SEAN CONNERY

We pay tribute to the man who built Bond and spawned Indy.

“I’M LOOKING FOR COMMANDER Bond and not an overgrown stuntman,” despaired arch snob Ian Fleming, confronted by the prospect of Sean Connery starring in Dr. No. Bond’s creator quickly came to endorse the choice but you can understand why he bristled: here was an ex-bodybuilder and West End chorus boy, a barely known, raw-edged brute of an actor bred in Scotland’s tough tenements. He had once mixed cement and polished coffins. Was this really the man to embody an old Etonian’s fantasies of upmarket escapism on the big screen?

In fact Connery has as much claim to creating James Bond as Fleming himself. He created the movie Bond, who’s a very different beast to the book Bond. And he did this by bringing a sense of self-awareness, a sense of irony. He did this by twinkling.

“The only thing I said to the producers was that the character had one defect, there was no humour about him,” said Connery in 1965. “To get him accepted they’d have to let me play him tongue-in-cheek, so people could laugh.”

But while the humour made Bond a cinematic phenomenon, it never undercut him. As 007, Connery redefined what it meant to be a male film star: stylish, preposterously handsome, but brutal when the occasion called for it. There was a time bomb beneath those Anthony Sinclair suits, something coiled and dangerous. Charm and menace. It was a combination that made him a compelling screen presence.

Bond gave Connery international stardom but that soon felt like a gilt-edged bear-trap. In 1967 he fled the role, frustrated by the overwhelming fame of it all – and the certain feeling he was being shortchanged for his services. He was lured back for 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever and again in 1983 for Never Say Never Again, a rival production to the official Bond franchise. Voicing the video game of From Russia With Love in 2005 provided an improbable coda to his MI6 days.

Beyond Bond, Connery remained a draw. From a psychologically broken police detective in bleak thriller The Offence (1973) to a folk hero in twilight in Robin And Marian (1976), he didn’t just command the screen – he conquered it, annexed it. Your eyes were always on him. The sheer force of his brand licensed him to keep his Edinburgh accent intact, whatever nationality he was playing. “Drama is conveyed with emotion and it’s best to spend time looking for that emotion, which is international, instead,” he argued.

There were memorable genre roles along the way. John Boorman cast him in 1973’s mind-warping SF tale Zardoz (Connery admitted he was “absolutely caught by its originality”). He brought law to Jupiter’s moon in Outland (1981), played King

Agamemnon in Time Bandits (1981) and made a dashing immortal in Highlander (1986).

1988 saw Connery win an Oscar for his turn as principled beat cop Jim Malone in

The Untouchables. The next year he delivered one of his most cherished performances as the gruff, tweedy Henry Jones Snr in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, sparking off Harrison Ford to form an endlessly watchable double-act. It was a knowing piece of casting: Bond’s big screen adventures had inspired Indy in the first place.

Connery retired after playing Allan Quartermain in 2003’s The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It was, by all accounts, a bad experience for him, but by that point he had no need to add to his screen legend. “You have to work very hard to make something look easy,” he said in 2002. Forged among those Scottish tenements, it was a work ethic that

won him immortality. NS