South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Bond actor Sean Connery dies at 90
The Scotsman found international fame as the original James Bond and defined aging coolness.
Sean Connery, the irascible Scot fromthe 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 Saturday in Nassau, the Bahamas. Hewas 90.
His deathwas confirmed by Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, on Twitter. “Our nation today mourns one of her best loved sons,” shewrote.
“Bond, James Bond” was the character’s familiar self-introduction, and to legions of fans who have watched a parade of actors play Agent 007, none uttered the words or played the part as magnetically or as indelibly as Connery.
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 1963’s “From Russia With Love,” “Goldfinger” and “Thunderball.” After he grew tired of the role, Connery would be lured back for one more Bond movie, “Diamonds Are Forever,” only by the offer of $1 million as an advance against 12% of themovie’s gross revenues.
Connery would revisit the character one more time a decade later, in
1983’s elegiac “Never Say Never Again.” But he had made clear long before then that he was not going to let himself be typecast.
Connery won a bestactor award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for
1986’s “The Name of the Rose,” in which he played a crime- solving medieval monk, and the Academy Award as best supporting actor for his performance as an honest cop on the corrupt Chicago police force in 1987’s “The Untouchables.”
He was born Thomas Sean Connery on Aug. 25,
1930. At the age of 9, Thomas found an earlymorning job delivering milk in a horse cart for four hours before he went to school. At 13, Thomas Connery became a full-time milkman. Britain had been atwar for four years. Three years later, with the soldiers coming home and work scarcer, he joined the RoyalNavy.
He signed up for 12 years, but was discharged at 19 after acquiring an ulcer. He had also acquired two tattoos on his right arm — “Mum and Dad” and “Scotland Forever”— and a small disability grant, which he used to learn furniture polishing. Bodybuilding led indirectly to a touring production of the musical “South Pacific.” He was chosen for the chorus because he looked like a sailor.
“I spent my ‘South Pacific’ tour in every library in Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales,” Connery told The Houston Chronicle in
1992. “And on the nightswe were dark, I’d see every play I could. But it’s the books, the reading, that can change one’s life. I’m the living evidence.”