Judi Dench Award. In 1989, Judi Dench starred in David Tucker's Behaving Badly for Channel 4, based on Catherine Heath's novel of the same name. After the long period between James Bond films "Licence to Kill" (1989) and "GoldenEye" (1995), the producers brought in Dench to take over as the role of M, James Bond's boss. The character was reportedly modeled on Dame Stella Rimington, the real-life head of MI5 between 1992 and 1996; Dench became the first woman to portray M, succeeding Robert Brown. The seventeenth spy film in the series and the first to star Pierce Brosnan as the fictional
Judi Dench the role of Mistress Quickly in the RSC's new musical "The Merry Wives", a version of "The Merry Wives of Windsor". Dench appeared opposite Cate Blanchett as a London teacher with a dedicated fondness for vulnerable women in Richard Eyre's 2006 drama film "Notes on a Scandal", an adaption from the 2003 novel of the same name by Zoë Heller. A fan of Heller's book, Dench "was thrilled to be asked to ... play that woman, to try to find a humanity in that dreadful person". The specialty film opened to generally positive reviews and commercial success, grossing US$50 million