First Look: Judi Dench checks into 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel'

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel release has just been announced for March 9th, 2012, and to celebrate USA Todayhave published a very special first look at the movie, which stars Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Dev Patel and Maggie Smith. Directed by John Madden (SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE), THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL tells the story of a group of seniors who travel to an Indian hotel run by a... let's say enthusiastic young manager. It's an uplifting, jubilant ride, and you can read more of USA Today's coverage, including an interview with Dame Judi, here (which you can also read below). (via Fox Searchlight site)

Check out the first two The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel stills of (no stills of her co-star just yet)...

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
stills featuring Judi Dench

(source: USA Today)

Read Judi Dench's USA Today interview...

Judi Dench checks into Exotic Marigold Hotel

The first time Judi Dench worked with director John Madden, she earned an Oscar nomination as Queen Victoria in 1997's Mrs. Brown.Their collaboration proved so gratifying that the actress recalls telling him, "If you need someone to stroll across in the background in your next film, please call me."

He took her at her word, and Dench's "stroll" was good enough to win a supporting Oscar for her brief yet indelible portrait of Queen Elizabeth I in 1998's Shakespeare in Love.

Now Madden, 62, and this grande dame, 76, have made it a trilogy with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which opens March 9 and whose trailer premieres Sept. 16.

The travelogue with abundant humor is a contemporary fable about a group of British retirees lured to a supposedly luxury retirement home in India.

Though the ensemble includes Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and Maggie Smith as well as Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel, Dench proves she still rules.

"Judi is the key to the whole thing," Madden says. "She is playing a character very different from the sort of roles we are used to seeing."

Instead of being authoritative and controlling, he says, her Evelyn is "a very ordinary woman, a widow who has been thrust into a shocking circumstances after her husband dies and leaves her destitute."

For Dench, the shoot in India was like "old home week" because she has worked with her co-stars before, including Penelope Wilton (TV's Downton Abbey) and Celia Imrie (the Bridget Jones series).

"We did behave ourselves quite well," Dench says. "John Madden kept us in order."