EVERYONE KNEW DR NO WOULD MAKE SEAN A STAR… EXCEPT 007 HIMSELF
How Connery nearly quit after his first Bond movie because he thought it was too ‘glitzy’
SEAN Connery was very nervous. He’d just attended an early American screening of Dr No – the first time the all-important movie reviewers had a chance to see him as James Bond – and he hated it. But actress Shelley Winters, who was with him, was bowled over by what she saw.
After the screening, in early 1963, Connery insisted the two of them dine at a humdrum drugstore chain, arguing that nobody would come looking for him there. “He was very nervous about the film,” Winters recalled. “In fact, he hated it.”
Dr No was, he told her, “glitzy, mannered and dangerous”. So much so, apparently, that he wanted nothing more to do with the series its producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli were now certain they were going to create.
The admirably down-to-earth Winters told him: “Sean, if you truly don’t want to do any more Bond pictures, just ask for some outrageous sum like a million dollars a picture for three pictures.” It was sage advice, as things were to turn out.
Given his reluctance, Connery might well have wondered if the £6,000 he had been paid for Dr No might be the biggest money he would ever earn. Luckily for him the world’s cinemagoers shared the opinion of Winters – and a star was born.
But Sean had something else going for him too: his girlfriend Diane Cilento who he had met on the TV production of Anna Christie five years earlier. She had introduced the fledgling actor to new ideas, plays, writers, producers, teachers and lifestyles that would have a lasting impact on both his life and his work.
There had been a spark between them from the moment they had first met five years earlier.
“He looked dangerous but fun,” the Australian actress would recall of her first sighting of Connery at a movie première.
Though their eventual marriage would go through a painful breakdown, and though, years after their divorce, they still had sporadic verbal sparring matches – most notably over her claims he hit her and his public comment he didn’t think there was “anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman” – there can be no doubt that Cilento was an enormously beneficial influence on the actor.
Only a couple of months before their meeting, Cilento had attempted suicide. On March 29, 1957, she was found in a hotel bath, her wrists slashed, her blood seeping into the water, as her two-year-old marriage to assistant director Andrea Volpe crumbled.
But although Connery and Cilento quickly became close, they did not become a conventional couple for quite some time. It has been claimed Connery left his then lover, photographer Julie Hamilton, for Cilento during the rehearsals for Anna Christie, but Hamilton is adamant their relationship continued well beyond the summer of 1957.
MOREOVER, Cilento maintains she and Connery had known each other “a whole year before we fell in love”. While Hamilton recalled Connery waking one morning and telling her, with absolute certainty, he was now in love with Diane, it was to be some time before Cilento began to respond to his attentions.
Having tried marriage once and found it wanting, she was not about to be tied down again while still only in her mid-20s. To hear her tell it, it was Connery who made all the running in what would finally become their romance. Connery’s proposal of marriage didn’t come out of the blue. They had been together five years and Cilento was pregnant with his child. On November 29, 1962, two months after the opening of the Bond movie, and only one month after the annulment of her marriage to Volpe, Cilento and Connery were secretly married in Gibraltar.
By early February, just weeks after Cilento had given birth to their son, Jason, Connery was back on set for the second 007 movie From Russia with Love.
Although Bond was proving lucrative – Connery’s salary had more than tripled, to some £20,000 plus £65 a week expenses – his attempt to show his versatility stalled when the 1964 Alfred Hitchcock thriller Marnie, starring the Scot, turned out to be the director’s first flop in a decade.
That setback was quickly forgotten, however, when Connery’s third outing as Bond in Goldfinger later that year saw him finally break big in America.
Movie posters began featuring his name in a bigger type than his character. Even 007 creator Ian Fleming, who hadn’t been happy with the casting of the working-class Connery as his public school-educated hero, had given his Bond a Scottish background in his 11th novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in a nod to the actor who had made the character his own.
Not all the attention was positive though. Fans started hanging around Connery‘s house in Acton, west London, stealing ladders from the builder’s yard next door to get a better peek and, in Paris, a woman jumped into his car as he drove slowly down the Champs-Elysées for the Goldfinger opening. Connery was none too happy about such attention .As his director on the fourth Bond film Thunderball, Terence Young said: “Sean could be the biggest star in movies since [Clark] Gable. But he won’t be.
“He doesn’t give a damn for the ancillary assets of being a star. It’s not that he’s ungrateful. It’s just that he’s too concerned with personal integrity.”
By then, his marriage to Diane on the rocks, Connery announced the next Bond film You Only Live Twice would be his last, confirming that to the Queen Mother at the première when she asked if it was “really your last Bond film?” Yet his stock remained high; he commanded $1million a movie and branched out by writing a ballet and turning his hand to theatre directing.
BUT in 1972, even after Psycho star John Gavin had already signed as 007, Connery was lured back to play Bond in Diamonds are Forever for a cool $1.25million plus a 12.5 per cent share of profits – at the time the highest pay cheque in cinema history.And he had double cause to celebrate. A year earlier, in March 1970 at a golf tournament in Casablanca, Connery had met Micheline Roquebrune, the woman who would eventually become his second wife. She had taken first prize in
the women’s competition, he in the men’s and, as is customary on such occasions, they had danced the first dance of the evening together.
And not only the first. They danced all night, and spent the bulk of the next two days in each other’s company, too.
As their love blossomed he told her: “I’m very serious. I don’t want to play games with you.” They agreed it was time they “both started working on divorces”.
On May 6, 1975, once again in Gibraltar, Connery married for the second time. His newfound happiness coincided with two cinematic highpoints, with The Man Who Would Be King, with Michael Caine in 1975 and Robin and Marian, alongside Audrey Hepburn, a year later.
But in his private life, he was dismayed when it emerged his accountant, former army major Kenneth Richards, had defrauded him to the tune of £2.5million. It only came to light when Micheline buttonholed him over a new washing machine that should have been delivered to their Marbella home and Richards confessed he had no records for her husband’s investments.
Connery sued Richards but the accountant was declared bankrupt before having to pay back a penny. The star put that setback behind him by agreeing to return one last time as 007 in Never Say Never Again – the title of the 1983 movie suggested by his wife after he had vowed “never” to reprise the role.
Although the production was an unhappy one beset by problems, Connery went on to bigger things. He went on to win acclaim playing a monk in The Name Of The Rose, for which he won a BAFTA award, and for his scene-stealing turn as an ageing cop in The Untouchables in 1987, which earned him his only Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
AFTER years as a leading man, Connery was now content to play character roles alongside younger stars and scored further box office hits in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – playing Harrison Ford’s father – The Hunt for Red October, The Russia House, The Rock, and Entrapment, opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones.
His contribution to cinema was recognised when, in January 1996, at the Golden Globes Awards, he received the Cecil B DeMille award for a lifetime achievement in motion pictures. Collecting his award, he said: “It is the stuff in between the shooting and the punches and the car crashes that really counts. The scenes… that try to say something about how we really behave, what we really feel... that… sends [audiences] into the movie houses.”
Two years later he received a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award and, as the new millennium dawned, mere months after the inauguration of the new Scottish Parliament, he was knighted.
A staunch supporter of Scottish independence, he had been nominated twice before but was overlooked because of his political views. Although he continued to work and won acclaim for his performance as a reclusive writer in Finding Forrester, later films like The Avengers and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were disappointing, finally prompting Connery to retire.
Since his retirement, home has been on New Providence Island, west of Nassau in the Bahamas. It’s unlikely we will ever see him or hear his unmistakable voice again on the silver screen but Connery remains the most physically watchable film star the British cinema has ever produced.
He once said he had “no illusions” that he might one day achieve “completeness”. But we are all in search of such completeness – and at least occasionally and momentarily we find it by gazing at certain movie stars. Not since the days of Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, has anyone fulfilled that function as frequently and as potently as Sean Connery.
Maybe he really does have no illusions.As he turns 90 this week, we should be thankful that for half a century, he granted us so many of our own.
●●Sean Connery: The Measure Of A Man by Christopher Bray (Faber, £9.99) is out now. Call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via expressbookshop.co.uk UK delivery £2.95, orders over £12.99 free