The 4 main M's. Bernard Lee, Robert Brown, Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes
| “ | If you carry a double-O number, it means you're licensed to kill, not get killed. | „ |
| ~ Miles "M" Messervy (Bernard Lee) |
| “ | Effective Immediately, your licence to kill is revoked, and I require you to hand over your weapon. Now. I need hardly remind you that you're still bound by the Official Secrets Act. | „ |
| ~ Admiral "M" Hargreaves (Robert Brown) |
| “ | If you think for one moment that I don't have the balls to send a man off to die, your instincts are dead wrong. I've no compunction about sending you to your death. But I won't do it on a whim. Even with your cavalier attitude towards life. | „ |
| ~ Olivia "M" Mansfield (Judi Dench) |
| “ | So 007, lots to be done. Are you ready to get back to work? | „ |
| ~ Gareth "M" Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) |
M is a fictional character in Ian Fleming's James Bond series; the character is the Head of Secret Intelligence Service—also known as MI6. Author Ian Fleming based the character M on a number of people he knew who commanded sections of British intelligence. Primary amongst these was Rear Admiral John Godfrey, who was Fleming's superior at the Naval Intelligence Division.
M has appeared in the novels by Fleming and seven continuation authors, as well as appearing in twenty-four films. In the EON Productions series of films, M has been portrayed by four actors: Bernard Lee, Robert Brown, Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes, who is the current incumbent; in the two unofficial productions, M has been played by John Huston and Edward Fox.
He gives James Bond an assignment in each film except for For Your Eyes Only, where he didn't appear in the film, but he was mentioned by Bond, and Licence To Kill, where he revokes James Bond's weapon.
Background[]
"M" is a code letter and name for the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. The title "M" is believed to have been derived by creator Ian Fleming from the first real-life head of His Majesty's Secret Service, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, who used his initial "C" to indicate when he had seen a paper and so became referred to as "C," a practice that carried on with his successors. Other influences on the character include Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming's superior in British Naval Intelligence during World War II, and "R," the secret service employer of W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden. M's first name is also revealed in Moonrakerwhen a character calls him Miles. In The Man with the Golden Gun, M's true identity is revealed as Admiral Sir Miles Messervy; this may be where the M comes from, but does not explain the films because there has been more than one M. In the 2006 film version of Casino Royale, it is suggested the letter may likewise refer to the actual name of the later, female M.
In the novels and almost all films, all characters holding the title of M have been aided by Miss Moneypenny (personal secretary) and Bill Tanner (Chief of Staff).
Bernard Lee[]
M was played by Bernard Lee from the first Bond film, Dr. No, until Moonraker. In the novels, M displays a liking for Bond, when he bends the rules for Bond on several occasions. For instance in the short story For Your Eyes Only, Bond agrees to carry out a private assassination for M, while in The Man with the Golden Gun, Bond attempts to assassinate M himself; this is as a result of extreme Soviet brainwashing, and M insists that Bond be rehabilitated rather than punished. In the first post-Fleming book, Colonel Sun, M is kidnapped from Quarterdeck, his home, and Bond goes to great lengths to rescue him. In the later books, written by John Gardner, Messervy protects Bond from the new, less aggressive climate in the Secret Service, saying that "sometime this country will need a blunt instrument." In the films, their relationship is similar.
In On Her Majesty's Secret Service it is revealed that M's pay as head of the Secret Service was 6500 pounds a year, 1500 pounds of which coming from retired naval pay (by comparison, Bond makes 1500 pounds). Although his pay is good for the 1950s and 1960s, it is never explained how M received or can afford his membership at Blades, an upscale private club for gentlemen he frequents in London to gamble and dine. Blades has a restricted membership of only 200 gentlemen and all must be able to show 100,000 pounds in cash or gilt-edged securities.
Robert Brown[]
After former M Bernard Lee's death in 1981, the producers decided to hire actor Robert Brown to continue the role in the Bond films. Starting with 1983's Octopussy, Brown would continue to play the character for the remainder of the Roger Moore era and both of Timothy Dalton's films. He would later be succeeded by Judi Dench in the 1995 film GoldenEye.
Later Bond novels by John Gardner retain Sir Miles Messervy as M. Raymond Benson's 1998 novel, The Facts of Death is more clear by having Hargreaves present at a party hosted by Sir Miles Messervy. The World Is Not Enough (1999), for instance, features an oil-painting portrait of Bernard Lee as the original M, prominent on a wall behind Judi Dench, in the Scottish MI6 headquarters. One further thing to note is that in the pre-title credits to The Living Daylights, M's insignia suggests he is a Rear Admiral, which would mean if he is Hargreaves then he has been demoted; since Hargreaves' insignia in The Spy Who Loved Me suggests he is a Vice Admiral, though in A View to a Kill he is referred to as Admiral which creates a continuity problem either way.
As played by Brown, M lacks a sense of humor and has absolutely no tolerance for Bond's antics, which supports the theory that this M is Hargreaves or someone else other than Messervy. Brown's M came off tougher than his predecessor, wasting no time to revoke Bond's licence to kill in the film Licence to Kill when Bond goes off on a personal vendetta to avenge his friend Felix Leiter, who been maimed by the film's villain, Franz Sanchez. After Bond kills Sanchez with help from pilot Pam Bouvier, however, M reinstates him.
Judi Dench[]
Dame Judi Dench first portrayed M in the 1995 Bond film GoldenEye, the first to feature Pierce Brosnan as 007. Her M is characterized as relying more on data and statistical analysis than her predecessors; her assistant Bill Tanner call her "The Evil Queen of Numbers" behind her back, and she tells Bond that she is aware that he considers her "an accountant" and "a bean counter". She also has an adversarial relationship with Bond at first, calling him "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War". While they dislike each other, however, M and Bond respect each other's abilities and silently acknowledge that they need each other.
In The World is Not Enough, it is revealed that M is a family friend to the main villain, Elektra King, having studied at Oxford with her father, Robert. When Elektra was kidnapped by the terrorist Renard, M advised her father not to pay Renard's ransom demands, reasoning that Renard would just take the money and kill Elektra anyway. Elektra resented both her father and M for years afterwards, and in the main timeline of the film plots with Renard to kill her father and kidnap M. Bond ultimately rescues her and kills Elektra and Renard, however.
In 2006, when the series was rebooted with Daniel Craig as Bond, Dench remained in the role. In Casino Royale, she is portrayed as promoting Bond to 00 status after he kills traitorous Section Chief Dryden and his terrorist contact Fisher. She considers firing him for publicly killing the bomb maker Mollaka Danso in Madagascar and blowing up the Nambutu Embassy where he was hiding, but welcomes him back to the Service after he thwarts Carlos Nikolic's attempt to destroy a prototype airplane. She then tasks him with bankrupting terrorist financier Le Chiffre in a high stakes game of poker in Montenegro. At the end of the film, M tells Bond that his lover Vesper Lynd, who had committed suicide, betrayed him by stealing the money he won from Le Chiffre and giving it to his henchmen in order to save her boyfriend Yusef Kabira, whom she believed was being held captive by the terrorist organization behind Le Chiffre. When Bond renounces Vesper as a traitor, however, M gently chastises him, saying that Vesper had made a deal with Le Chiffe's bosses to spare Bond's life in exchange for the money.
In the following film, Quantum of Solace, Bond brings Mr. White, a middleman for the terrorist organization Quantum, to M for questioning, only for her bodyguard Craig Mitchell to betray her and help White escape. When Bond goes rogue to stop Quantum leader Dominic Greene from staging a coup in Bolivia, M faces pressure from the CIA to fire him or have him killed, and she reluctantly relieves him of his duties after Greene's men murder MI-6 Agent Strawberry Fields, who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time - Bond's hotel room, following a tryst with 007. Bond foils Greene's plot and captures Kabira, who turns out to have been a Quantum agent who manipulated Vesper into betraying her country and Bond, and M "straightens things out" with the CIA and restores Bond to active duty.
In Skyfall, she tasks Bond and Agent Eve Moneypenny with recovering a hard drive stolen by the mercenary Patrice that contains the names of British Intelligence agents embedded in terrorist organizations. She orders Moneypenny to shoot Patrice while he and Bond are fighting on top of a speeding train, but she ends up hitting Bond, which apparently kills him. Patrice gets away and sells the names on the hard drive, which results in five agents being murdered. M is blamed for the fiasco, and SAS official Gareth Mallory informs her that she is to be forcibly retired in two months time. Soon afterward, a mysterious terrorist hacks into MI-6's computer network, and bombs the agency's headquarters, killing several agents. M is once again blamed.
Bond, who survived the shooting and used his supposed death to retire, comes back to London after the bombing and shows up at M's house, demanding to know why she ordered Moneypenny to shoot him. M defends her actions by saying she weighed the possibility of killing him against the certainty of several other agents' deaths. Bond returns to service, but has suffered extensive physical trauma from being shot and still blames her for his misfortune, and so fails the physical and psychological tests he needs to pass for reinstatement. M nevertheless clears him for duty, and sends him to kill Patrice and discover who was responsible for the bombing.
When Bond finds and captures the mastermind of the attack, former MI-6 agent turned cyberterrorist Raoul Silva, he brings him before M. Silva accuses her of betraying him to the Chinese government, who tortured him for months until he attempted suicide by biting into a cyanide capsule, which only disfigured him. She privately tells Bond that Silva, whose real name is Tiago Rodriguez, had been a brilliant agent who began hacking the Chinese government without authorization, so when they caught on to him, she gave him up in exchange for the safe return of six captured MI-6 agents and a peaceful transition of sovereignty in Hong Kong. She then leaves to attend a hearing of the government committee that is investigating the bombing and the theft of the hard drive.
During the hearing, a minister accuses M of mishandling MI-6, which she dismisses as obsolete. M counters that the world still faces threats that regular government and military authorities are ill-equipped to handle. As if to prove her point, Silva, who has escaped from MI-6 custody, bursts into the hearing at that very moment and opens fire, killing several people and wounding Mallory, although he cannot bring himself to shoot M. Bond helps her get away, and takes her to Skyfall, his childhood home in Scotland, to hide out and prepare for Silva's attack. While they wait, M laments that she has "f--ked this up", but Bond assures her that she was only doing her job.
When Silva and his men attack Skyfall, they open fire on the house, and M is mortally wounded. The house's caretaker, Kincaide, takes her to a chapel behind the house, where Silva finds her. He begs her to kill them both by firing a bullet through her skull and into his, but Bond intervenes just in time, killing him by throwing a knife into his back. M collapses in Bond's arms, gives him a rare smile, and says "At least I got one thing right" as she dies. A heartbroken Bond closes her eyes and kisses her forehead as he cradles her dead body. She is succeeded as M by Mallory.
She appears posthumously in the next film, Spectre, in a video will made shortly before her death in which she orders Bond to kill Marcio Sciarra, a high-ranking member of the titular criminal organization, in an "off the books" mission.
Her real name is finally revealed in Skyfall after her death, when a box of her effects is shown bearing the legend "Olivia Mansfield". In Casino Royale, Bond tells her that he has found out her real name and begins to say it, but she cuts him off by saying, "Utter one more syllable and I'll have you killed." She is implied to be married in Quantum of Solace, but in Skyfall she makes reference to her "late husband", suggesting that he died sometime between the two films. In GoldenEye, she says she has children.
Ralph Fiennes[]
Gareth Mallory is first introduced in Skyfall as a high-ranking MI-6 agent who once served in Northern Ireland and was taken prisoner there by the IRA for three months. He oversees the committee investigating M following a terrorist bombing of MI-6 headquarters, while secretly helping Bill Tanner and Q track the bomber, Raoul Silva, in defiance of the committee's orders. When Silva attacks M during a hearing, he shoots Mallory in the arm, requiring him to wear a sling for the rest of the film. After M dies, Mallory succeeds her.
In Spectre, MI-6's 00 section is shut down by the British government thanks to the machinations of Max Denbigh, aka "C", the corrupt head of the Joint Intelligence Service (JIS) who is really a member of Spectre. Denbigh seeks to replace MI-6 with a global surveillance program called Nine Eyes, which he secretly developed at the behest of criminal mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the leader of Spectre. M is appalled that Nine Eyes would, among other things, spy on British agents as well as terrorists and criminals, but Denbigh overrules him, effectively making M's job irrelevant.
Bond helps disable the Nine Eyes program, sending Denbigh into a rage when he cannot access it on his computer. M confronts Denbigh and accuses him of treason. Denbigh tries to shoot M while sneering that the letter must stand for "moron," but M reveals that he has emptied Denbigh's gun and retorts that "C" stands for "careless". After Denbigh is killed and Blofeld arrested, the 00 section is reinstated, with M once again at its helm.
In No Time to Die, Bond has been retired from MI-6 for five years, and M has replaced him as 007 with a female agent named Nomi. When terrorist Lyutsifer Safin steals Project Heracles, a bioweapon that kills targets based on their genetic code, Bond returns to service and reunites with Mallory, who fears that 007 is past his prime as an agent and is a potential liability. By the end of the film, however, Bond succeeds in destroying the weapon and killing Safin. After Bond sacrifices his own life to protect his former lover Madeleine Swann and their daughter Mathilde, whom Safin had re-engineered the bioweapon to kill after infecting Bond with it, M drinks to 007's memory with Nomi, Moneypenny, and Q, before ordering them back to work.
