Daniel Craig Had M Killed, Judi Dench Reveals in New Memoir

Judi Dench names the man who ended her Bond career: Daniel Craig. In her new memoir "Is It Too Late to Make a Run For It?", published Nov. 3 by St. Martin's Press, the Oscar winner reveals that Craig suggested M's death in 2012's "Skyfall." Dench writes: "Apparently, it was Daniel's idea to have me killed."

She delivers the line with her customary deadpan. Then she adds the kicker: "But first I had to suffer the indignity of being sacked by Ralph Fiennes. Arsehole." She was laughing, she notes.

How did Dench's M come about?

Dench played M, James Bond's MI5 boss, in eight Bond films. She started with 1995's "GoldenEye" and ended with "Skyfall" in 2012, plus a brief cameo in "Spectre." Asked whether the casting of a female M followed Stella Rimington becoming head of MI5 in 1992, Dench doesn't argue. "Oh, no doubt. The producers wanted to reflect the times, and quite right, too," she says. "But I wasn't trying to be Stella Rimington." Dench met Rimington only once, briefly in 2023. The two planned a dinner a few months before Rimington died. It never happened.

The role had its pleasures. "I loved playing M because it was great to be able to tell all those men where to get off; put them in their place," Dench says. Her first meeting with Pierce Brosnan's Bond produced the series' most quotable putdown: "You're a sexist, misogynist dinosaur." Dench's verdict on the experience: "I was drunk with power." She also got to "muck about with gadgets when, in real life, I can't even work the ironing board."

How did she build a 'functionary' into a character?

M exists, on paper, to hand Bond his mission and the audience its story. Dench approached her like any part: by inventing a past the audience never sees. "It gives you a foundation and the confidence to step out in front of the camera," she explains. The biography accreted over eight films. M studied law at Oxford. She has two daughters. She enjoys whisky. On "Casino Royale," Dench suddenly discovered she was married, courtesy of a bedside scene. By "Skyfall" she was a widow whose late husband loved poetry.

The films withheld one detail until the very end. In "Skyfall," Bond receives a box M bequeathed him, bearing a label that reads "Olivia Mansfield" — her real name, revealed only in the final moments. Dench's own middle name is Olivia. "I wonder if that's where they got the idea from," she writes.

What went wrong on 'Tomorrow Never Dies'?

Not every shoot ran smoothly. Dench names Michael Apted and Martin Campbell as directors she adored. "Tomorrow Never Dies" (1997) was another matter. The script "seemed to be in a permanent state of flux," with daily rewrites and, in her account, "a general air of chaos." One night a motorcycle courier met her at home at ten o'clock with a dozen new pages. Her pick-up was at five a.m. Her assessment is brief: "I mean, when the hell would I have a chance to learn all that?"

The technical dialogue compounded the problem. "A lot of what I had to say as M was very technical, and at times I just didn't understand what I was talking about," she admits.

Was it a family affair?

Dench describes the franchise as just that, literally: producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson are siblings, and they retain crews film to film. "It feels like a company," she says. Familiar faces included make-up artist Naomi Dunne, plus Brosnan and Craig themselves. Her enjoyment, she notes, "tended to depend on the script" and on the director.

Who is her favorite Bond?

She declines to pick. "I'll always have a soft spot for Sean [Connery] because he was the original," she says, but Brosnan and Craig "really made it their own." Both, she adds, share a self-deprecating humor she considers essential to the role. She charts Bond's drift across her tenure: once a Savile Row-suited fantasy figure who emerged from fights unscathed, he became "dirtier, more realistic, less of a fantasy figure." The scripts grew less witty, she concedes — "but then the character moves on. Bond reflects the times."

Did she cry when M died?

She did not. Producers Broccoli and Wilson, with director Sam Mendes, broke the news over lunch at the Wolseley restaurant; Craig, she believes, wasn't there. Press reports said she cried. "Of course I didn't cry," she writes. "Why on earth would I cry after twenty glorious years and eight Bond films — which, by the way, is one more than Roger Moore, the longest-running 007 to date."

She has, however, never watched "Spectre," despite her hour-long cameo on a television screen. "Because they killed me off, I'm still sulking," she writes. "And so I've never seen the film."

The memoir, structured as a conversation with actor and director Brendan O'Hea, covers the highs and lows of a career spanning stage and screen. Bond fans now know where the bodies are buried. One of them, it turns out, is M's — and Craig signed the order.