidly, Dame Judi who has been acting, in theatre and film, since the late 1950s, said her performance of writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch was one that she would like to have improved.

True to role

She said Murdoch, who died in 1999, had been one of her heroines and like many people she still had a vivid impression of what the writer had been like.

"I was frightened to play her because lots of people must have seen her and knew her and her husband John Bayley, of course, is still alive," she said.

"I had to be absolutely sure that what I fed in of my own was her personality, philosophy and wisdom. So my responsibility to her was very great."

In her long stage and screen career Dame Judi has accumulated a long list of honours. This includes Baftas for Iris and A Room With a View, and a best supporting actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.

However, when asked by a student how she felt about winning awards for acting she said she was perplexed by the whole process.

"You can see if someone is a wonderful dancer, you can hear if someone is a wonderful singer, but with acting it is quite a different thing. It is so much about personality," she said.

"I don't know how you assess acting, but that's not to say I'm not extremely grateful."

Designer ambitions

Dame Judi said that with the forthcoming academy awards on 24 March she would bet on her Iris co-star Jim Broadbent and Gosford Park actress Dame Maggie Smith to win Oscars.

She told another student how she never intended to take up acting as a career and had originally intended to be a theatre set designer.

Her Queen Elizabeth won her an Oscar

It was the enthusiasm of her brother who went to drama school who awakened her own interest.

She said there had been many roles in theatre and film which she had enjoyed playing.

In particular, she loved the plays of Shakespeare, who she said her family used to jokingly refer to as "the gentleman who pays the rent".

She also relished her recent part in the West End stage comedy The Royal Family.

More current and equally enjoyable, she said, was her part as M in the Bond movies - of which the next in the series is currently being filmed.

Bond's boss

Dame Judi described 007 star Pierce Brosnan as "good news" and said she loved playing "the Boss".

But she dispelled the myth of many of the students in the union chamber that working on the Bond movies was glamorous.

"I thought it would be more romantic, but I ended up working in a shed," she said.

At the end of the evening she was given a standing ovation.

First year student Daniel Dolley, of St Anne's College, said: "She was absolutely terrific, better than I had imagined, charming and amusing. I was very impressed."