Sean Connery dies at 90.
The charismatic Scottish actor rose to superstardom as suave secret agent James Bond and had an Oscar- winning career.
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 in 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, 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 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 little- known Australian actor and model, 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. George Lazenby’s career never took off. James 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.”
A graceful transformation
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 middle- aged Robin Hood in
“Robin and Marian” ( 1976) did not erase the memory of his James Bond, they certainly blurred the image.
Connery won the Academy Award as best supporting actor for his performance as an honest cop on the corrupt Chicago police force in “The Untouchables” ( 1987).
Even before his acting ability was apparent, the 6- foot- 2 Connery had a remarkable physical presence, on screen 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.
In 1989, when he was 59 years old, People magazine anointed him the “Sexiest Man Alive.”
A challenging childhood
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 2 pounds a week in a rubber factory. His mother, Effie, occasionally got work as a cleaning woman.
At age 9, Thomas found an earlymorning 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.
Connery’s deprived childhood informed the rest of his life. When he was 63, he told an interviewer that a bath was still “something special.”
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.
“I don’t mind being older”
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.”
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.”
On July 5, 2000, wearing the dark green MacLeod tartan of the Highlands, Connery was knighted at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh by Queen Elizabeth II.
The palace is less than 1 mile from the tenement in Fountainbridge where Connery grew up.