Bernard Lee spent forty-odd years as the man behind the desk, the policeman, the officer, the boss. As M in eleven Bond films he gave the series its one fixed point: a superior who is not impressed and never has to say so.
Fi1m perspective
The first time we meet M, in Dr. No (1962), he is behind a desk and he is sour about it. Moneypenny is flirting in the outer office; in here nothing is funny. Bernard Lee does not raise his voice and does not get up, and four minutes of him and Lois Maxwell tell you how the whole service is run. Most of those minutes are Lee not being impressed.
He had been doing a version of this since the war. Out of the army in 1946 he became the man British films sent for when they needed a policeman, an inspector or a brigadier, and he did it in eighty-odd pictures. The one that stuck is Sergeant Paine, the dogged, loyal policeman of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). It is the best film we have seen him in, and we had other people to talk about, which is roughly what happened to Lee for thirty years. He worked with Reed twice. In 1960 The Angry Silence cast him against type as Bert Connelly, a union bully, and a year later Bryan Forbes's first film as director, Whistle Down the Wind (1961), gave him the father. Then came the desk.
Lee's M is close to the one in Ian Fleming's books: serious, efficient, a civil servant with kindly eyes who has no intention of using them on Bond. He told an interviewer in 1980, "Myself, I’d never read a Bond book." It does not show. In From Russia with Love (1963) he does exactly what he did the year before, and he went on doing it, unchanged, until Moonraker (1979). That is eleven films and seventeen years in the same chair, and the series never found a reason to move him.
We will admit that the office scenes are the ones we wait for in the early films. Connery plays Bond as a man who finds most things slightly funny; Lee plays M as a man who finds nothing funny at all, and for two minutes in each film Bond is being judged rather than admired. It pleased us far more than two men and a file have any right to. The gruffness is the point. Lee never once lets the joke of the series into M's office.
The caveat is the obvious one. The Bond films gave Lee a part, not a character, and asked nothing new of him in seventeen years, so the evidence of what else he could do is in the films outside them, most of which we have not got round to. If the M scenes make you curious, The Angry Silence, where somebody finally let him be the trouble, is the place to start.
Biography
Bernard Lee (1908–1981) was an English actor. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and appeared on stage from childhood, making his professional debut in the 1920s. After wartime service in the British Army, he became a familiar presence in British cinema as solid authority figures, including Sergeant Paine in The Third Man (1949).
Lee is best known for portraying M, the head of MI6, in the first eleven Eon James Bond films from Dr. No (1962) to Moonraker (1979). He also appeared in films such as The Blue Lamp (1950), The Battle of the River Plate (1956) and Whistle Down the Wind (1961). He was the grandfather of actor Jonny Lee Miller.
