M

In their first scene together, M lectures Bond because his Beretta jammed on a mission and nearly got him killed. He orders him to swap it for a Walther PPK, over Bond's objections, and sends him to Jamaica. Bernard Lee's M is a gruff former naval officer, impatient with Bond's flirting with secretary Moneypenny, but always the first to back him.

Bernard Lee plays the part in 11 films, from Dr. No to Moonraker. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, M pulls Bond off the Blofeld hunt after two fruitless years. Fuming, Bond dictates a resignation letter. Moneypenny turns it into a request for leave, and M signs it without a word. Bond finds out and thanks them both. It's one of the few times M shows, without saying it, that he cares about his agent.

Bernard Lee died in January 1981, before shooting his scenes for For Your Eyes Only. The producers didn't recast: in the film, M is on leave and Chief of Staff Bill Tanner fills in. Robert Brown takes over in Octopussy and stays through 1989.

This M's tensest moment comes in Licence to Kill. In Key West, he finds Bond set on avenging Felix Leiter, forbids it and revokes his licence to kill. Bond escapes in front of the guards. At the end, after Franz Sanchez falls, word comes that M wants Bond back.

In GoldenEye, M becomes a woman, played by Judi Dench. In their first private talk, she calls Bond a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War, and warns him she won't hesitate to send him to his death if needed. Even so, she tells him to come back alive.

In The World Is Not Enough, it gets personal: tycoon Sir Robert King is an old friend of M's and is killed inside MI6. M assigns Bond to protect King's daughter, Elektra, and ends up kidnapped by her in Istanbul, held in the Maiden's Tower until Bond rescues her.

When the series reboots with Daniel Craig, Judi Dench stays on as the boss of a rookie Bond. In Casino Royale she's furious over the mess he makes in Madagascar and over him breaking into her flat. In Quantum of Solace she learns her own bodyguard was working for Quantum.

In Skyfall, M's past catches up with her. She orders Eve to take the shot even with Bond in the line of fire, and he falls into a river. Then Raoul Silva, an agent M gave up to the Chinese in 1997, attacks MI6 and tries to kill her at a Parliament hearing. Bond takes her to Skyfall, in Scotland. Wounded in the gunfight, M dies in his arms and leaves him a bulldog figurine.

The new M is Gareth Mallory, played by Ralph Fiennes, a former soldier who chaired the committee overseeing MI6. He starts out wary of Bond, but is wounded defending the old M in Skyfall and takes over after her death.

In Spectre, Mallory battles C, head of a new security center who wants to scrap the 00 program and merge the surveillance of nine countries. Bond proves C works for SPECTRE. No Time to Die shows Mallory's darker side: Heracles, the nanobot weapon that kills by DNA, was a secret project he signed off on, and it falls into the wrong hands.

In Ian Fleming's novels, M is Admiral Sir Miles Messervy, a former naval officer. The most cited model is Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming's boss in naval intelligence during the war; another clue is Mansfield Cumming, the first head of the British secret service, who signed his name as C. Judi Dench's M was inspired by Stella Rimington, who became head of MI5 in 1992, and a prop in Skyfall reveals her name: Olivia Mansfield.