Dame Judi Dench could have been deceased., demised, shuffled off this mortal coil for all the use her parrot was when she had a 'frightful fall' at home.
The 87-year-old actress, whose eyesight is deteriorating due to macular degeneration, has told how she lay on the floor for 30 minutes after falling over at her Surrey home.
Dame Judi says: "I had a frightful fall not long ago. I tripped over the carpet, and there was nobody in the house and I was lying on the ground unable to get up for half an hour.
“I have a wonderful parrot who kept saying, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’
“This is when you need a very convenient parrot who would phone somebody – but she didn’t.”
Dame Judi lives four miles away from her partner, conservationist David Mills, 77, while her daughter Finty, 49, and 24-year-old grandson Sam live nearby.
But with nobody around and a parrot called Sweetheart who turned out to be a pretty useless Polly, Dame Judi was on her own.
She told Saga magazine: “After half an hour, I just got up.”
Asked whether she had a panic button installed, she said: “No, no, no. Nothing like that.
“It’s just something you have to live with. But you want to be independent – and it’s very, very difficult.”
The James Bond star spoke to the Mirror in 2012 about her failing eyesight, revealing she had been treated with injections in her eyes, but still struggled to learn her lines as scripts were difficult to read.
She said: “I can’t read scripts any more because of the trouble with my eyes. And so somebody comes in and reads them to me, like telling me a story.
“It’s usually my daughter or my agent or a friend and actually I like that. I sit there and imagine the story in my mind.”
Dame Judi said she found it “distressing” to eat out in restaurants, unable to see her dining companion.
He mother also had macular degeneration, which affects 600,000 people in the UK, usually from age 50 or 60, and is a leading form of blindness.
Speaking in 2015, Dame Judi she said she could no longer travel on the London Underground alone because she struggled with ticket machines, and in 2017, she said she struggled to watch films.
She said: “I can’t actually see very much. A friend of mine usually has to say, ‘He’s kissing her’ or ‘He’s walking away’. So a lot of things I miss.”
