Dame Judi Dench reveals her home is being 'taken over' by mice

Dame Judi Dench has revealed she is battling a mouse infestation at her home.

The 87-year-old James Bond star lives in an £8 million farmhouse in Surrey, built in 1497, and admitted she is struggling to control the mice.

Dame Judie told Olly Alexander on the Acting For Others podcast: "The mice have moved in since lockdown and I’m battling the mice. They have moved in and taken over a bit."

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She added: "My house is falling down a bit here and there. But it's lovely and the garden is simply wonderful."

The 7,000 square-foot property is said to have a separate cottage as well as a swimming pool, workshops, barns and a pond.

Dame Judi - who lives four miles away from 77-year-old partner David Mills - recently revealed she had suffered a fall at home, and lay on the floor for half an hour.

She told Saga magazine: "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.

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"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."

The actor said eventually she was able to "just get up" by herself.

During the coronavirus pandemic Dame Judi was a guest star in David Tennant and Michael Sheen's lockdown comedy Staged, poking fun at the world of virtual meetings.

But the actor admitted that the experience of living through lockdown has given her anxiety.

She said: “It has made me very anxious, the pandemic. I have lost my rhythm inside.”

Dame Judi recently spoke about how she copes with the deterioration of her eyesight in old age, as she is determined to keep acting.

She said: “You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very very difficult.

"I have 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, and that's the way I can learn.

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