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"It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven't done."
Judi Dench

Dame Judith Olivia "Judi" Dench (born 9 December 1934 in Heworth, England) is an English actress often ranked among the grandes dames of the English stage alongside Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson and Maggie Smithnote . While she previously worked mostly in theater — notably with the Royal Shakespeare Company — she has become more prominent as a movie actress since she took on the role of "M", the chief of MI6 and James Bond's boss, starting with GoldenEye. She ended up the second-most prolific actor in the role with eight appearances in the film series, the first being Bernard Lee at eleven.

She's also famous for winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Shakespeare in Love, where she arguably stole the film with a grand total of nine minutes of screen time as Elizabeth I. Ironically, she had previously been nominated for Best Actress for playing Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown, losing to Helen Hunt.

Ofcom, who handle complaints about television shows in the UK, sometimes refer to the "Judi Dench effect", noting that any swearword spoken by Judi Dench will result in more complaints than the same swearword spoken by anyone else. This is kind of ironic because, in her role as everyone's favorite cool auntie, she seems perfectly comfortable unleashing the occasional Precision F-Strike when necessary.

Word of God says Dench DMs for her grandkids; once word of this got out, no self-respecting geek would call her anything less than "Dame Judi Dench". Vin Diesel actually pushed to have her in The Chronicles of Riddick just so they could play the game togethernote .

While it came to light around 2012 that her eyesight is failing, Dench is adamant that she has no plans to quit acting. In addition to her acting work, she serves on the advisory board of the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, co-founded by her friend Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen. She is also one of a small and incredibly privileged number of people to have read published obituaries — to themselves — whilst still alive.

Referred to by Roman, from Sanders Sides, as "Queen Groovy Binch".

Fun fact: the ringtone on her phone is the James Bond theme. Apparently, it often went off in her scenes in the Bond movies.


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M lets Bond have it

Judi Dench's new M verbally dismantles the new Bond in the first third of the movie. As Bond's first female boss in the series, and as a woman considerably older than Bond, M takes the This example contains a YMMV entry. It should be moved to the YMMV tab.Broken Base Audience Surrogate Up to Eleven by telling him exactly what she thinks of him as a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" and "a relic of the Cold War." This may be exactly what some viewers thought when the movie premiered, because of world events in between this film and the last one, 1989's Licence to Kill. As in, "This is ANOTHER James Bond movie?"

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