The spies who lost me, how MI6 missed M

In the James Bond movies, 007 tracks down the villain to a secret lair with a mixture of cunning and whatever ingenious gadgets Q has dreamt up. In real life, as Dame Judi Dench found out, MI6, the foreign intelligence service, cannot find a house in Surrey even when they have been given the address.

Dench, 83, who played Bond’s boss Min eight films, right, discovered their less-thansurefooted approach to target acquisition and reconnaissance after she was invited to lunch at the Secret Intelligence Service in the 1990s for a briefing on their work.

MI6 insisted on using their car to pick up the actress and drive her to their London headquarters on the banks of the Thames at Vauxhall Cross.

‘‘I hugely enjoyed going to MI6 and MI5 [the domestic security service] for lunch. I loved it,’’ she said.

‘‘When I went to MI6 it was Sir David Spedding who was M– actually known as C – and they said to me, ‘Will you come at 12.30 on Tuesday?’

‘‘I said, ’That will be wonderful. I will get my driver to . . .’

‘‘They said, ’No, not your driver. He might not know where it is.’ ‘‘

Dench, incredulous, replied: ‘‘Where it is? It’s that Lego building by the Thames!’’

However, the spy chief, who has since died, insisted on sending the MI6 chauffeur to her Surrey home, with embarrassing consequences.

‘‘The irony is that their driver could not find my house, so we arrived half an hour late. It was wonderful to go into MI6 and say, ‘Sorry, your driver couldn’t find my house.’ It was one-upmanship,’’ Dench said in a video for deadline.com to mark her 60th anniversary as a professional actress.

Dench made her first Bond appearance opposite Pierce Brosnan in Goldeneye in 1995 and was killed off in Skyfall in 2012.

‘‘I did eight Bond movies as M. Everyone says seven – but I did a morning on Spectre [her character appears in a video message she had recorded for Bond]. I have never seen Spectre yet. They brought me back for a little fortelevision thing, so I did do a bit on it, so I actually think, ‘Well, I did eight’.’’

She said she thought it was time to go after 17 years. ‘‘I think MI6 would have given her the push by then.’’