FAREWELL, MR BOND
Sir Sean Connery 1930-2020
Sir Sean Connery, who has died aged 90, was a bona fide movie star with a 65-year career. He made some 70 films, and worked with countless big-name directors, from Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Lumet to Gus Van Sant. But to many cinema-goers, he will always be Bond, James Bond – the original screen 007, and the best. Suave, swaggering and sexually magnetic, with a hint of menace undercut by a wry wit and laconic demeanour, Connery took the “shallow, charmless protagonist” of Ian Fleming’s novels (“that cardboard booby”, in the author’s own words) and transformed him “into a screen superman”, said The Daily Telegraph. In the process, he transformed himself into a superstar, and one of the biggest names of the 1960s. Yet Connery had almost nothing in common with his alter ego. Whereas Bond was the sophisticated product of Eton and Fettes, the actor was brought up in a tenement in Edinburgh.
Thomas Sean Connery was born in 1930. His father, Joseph, was a lorry driver and factory worker; his mother, Effie, worked as a cleaner. Their home, in Fountainbridge, had no bathroom, and no hot water. “We were poor, but I never knew how poor until a social worker told me,” he recalled later. Aged nine, he started doing a milk round to make extra money, and after leaving Darroch School aged 14, he found a full-time delivery job, driving a horse and cart. Then, “Big Tam” (he was 6ft 2in) joined the Royal Navy. He served for three years (and had “Scotland forever” tattooed on his arm), before being medically discharged with duodenal ulcers. After that, he worked on building sites, as a coffin polisher, as a lifeguard – and backstage at a theatre. He also did life modelling, and competed in bodybuilding contests. In 1953, he went to London to take part in Mr Universe – and heard about auditions for a touring production of South Pacific. He went along, and won a part in the chorus. He was later promoted to a main role.
In Manchester, Matt Busby saw him play football, and was so impressed he offered him a contract at Man United. Connery turned it down, reasoning that an acting career had the potential to last longer than a sporting one. It was, he said later, one of his better decisions. By the late 1950s, he was appearing in films: he was a truck driver in the 1957 melodrama Hell Drivers, and starred alongside Lana Turner in Another Time, Another Place
(1958). But it was largely thanks to his role in a Disney movie about leprechauns, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, that he won the lead role in Dr. No, the first Bond film. Its producers, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, had approached various big-name stars, including Rex Harrison and Cary Grant. When they turned it down, Broccoli’s wife, Dana, at a screening of the Disney film, suggested Connery. He turned up to meet them ill-shaven and in baggy trousers. Broccoli liked his arrogance and his “balls”; Saltzman noted that he had the grace of a cat. Fleming, who’d imagined David Niven in the role, told them: “I’m looking for Commander Bond, not an overgrown stuntman”; but changed his mind after his girlfriend told him that Connery had sex appeal.
It fell to Dr. No’s director, Terence Young, to give Connery what he lacked, which was the confidence to inhabit Bond’s world, said The Guardian. According to Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny),
“Terence took Sean under his wing. He took him to dinner, showed him how to walk, how to talk, even how to eat.” Even so, he was nervous on set. According to co-star Eunice Gayson, he felt under such pressure, he fluffed his most famous line – “Bond... James Bond”. Nevertheless, Dr. No, with its “Jamaican sun, glamorous women, transatlantic jets and fast cars” thrilled audiences in austere postwar Britain, and “much of the rest of the world”, said The Sunday Times. There followed five more Bond films in quick succession; Connery’s fees grew ever larger; but he didn’t relish the public attention, and felt limited by the work. Bond films “don’t tax one as an actor”, he said. “All one really needs is the constitution of a rugby player to get through 18 weeks of swimming, slugging and necking.”
He starred in Hitchcock’s Marnie in
1964, and Lumet’s war film The Hill in 1965, while relations with the Bond producers grew increasingly sour. They had to offer him $1.25m and 10% of the gross to lure him back for Diamonds Are Forever, in 1971. He used the money to set up an educational trust for underprivileged teenagers in Scotland. He then starred opposite his friend Michael Caine in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and played the ageing
Robin Hood in Robin and Marian (1976). But there were few hits, and in 1983, he accepted $5m to play 007 one more time, in the “unofficial” Bond film,
Never Say Never Again (1983). At 53, he knew himself he was too old. “Let’s say never again,” one review concluded.
“His Bond was suave, swaggering and sexually magnetic, with a hint of menace undercut by
a wry wit and laconic demeanour”
Connery had married the Australian actress Diane Cilento around the time of Dr. No. He was not faithful and they divorced in 1973, having had a son, Jason. She later claimed he’d been abusive: he denied it, yet in 1965, he’d told Playboy that there wasn’t “anything particularly wrong” with slapping a woman, “if all other alternatives fail”. He reiterated the view in an interview in the 1980s, and only publicly reversed his stance in 2006. In 1975 he married Micheline Roquebrune, who shared his passion for golf (developed after he’d had to learn to play it for Goldfinger).
She encouraged him to take more commercial work – which led to a series of hits in the 1980s. He won an Oscar for his role as Jimmy Malone, a grizzled Irish cop with a distinctly Scottish burr, in The Untouchables (1987); he was Harrison Ford’s father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989); and a Russian
submarine commander in The Hunt for Red October (1990).
In the 1980s and 1990s, Connery became increasingly outspoken in his support for Scottish independence. This did much to galvanise the rise of the SNP – which he joined in 1992 – and also led to carping that for a man who loved Scotland, he lived a remarkably long way away from it: he’d become a tax exile in the 1970s, and lived in Spain and latterly in the Bahamas. (It may also have delayed his knighthood, finally awarded in 2000.) But he clearly was devoted to the land of his birth. In a book about Scottish culture in 2008, he recalled that on a recent return to Edinburgh for the film festival, a cab driver had been amazed that his passenger could put a name to every street they passed. “How come?” the driver asked. “As a boy I used to deliver milk around here,” Connery replied. “So what do you do now?” the cabbie asked. “That,” the actor wrote, “was rather harder to answer.”