The role Judi Dench kept trying to quit: “She keeps threatening but I won’t let her”
The old adage of “if you love them, let them go” is a piece of advice that we often don’t want to hear. The idea of having to sacrifice your own wants in favour of the well-being of someone else can be painful, but sometimes it’s for the best – that’s unless you’re a producer of one of the biggest movie series in the world and need one of your longest-running actors, Judi Dench, to stay attached to the franchise.
Dench began her career on the stage rather than the screen, becoming a stalwart feature of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre Company. It was here that the actor gained vital experience as a performer, tackling difficult and iconic roles such as Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and Juliet and ticking off a large sum of Shakespeare’s most impressive leading female parts.
In the meantime, she had various roles in television and cinema, making her film debut with 1964’s The Third Secret. Yet, Dench’s movie appearances were sporadic as she chose to focus on theatre instead, resulting in her place as an established cinematic star not coming until the mid-1980s. She appeared in various period dramas, like A Room with a View and Henry V, but in 1995, she landed one of her most recognisable roles as M in the James Bond series’ seventeenth film, GoldenEye.
The character had always been played by a man in the previous films, such as by Robert Brown and Bernard Lee, but Dench was the first woman to play the MI6’s Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. She portrayed the character in seven Bond films before making a small cameo in 2015’s Spectre via a video message recorded before her tragic death, which takes place in 2012’s Skyfall.
M is killed by Silva’s men as she attempts to help Bond fight against them, marking the end of Dench’s run as the iconic character in the long-running franchise. However, the actor had actually been trying to quit the franchise before then, much to the dismay of Barbara Broccoli, who always ensured that Dench remained a part of the series for as long as possible.
“She is our anchor. She is the anchor of the film in terms of the character. She is the only authoritative figure in Bond’s life,” she told Comingsoon.net. Broccoli added, “She had such a great relationship with Pierce [Brosnan] on the screen and she has such a great relationship with Daniel [Craig]. She is our anchor. She is the real Bond girl – the one that keeps it all going, and I don’t want her to leave. She keeps threatening to leave but I will not let her.”
In this case, perhaps it was best for Broccoli to ignore “if you love them, let them go” because Dench’s tenure in the Bond series has been one of the most important aspects of each film, while the franchise has also helped to establish Dench as one of the most famous British actors of her generation. Much to the relief of Bond fans, Broccoli was always able to convince Dench to stay on for another film, making her the second-longest-running M after Lee.
