SEAN CONNERY, ORIGINAL BOND
Sir Sean Connery, the original and considered by many to be the best James Bond, has died at 90.
Sean Connery, the irascible Scot from the slums of Edinburgh who found international fame as Hollywood’s original James Bond, dismayed his fans by walking away from the Bond franchise and went on to have a long and fruitful career as a respected actor and an always bankable star, died on Saturday in Nassau, the Bahamas. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, on Twitter. “Our nation today mourns one of her best loved sons,” she wrote.
“Bond, James Bond” was the character’s familiar self-introduction, and to legions of fans who have watched a parade of actors play the role — otherwise known as Agent 007 on Her Majesty’s Secret Service — none uttered the words or played the part as magnetically or as indelibly as Connery.
Tall, dark and dashing, he embodied the novelist Ian Fleming’s suave and resourceful secret agent in the first five Bond films and seven overall, vanquishing diabolical villains and voluptuous women alike beginning with “Dr. No” in 1962.
As a more violent, moody and dangerous man than the James Bond in Fleming’s books, Connery was the top box-office star in both Britain and the United States in 1965 after the success of “From Russia With Love” (1963), “Goldfinger” (1964) and “Thunderball” (1965). But he grew tired of playing Bond after the fifth film in the series, “You Only Live Twice” (1967), and was replaced by George Lazenby, a littleknown Australian actor, in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969).
Connery was lured back for one more Bond movie, “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971), only by the offer of $1 million as an advance against 12% of the movie’s gross revenues. Roger
Moore took over for “Live and Let Die” (1973) and continued to play the part for another 12 years. Lazenby’s career never took off. Bond has been played by Daniel Craig since 2006.
Connery would revisit the character one more time a decade later, in the elegiac “Never Say Never Again” (1983), in which he wittily played a rueful Bond feeling the anxieties of middle age. But he had made clear long before then that he was not going to let himself be typecast.
He searched out roles that allowed him to stretch as an actor even during his Bond years, among them a widower obsessed with a woman who is a compulsive thief in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie” (1964) and a raging, amoral poet in the satire “A Fine Madness” (1966). His first post-Bond performance was as a burned-out London police detective who beats a suspect to death in “The Offence” (1972), the third of five movies he made for the celebrated director Sidney Lumet. The others were “The Hill” in 1965, “The Anderson Tapes” in 1971, “Murder on the Orient Express” in 1974 and “Family Business” in 1989.
“Nonprofessionals just didn’t realize what superb high-comedy acting that Bond role was,” Lumet once said. “It was like what they used to say about Cary Grant. ‘Oh,’ they’d say,
‘he’s just got charm.’ Well, first of all, charm is actually not all that easy a quality to come by. And what they overlooked in both Cary Grant and Sean was their enormous skill.”
In the 1970s and ‘80s, Connery gracefully transformed himself into one of the grand old men of the movies. If his trained killer in the futuristic fantasy “Zardoz” (1974), his Barbary pirate in “The Wind and the Lion” (1975) or his middleaged Robin Hood in “Robin and Marian” (1976) did not erase the memory of his James Bond, they certainly blurred the image.
Connery won a best-actor award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for “The Name of the Rose” (1986), based on the Umberto Eco novel, in which he played a crimesolving medieval monk, and the Academy Award as best supporting actor for his performance as an honest cop on the corrupt Chicago police force in “The Untouchables” (1987). Connery taught himself to understand that character — Jim Malone, a cynical, streetwise police officer whose only goal is to be alive at the end of his shift — by noting the other characters’ attitudes toward him.
After reading Malone’s scenes, he told The New York Times in 1987, he read the scenes in which his character did not appear. “That way,” he said, “I get to know what the character is aware of and, more importantly, what he is not aware of. The trap that bad actors fall into is playing information they don’t have.”
Even before his acting ability was apparent, the 6-foot-2 Connery had a remarkable physical presence, onscreen and off.
Lana Turner picked him to play the war correspondent with whom she tumbles into bed in the forgettable 1958 melodrama “Another Time, Another Place.” He earned his chance as Bond when the producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman watched him walk.
“We signed him without a screen test,” Saltzman said.
He was born Thomas
Sean Connery on Aug. 25, 1930, and his crib was the bottom drawer of a dresser in a cold-water flat next door to a brewery. The two toilets in the hall were shared with three other families. His father, Joe, earned two pounds a week in a rubber factory. His mother got occasional work as a cleaning woman.
At the age of 9, Thomas found an early-morning job delivering milk in a horse cart for four hours before he went to school. His brother, Neil, had been born in December 1938, and the usual meals of porridge and potatoes had to be stretched four ways. Once a week, if the family had a sixpence to spare, Thomas would walk to the public baths and swim “just to get clean.”
When asked why he was willing to take second billing as a coal miner saboteur to Richard Harris’ company spy in “The Molly Maguires” (1970), he said, “They paid me a million dollars for it, and, for that kind of money, they can put a mule ahead of me.” But he donated 50,000 pounds to England’s National Youth Theater after he read that the theater needed money. An ardent supporter of Scottish nationalism, he also gave 5,000 pounds a month to the Scottish National Party.
Almost from the time he left James Bond behind, Connery shifted from gorgeous young man to character star. “The reason Burt Lancaster had a longer, more varied career than Kirk Douglas was that he refused to allow himself to be limited,” Connery told The Times in 1987. “He was more ready to play less romantic parts, and was more experimental in his choice of roles. And that’s the way I’ve tried to be. I don’t mind being older or looking stupid.”
Often willing to take roles in bad pictures if the money was good enough, Connery was the voice of a computer-generated dragon in “Dragonheart” (1996) and a villain trying to unleash a weather catastrophe on London in the misfire film version of the cult British television series “The Avengers” (1998). But he had more than his share of latecareer triumphs as well.
He relished his role as Harrison Ford’s eccentric father in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989) — even though Ford was only 12 years younger than he was. The next year he played a Russian nuclear submarine commander trying to defect to the United States in the film of Tom Clancy’s “Hunt for Red October.”
Connery’s last movie was one of his lesser ones: “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (2003), an unsuccessful screen adaptation of a clever comic-book series about a group of Victorian heroes.
In 2005, he told an interviewer that he was done with acting, less because of his age than because of the “idiots now making films in Hollywood.” Five years later, he told another interviewer: “I don’t think I’ll ever act again. I have so many wonderful memories, but those days are over.” Except for some voice-over work, and despite occasional talk of possible new projects, they were.
In addition to his wife and his son Jason, his survivors include a stepson, Stephane, and his brother.