Theatrical success came quickly, with a variety of roles in anything from Shakespeare to A Streetcar Named Desire. “I’ve never regretted `not exporting’ because I always thought you explain yourself best in your own language,” she explains (in English).Kjer has always lived near Copenhagen. Her co-star in Gurney’s two-hander was her husband and longtime acting partner Ebbe Rode, who died two months ago, aged 87.”I wonder why I’ve continued to work for so long,” she laughs. “Maybe it’s because I am very shy and when I work I am not shy.”Next year, for the 250th anniversary of the Royal Theatre [in Copenhagen], I am working on stage in a Karen Blixen story. I will play a witch.”The Royal Theatre has a personal significance for Kjer, too: she made her stage debut there in 1937.

Since 1995 alone, she has played Hermann Broch’s gruelling Celine on stage and, until last year, she was touring with AR Gurney’s Love Letters. Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves earned Denmark a further Oscar nomination and the soporific film-maker’s inspired hospital drama for Danish television won itself that rare accolade, an international cinematic release as The Kingdom and The Kingdom II.
In recognition of the seminal role of Babette’s Feast in the Danish film renaissance, Kjer will recite part of her own interpretation of the Karen Blixen novella from which Axel adapted his film. “I will only be reading part of my interpretation of Babette’s Feast, otherwise it would take all night! The whole thing is more than two hours in length, almost as long as the film.”At a time when most actresses of her age are in their dotage, Kjer is headlining in television, booked for more stagework and would love to do another film. Kjer, part Simone Signoret, part Katherine Hepburn, is nevertheless playing down her role as the Grand Old Dame of Danish cinema. Admittedly, this is something of a cliche in the ghettoised realm of European cinema, but there are not many film stars who are able to claim, as Kjer can, to have lent their name to their homeland’s equivalent of the Oscar: the Bodil. The Nineties have borne witness to a resurgence in Denmark’s cinematic fortunes, a success for which Gabriel Axel’s wry fable arguably laid the groundwork.

This week, the 81-year-old Kjer, star of 60 films, more than 100 plays and countless radio and television productions, is undertaking a rare visit to London to attend a gala screening of one of her greatest films, Babette’s Feast (1987 winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar), which on Sunday opens a nine-film season of Danish cinema at the National Film Theatre. Thanks to them we still – intermittently – have a rip-roaring time.. BODIL KJER is a household name in Denmark, even if she barely gets a mention outside the arthouse foyer in the UK. Yet he had a talented cast, with a vocally-splendid Emperor (Lynton Black), a perfect Katisha (Jill Pert), and a Nanki-Poo (Joseph Shovelton) who sings like a dream. The lighting and sets, which should provide continuity, instead change their game every couple of minutes.The director, meanwhile, throws away all the work’s great moments, dissipating their focus and blurring the contrast between quick-fire brilliance and slow expansiveness. For this show – presented by Raymond Gubbay – is quite simply a throwback to pantomime. Indeed, Eric Roberts’s Ko- Ko is pure Northern panto, completely at variance with the comedy’s graceful urbanity: this never was, and should not be now, a “children’s show”.

And the pantomime muse is even more disastrously invoked by the costumes, designs, lighting, and choreography, which are all the last word in tackiness.Choreography is too grand a word to describe the movement here: I’ve seldom seen a more rag-tag bunch. A work like this has to be perfectly drilled, but one has no sense here of the necessary blood, sweat, and tears.The costumes come in a cacophony of colours, combining Viking with 16th century Venice, Japan with Thirties prop-box; Ko-Ko’s get-up is a fright, while the Emperor’s is ludicrously out of scale. And if their routines were creaky, their singing was a delight, and their acting gloriously in keeping with the preposterous demands of their material. But that company was killed stone-dead: the D’Oyly Carte now strutting their stuff on the South Bank is an ersatz concoction.
But you have to admire their temerity in bringing, of all things, The Mikado, to the stage. For this was the opera with which Jonathan Miller proved that Gilbert and Sullivan doesn’t have to be frumpy, provincial, amateur dramatic stuff for village halls. His black-and-ivory Twenties version for ENO had the whiplash elegance which the original must have had 100 years ago. The town band of Titipu come on still feverishly adjusting their shoes and hats, while their limbs fly in all directions; the three little maids don’t move like a threesome at all.