Judi Dench has been diplomatically withering about Cats since 2020, when she described her costume as looking like 'five foxes fucking on my back.' Her forthcoming memoir, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, goes further — not into blame, but into the particular sadness of collective failure. 'Oh God, I can't bear it,' she writes, noting that Andrew Lloyd Webber had waited decades for the adaptation. 'What a waste of all that goodwill and talent.' What makes Dench's account interesting is its refusal to perform ignorance as innocence. She says she never saw the final cut, so she declines to judge it — but she does say she felt ill at ease from the start and didn't feel right in the role. That's a meaningful admission. Old Deuteronomy is the spiritual anchor of the show; if the actor playing her is unsettled, the whole structure lists. She adds a detail that cuts differently than the CGI jokes: the young dancers, she writes, were 'left hanging at the end of each take. They'd stand there exhausted and be completely ignored.' It's the sharpest thing in her account — not a critique of the film's look or concept, but of a set culture that failed the people most vulnerable in it. Dench is careful to distribute no blame. 'There were no villains in the making of Cats,' she writes, and then offers a taxonomy of honest failure: wrong timing, cast that didn't gel, elements that didn't coalesce. This is not false generosity — it reads as someone who has been in enough productions to know how many things have to go right simultaneously, and how rarely they do. Lloyd Webber's response, by contrast, has been less forgiving. He called the film 'off-the-scale all wrong,' accused director Tom Hooper of failing to consult anyone from the original West End production, and says the experience left him so emotionally damaged he became a dog owner. He later had to prove the Havanese puppy was an emotional support animal to an airline. The airline waived the doctor's report requirement upon learning what Hollywood had done to Cats. The film's particular technical failures — the erratic CGI that removed every character's anus but somehow retained Dench's human hand and wedding ring — have become part of cinema's comedic folklore. Dench doesn't address the anus problem in the memoir excerpt. Some things are beneath commentary. What Dench offers instead is a working artist's philosophy under failure: you do your best, you offer something up, you hope people join the party. Sometimes they don't. The memoir's account of Cats is not a post-mortem — it's a grace note. Which is, characteristically, more than the film deserved.
