I must be the only person in the world who never met her," says Dame Judi Dench about British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, whom she and Kate Winslet portray in the new film Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, directed by Richard Eyre. Although she's exaggerating, an untold number of readers do feel as if they knew Murdoch, thanks to her works of philosophy and, especially, to her vivid and darkly passionate novels, which are about what Murdoch called "the unique strangeness of human beings." Dench, herself a fan of the author since the 1960s, experienced the formidable, if quiet, Murdoch mania firsthand. "One day while filming in Oxford, somebody recognized me as her," Dench recalls. "She said, 'I know exactly who you're being.' That was very exciting indeed." Being Iris Murdoch, who was, by all accounts, a wonderful listener with no ability for small talk, was also humbling. "I nearly had the opportunity of meeting John Bayley [Murdoch's husband] during the film," Dench says. "But I didn't, and I'm quite glad. I would love to meet him, but I didn't want to have to face him with me playing her."

More than a profile of an extraordinary character, the movie, based on Bayley's memoir, is also a love story about Murdoch and Bayley's 45 years together, which ended with Murdoch's death in 1999 after several years of enduring Alzheimer's. "They were two strange, curiously, curiously unique people who found each other," Dench says.