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 Tomlin in Franco Zeffirelli's semi-autobiographical period drama "Tea with Mussolini" which tells the story of young Italian boy Luca's upbringing by a circle of British and American women, before and during World War II. 1999 also saw the release of Pierce Brosnan's third Bond film, "The World Is Not Enough". This film portrayed M in a larger role with the main villain, Renard, coming back to haunt her when he engineers the murder of her old friend Sir Robert King and seemingly attempts to kill his daughter Electra. In January 2001, Dench's husband Michael Williams died from lung cancer. Dench