Judi Dench

Dench made her professional debut with the Old Vic Company in 1957, cutting her teeth on Shakespeare - Ophelia, Juliet, Lady Macbeth - and winning a BAFTA as Most Promising Newcomer even as theatre remained her center. Her 1968 turn as Sally Bowles in Cabaret drew excellent reviews, and over the next two decades she became a pillar of the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. Television brought her into British living rooms through A Fine Romance and As Time Goes By, but film work stayed sparse until 1995, when GoldenEye cast her as M - a role she'd play in eight Bond films through 2015. In 1998, eight minutes as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love won her an Oscar; seven more nominations followed, from Mrs Brown to Belfast, stretching across twenty-four years. She holds an Academy Award, a Tony, seven Oliviers, and six BAFTAs - a seven-decade accumulation that reads less like a career than an institution.