...in Shakespeare in Love (1998)

The imperious gaze, the lordly snap: It's hard to think of a role that Dame Judi hasn't invested with royal authority. So from the moment that she appears as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love, you think, Of course! Who else? At first, her look alone is pure spectacle: that big, white, round, eyebrowless head poised like an egg atop a Renaissance Christmas tree. Staring at her, you don't think of previous movie monarchs — you think of Klaus Nomi, Jabba the Hutt, and Divine. Yet the sublime trick of this performance is that the Queen, a supreme politician, uses her grandly gold-gilded, otherworldly presence to conceal the tender mortal within. ''I know something of a woman in a man's profession,'' she says, with an implied wink, to a just-outed female stage actor, and as we look into those ice-marble eyes, the ones we thought were heartless, we realize that what Dench's imperious gaze conveys, above all, is infinite wisdom, and the compassion that powers it. —OG