Dame Judi Dench’s eyesight is so bad she can’t watch TV or stage shows, the 90-year-old actress has revealed.

Dame Judi has macular degeneration – which can cause permanent and rapid central vision loss and is the No.1 cause of vision loss in people over 50.

This week, she revealed the impact of the condition on her everyday life.

“I can’t see any more,” Dame Judi said at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds – where she is patron.

“When I go to the theatre, I can’t see. Hopeless.”

She has even struggled with television, and admitted she hadn’t been able to actually see her friend Dame Celia Imrie on the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors series.

“Somebody told me what was happening. I want to hear the dirt that went on,” she said.

Dame Judi first revealed her macular degeneration in 2012. Last January, the veteran actress gave a bleak update on her condition.

“Somebody will always be with me. I have to now because I can’t see and I will walk into something or fall over,” she said on an episode of Trinny Woodall’s Fearless podcast.

“I’m always nervous before going to something.

“I have no idea why… I’m not good at being on my own at all, nor would I be now. And fortunately, I don’t have to now because I pretend to have no eyesight.”

During a 2021 event for Britain’s Vision Foundation, Dench opened up about how she had battled to read scripts due to her rapidly fading vision.

“You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult,” she said.

“I’ve had to find another way of learning lines and things, which is having great friends of mine repeat them to me over and over and over again.

“I have to learn through repetition, and I just hope that people won’t notice too much if all the lines are completely hopeless.”