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
Helen Mirren name to Mirren in the 1950s and changed his name to Basil Mirren. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II and later drove a taxi cab and was a driving-test examiner, before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport. Mirren's mother was a working-class Londoner from West Ham, East London, the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose own father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria. Mirren considers her upbringing to have been "very anti-monarchist". Mirren was the second of three children; she was born three years after her older