THE RELUCTANT SPY
Sean Connery’s stardom spanned nearly six decades. But it all began with James Bond, a role he became synonymous with, and struggled against
The soft but distinctive Scottish burr, the sharply etched features and world-weary gaze, the smooth charisma that goes hand-in-hand with sudden violence; for many of us, James Bond is Sean Connery. “The thing that is indisputable is that Sean Connery is the reason why this series took off,” says Bond producer Barbara Broccoli. “I don’t think we would be here 58 years later if the leading actor in the first film had not pulled it off in such a way as Connery did.”
The actor, who was 32 when he won the role in the modestly budgeted adaptation of Ian Fleming’s spy thriller Dr. No (1962), had lived his fair share of life before being catapulted into legend. The son of a lorry driver, he had been a champion bodybuilder, a milkman, a day labourer, a bouncer, and an almost-professional footballer. When he became an actor, first in the theatre and later on the screen, his early roles tended to be similarly tactile: he played a boxer, a soldier and the like. His rough-and-readiness extended to brawls. There’s the story of Connery single-handedly fighting off six Edinburgh billiard-hall thugs, even knocking two of their heads together; then there’s the one about the time a Mafioso pulled a gun on him and he knocked the man flat on his back. Some of it might be apocryphal, but there are plenty of tales of the hard-knock Connery getting himself into and out of some situations that James Bond could appreciate.
When producers Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman set out to adapt Ian Fleming’s novel, they knew just how crucial it would be to find a convincing leading man. They needed someone with the ability to fight his way out of trouble but with a sophisticated air, and when they met the 6’ 2”, well-built Scotsman, they knew he was tough — but they weren’t immediately sure he was 007. They’d previously been considering actors like David Niven and Cary Grant. Could Connery also portray a gentleman?
Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator, wasn’t entirely convinced either. He thought Connery was “unrefined”, saying that he looked less like his aristocratic secret agent and more like a “stuntman”. Still, the producers decided to take the gamble. “The important thing to acknowledge here, too, is that Cubby and Harry, they were Anglophiles. Cubby was an American living in Britain and making films in Britain,” says Broccoli of her father and his producing partner. “And so when it came to casting the role, they didn’t go along with a traditional casting of someone in the class structure here. They weren’t confined to thinking of him as having to be an upper-class British actor, which meant that they cast a workingclass actor from Scotland. They were very open-minded about who could play this role.”
Connery’s take on the character was, at first, a little rough around the edges. He gesticulated with his hands while talking, something director Terence Young set out to stop him from doing. Young, who had actually spent his own time in British Intelligence during World War II, sent Connery on a crash course in how to walk, talk, and look like a perfect gent. Finally, any residual doubts about the actor were quashed by one other deciding factor: his effect on women. Broccoli describes for Empire how her mother, Dana, had had some influence on her father Cubby’s casting of Connery. “A lot of it had to do with instinct and intuition. So they [Dana and Cubby] sat and watched Darby O’gill And The Little People in the screening room. It’s a Disney film where Sean sings — he’s hardly a suave secret agent. And you know, my father said, ‘What do you think? Is he sexy?’ And my mother said: ‘You bet he is.’”
Audiences tended to agree. His first appearance in Dr. No, lounging at a roulette table, cigarette hanging coolly from his lips, announcing himself as “Bond — James Bond”, proved indelible. “One of the great screen introductions of a hero,” sums up Broccoli. “This young actor, who hasn’t had a lot of experience, really, carries that movie in a way that’s pretty extraordinary.” That film’s huge commercial success was followed by increasing profits throughout the ’60s, and Goldfinger, in 1964, would become the fastest money-maker in cinema history.
Connery’s demeanour defined the classic Bond traits, but
also provided a uniquely dry, sarcastic sense of humour that seemed like a darkly comic rejoinder to the casual violence on show. By the mid-’60s, he was as famous as The Beatles. Women threw themselves on top of his car at movie premieres. As Broccoli puts it: “At that time, he was such a monumental movie star. I mean, he couldn’t go anywhere without hordes and hordes of press and spectators. And he didn’t court that kind of lifestyle. He didn’t court that kind of publicity. It just followed him around.”
But he began to rankle at both his extraordinary fame and the constrictions of the role. The shoot for the 1967’s You Only Live Twice — a film famous for its reveal of the dastardly villain Blofeld —was the source of one of Broccoli’s favourite memories of Connery. “I was seven years old, and I got very, very ill,” she recalls. “I had a high fever and my mother was very worried. We were on this remote island. And there was only one traditional Western bed, which they had shipped in for Sean. Everybody else was sleeping on the mat on the floor. And so Sean Connery gave me his bed, so that I could be nursed back to health.” Aside from this generous gesture, however, the mood on set was fairly grim, with frequent arguments between
Connery and his producers. Constantly chased by reporters and paparazzi who even followed him to the toilet, the star was fed up of being in the shadow of Bond. He demanded more money to make up for his loss of privacy and the breakneck pace of filming the series. When Broccoli and Saltzman refused to raise his salary, Connery quit.
“Do you want to know once and for all what I think of that pest?” he said to an interviewer in 1968. “He’s made life impossible for me. I wish they’d kill him.” It calls to mind the more recent statement made by Daniel Craig, after his arduous experience on Spectre, which he completed with a broken leg. Craig said then that he’d rather slash his wrists than return. Be that as it may, both Connery and Craig did return after some negotiations. Perhaps the lure of Bond was too attractive. In Connery’s case, it would take a few years before he came back, after one George Lazenby film (Her Majesty’s Secret Service) and the offer of a salary of $1.25 million to star in his final official Bond film.
Diamonds Are Forever (1971) would be the most expensively budgeted outing of the Connery Bonds, but the money that Connery would earn from it went to an unexpected place: the Scottish Educational Trust, a charitable organisation. Just when you might expect Sean Connery to zig, he tended to zag.
The relationship between Connery and Broccoli and Salzman’s production company, EON, would remain contentious for years to come, particularly when the actor appeared in a final Bond role over a decade later — Never Say Never Again (1983). The unofficial spy thriller was a remake of Thunderball, and Connery’s only outing not made by EON Productions. The title, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Connery’s consistent refusal to return to the role, would prove to be the final outing for the then 53-year-old star. But Barbara Broccoli says that the ire did not last forever. “Sean made peace with Cubby when he was ill. They had a wonderful conversation in which they acknowledged that their partnership had really created something very special. They had created something special together.”
Regardless of the interpersonal fallouts, Connery’s stretch as Bond would pass into legend, and the actor’s perceptive, no-nonsense
understanding of the character would propel the whole franchise to where it is today. As he told the press back in the ’60s: “If you take Bond in the situations that he is constantly involved with, you see that it is a very hard, high, unusual league that he plays in. Therefore he is quite right in having all his senses satisfied — be it sex, wine, food or clothes — because the job, and he with it, may terminate at any minute.” Capturing the dynamism and danger of 007 was always a job Connery was up to, regardless of his ambivalence. Even though he felt frustration with the role, his impact on Bond was immeasurable.
His take on the character succeeded in part because of his veneer of sophistication over animal masculinity; Savile Row tailoring barely hid his lethal abilities. But the occasional hint of real vulnerability showed that Connery was not merely a figure of fantasy. Arguably, Connery’s 007 became the model for every other incarnation: future inheritors of the secret agent would see-saw between the cosmopolitan and the brute. In retrospect, subsequent Bonds have been judged by where they fell on the spectrum between the two, with Daniel Craig more of the solemn, rugged specimen and Pierce Brosnan more the charming womaniser. “He’s a hard act to follow,” series producer Michael G. Wilson tells Empire. “Each Bond that came along had a different style, played themselves in the role, but everyone always compared the new Bond to Sean. He was the gold standard to which you would compare.’
In Skyfall, Daniel Craig’s 007 goes back to his roots, heading up to his ancestral Scottish home in the highlands and defeating his nemesis Silva the old-fashioned way. When he arrives, the grizzled old groundskeeper is played by Albert Finney, but it was a part at one point earmarked for Sean Connery. As fitting as a Connery cameo might have felt initially, it was eventually nixed by director Sam Mendes. Perhaps rightly, he felt that the only role Connery should ever have in the series was the one he made famous. Even more significant, perhaps, is the fact of Bond having Scottish ancestry at all: many elements of the agent’s backstory were later written into the novels by Ian Fleming, once skeptical about the Scottish actor, based on Connery’s own portrayal of the character. Such was the star’s influence on the creator of Bond himself.
As Broccoli puts it: “We will always celebrate Sean’s legacy. He was the original.”