Dame Stella Rimington was the first female head of MI5, Britain's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. She died on August 3rd 2025, aged 90.
Rimington abandoned her career as an archivist to follow her husband to Britain's High Commission in New Delhi, where she was recruited to MI5 by someone who "tapped me on the shoulder" in the compound. Her first job was spying on communists in Sussex. She rose through MI5's branches—from F-Branch, to head of K-Branch, then G-Branch—moving from cold-war work to Irish terrorism before becoming director general in 1992.
She was the first holder of the top job to have her name formally announced, which led to paparazzi attention that she found deeply uncomfortable.
After leaving MI5, Rimington published an autobiography and then began writing spy novels. Critics were unkind—her autobiography was called "a dull read" and her novels "predictable"—but her fiction featured domestic realism rather than Ian Fleming's fantasies. Her first novel's heroine spent time musing about whether the washing machine had finished its run.
Dame Judi Dench's "M" in the 1995 film "GoldenEye" was widely understood to be based on Rimington, who agreed: she "holds her hands in the same way as me." Rimington helped change the portrayal of spies in popular culture, opening the way for shows such as "Black Doves" on Netflix.
A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.