M behaved more like a 'surrogate mother' to Craig's Bond, and that respect and affection was mutual in Skyfall, Bond took it upon himself to personally protect M from the villainous Silva (Javier Bardem), and he was crushed when M died at the end of the film, which also made Dench the only M to be killed in a Bond movie. The M that Daniel Craig's younger James Bond took his orders from had no prior history with (or disdain for) the new 007, and their relationship was very different.
In the Brosnan 007 movies, Dench's M struck fear into her subordinates and was derisively known as 'the evil queen of numbers.' Yet M was also a wife and parent she was compassionate almost to a fault, which Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) used against her in The World Is Not Enough. However, just as Craig's Bond is a different incarnation of 007 than his predecessors - every actor from Sean Connery's original to Pierce Brosnan portrayed the same 007 - Dench actually played two versions of M between the Brosnan films and the rebooted Craig continuity.
