Dench Is "Very Pleased" With Oscar Nod

(CBS)  Dame Judi Dench won the Oscar for best supporting actress in 1999 for her role as Queen Elizabeth in "Shakespeare in Love." She added an Oscar nomination for best actress for her performance in "Notes on a Scandal."

She spoke to The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith on the phone from London and told him that she was "very pleased" but is up against some "frighteningly good" competition including Helen Mirren, Penelope Cruz, Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet.

Dench, 72, said she hasn't had a chance to scope out the competition because she is staring in a musical version of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" in London.

Dench has vast and far-reaching experience in acting. She played Lady Macbeth and starred in a popular British sitcom. Her big break came when an obscure made-for-TV movie about Queen Victoria called "Mrs. Brown" was put into theaters.

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"Notes on a Scandal" costar Cate Blanchett was nominated for best supporting actress and the tension between the two characters is the crux of the movie. Dench plays a bitter, manipulative yet needy aging teacher who befriends a younger teacher — Blanchett — who has an affair with a teenage student. The role was extremely taxing, Dench said.

"It's one of the few parts that I — that at the end of the day, taking it all up, I was quite glad to get back to the person underneath it all," she told Smith. That's not usually the case. And so that was quite a relief. It's hard. It was a very hard piece to do."

But despite all the emotionally draining work she did for "Notes on a Scandal," Dench is not sure she will be able to attend the Academy Award ceremony where she may claim her Oscar.

"Because I have to have a knee operation and that might get in the way," she said.