Judi Dench

Born: 9th December 1934
Where: York, England

The legendary stage actress reached the peak of her big screen career when she landed an Oscar for best supporting actress for Shakespeare in Love.

She has also been nominated three times: for best actress in a leading role (Iris, Mrs Brown) and for best supporting actress (Chocolat).

However, she is probably best known to younger viewers for her portrayal of spymaster M opposite Pierce Brosnan in the Bond series.

Widely recognised as one of Britain's greatest performers, Dame Judi is at equally at home in period dramas such as A Handful of Dust and sci-fi thrillers like The Chronicles of Riddick.

It wasn't until her fifties that she began to find rich movie roles such as Mrs Brown, Iris and The Shipping News.

She made her first stage appearance as a snail at Quaker School before attending York's Mount School.

After graduating from London's Central School of Speech and Drama she made her debut with the Old Vic Theatre Company as Ophelia in Hamlet in 1957.

In 1964, she made her film acting debut in The Third Secret, and a year later had her breakthrough screen role in Four in the Morning.

In 1969 Dame Judi joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, and spent much of the next two decades amassing an impressive body of work.

She demonstrated her range with diverse portrayals as a romance novelist in A Room With a View, Anthony Hopkins' jealous wife in 84 Charing Cross Road, Rupert Graves' materialistic mother in A Handful of Dust, and the lusty Mistress Quickly in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V.

She even received Best Supporting Actress BAFTAs for A Handful Of Dust and A Room With A View.

In 1995, she was chosen to replace the late Bernard Lee as spymaster M in Pierce Brosnan's Bond debut Goldeneye and reprised the role in Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day.

Two years later she landed her first lead role in a career spanning 40 years when she played Queen Victoria opposite Billy Connolly's valet in John Madden's Mrs Brown.

Her performance earned the actress some of the best reviews of her career, and she received a Golden Globe and BAFTA Award for Best Actress, as well as a Best Actress Academy Award nomination.

The following year, director Madden cast her as another British monarch, this time Queen Elizabeth I, in Shakespeare in Love.

Although Dame Judi only appeared in a handful of scenes with about eight minutes of screen time, she made such a strong impression that she was awarded the 1999 Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

At the same time she was made a Dame of the British Empire (she had been awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1970).

In 2000 she narrated the Jewish refugee documentary Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.

She also landed another Oscar nomination as the bitter French villager who resents free-spirited Juliette Binoche in the Lasse Hallstrom-directed Chocolat.

Following her husband Michael William's death in January 2001, she continued to work, turning in two rich, very different performances.

Hallstrom cast her again, this time as a Canadian woman assisting her nephew on his journey of self-discovery in The Shipping News.

Dame Judi then undertook the role of British novelist and Alzheimer sufferer Iris Murdoch in the biopic Iris, based on the memoirs of Murdoch's husband John Bayley.

In 2002, she played Lady Bracknell in an indifferent adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest and provided the voice of cow Mrs Calloway in Disney's Home On The Range.

In 2004, she took the role of Aereon in the sci-fi thriller The Chronicles of Riddick with Vin Diesel and also appeared in Charles Dance's Ladies in Lavender.

She provided the voice of the narrator for The Magic Roundabout and, in 2005, the part of the forbidding Lady Catherine de Bourg in Pride & Prejudice.

The dame year she also won critical acclaim for the role of Laura Henderson in Stephen Frears' comedy drama Mrs Henderson Presents.

Recently she reprised the role of M for Daniel Craig's first outing as James Bond in Casino Royale and delivered a critically-acclaimed performance opposite Cate Blanchett in the drama Notes on a Scandal.