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 went to Nova Scotia, Canada, almost immediately after Williams's funeral to begin production on Lasse Hallström's drama film "The Shipping News", a therapy she later credited as her rescue: "People, friends, kept saying, 'You are not facing up to it; you need to face up to it', and maybe they were right, but I felt I was – in the acting. Grief supplies you with an enormous amount of energy. I needed to use that up." In between, Dench finished work on Richard Eyre's film "Iris" (2001), in which she portrayed novelist Iris Murdoch. Dench shared her role with Kate