After the long period between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye, the producers brought in Dame Judi Dench to take over as the new M. The character is said to have possibly been based on Stella Rimington, the head of the real MI5 between 1992 and 1996. M’s real name has yet to be revealed in the films, but recent Bond novelist Raymond Benson gives her the name Barbara Mawdsley.

Judy Dench as M in ‘GoldenEye’.

In Casino Royale, Bond is able to figure out her real name and find out her home address so he can access classified data from the security clearance of her computer, but M quickly forbids Bond from mentioning either, leaving her name and address a mystery to the audience.

Unlike the ambivalence of Brown’s M, Dench plays a new person appointed to the position of M (putting to rest a long time debate over the nature of the character). In GoldenEye, she is clearly established as different from her predecessors; she is cold, blunt, and unabashedly dislikes Bond, whom she calls a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War.” Tanner, her Chief of Staff refers to her during the film as “the evil queen of numbers.” In later films she begins to care more about 007. Whatever affection she may have for 007 never interferes with her unerring professional detachment, however; in Die Another Day, she orders her subordinates to disavow Bond after he is taken prisoner in North Korea, and abandons him to be tortured for 14 months. Although it would appear that Dench’s M and Bond don’t get along too well, M still has the same high professional respect for Bond that her predecessors had (from The World Is Not Enough: “He’s the best we have, although I’d never tell him.”).

For Casino Royale in 2006, Dench is the only cast member to return, as the film is a reboot of the franchise in which one sees Bond’s earliest career highlights. The casting is considered somewhat controversial therefore, because Dench essentially plays a new version of the same character, with no history with Bond, promoting him to double-O status and sending him on his first missions.

Dench has played M in the following films so far:

• GoldenEye (1995)
• Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
• The World Is Not Enough (1999)
• Die Another Day (2002)
• Casino Royale (2006)
• Quantum of Solace(2008)