Dame Judi Dench has shared that she once pushed a dead rat through her neighbour's letterbox during her youth. The 91-year-old revealed she carried out the prank because her brothers could never retrieve their balls when they knocked them over the fence while playing cricket.

Dame Judi told the BBC's This Natural Life podcast: "The boys used to play cricket in the garden, and they used to be always batting the balls over into the other gardens, and there was a lady called Miss Lazenby, and she never ever would throw the ball back, or give us the balls back. This is a terrible story, and once the boys found a dead rat in the barn, and they parcelled it up, and they said to me, 'Judi, will you just go round and put this through Miss Lazenby's door?'

"So I did go and squeeze it through Miss Lazenby's door, Miss Lazenby was rather red about it, saying, 'please give us our balls back', we wrote this message, it was tied on the dead rat."

She was subsequently asked whether they eventually recovered their balls, to which Dame Judi responded: "Probably not... I don't think we were allowed to play cricket again."

Throughout her illustrious career – spanning seven decades – Dame Judi has collected an Academy Award, a Tony Award, two Golden Globe Awards, four British Academy Television Awards, six British Academy Film Awards, and seven Olivier Awards.

She made her professional stage debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company, subsequently performing with both the National Theatre Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Dame Judi has also portrayed M across eight James Bond films, from her debut in GoldenEye (1995) through to Spectre (2015), as well as featuring in the television series A Fine Romance and As Time Goes By.

Most recently she lent her voice to The Fridge in The Magic Faraway Tree.