I’m an actor. It’s not brain surgery. If I do my job right, people won’t ask for their money back
– Sir Sean Connery
ON ACTING
Connery credited Superman actor Robert Henderson for encouraging him to join the profession after he saw him working in the chorus of the musical South Pacific.
The actor said: “He told me I needed to educate myself and gave me 10 books to read, including Shaw and Shakespeare, and he told me I needed to change my voice. I did, but I never wanted to change the music of what Scottish speaking is.
“I came back from the tour of South Pacific with a bicycle, £90 in the bank, I had a roof over my head but I had no phone, and I became an actor.”
Connery said he always refused to use his accent or change his voice for a part. He said: “That’s because I believe the emotion you hear remains the same, internationally.
“The emotion you hear from a Russian is the same as you hear from the Irish, a Pole or a Scot – even an Englishman.”
“I’m an actor – it’s not brain surgery. If I do my job right, people won’t ask for their money back.”
“Perhaps I’m not a good actor, but I would be even worse at doing anything else.”
ON JAMES BOND
“I have always hated that damn James Bond. I’d like to kill him.”
“There’s one major difference between James Bond and me. He is able to sort out problems.”
“I care about Bond and what happens to him. You cannot be connected with a character for this long and not have an interest. All the Bond films had their good points.”
“I’ve only read two Bond books; I found Ian Fleming himself much more interesting than his writing.”
“Everyone who said that the first one was going to be a success is a liar because they didn’t know. The film costs less than a million dollars. They didn’t make one immediately afterwards because they still weren’t sure. Everybody forgets that. Believe me, nobody could have foreseen that all these years later, we’d be sitting here discussing James Bond.”
ON GOLF
“You know, the Oscar I was awarded for The Untouchables is a wonderful thing, but I can honestly say that I’d rather have won the US Open Golf Tournament.”
ON SCOTLAND
“I am not an Englishman, I was never an Englishman, and I don’t ever want to be one. I am a Scotsman. I was a Scotsman and I will always be one.”
“Everything I have done or attempted to do for Scotland has always been for her benefit, never my own and I defy anyone to prove otherwise.”
ON INDEPENDENCE
“I’ve always been hopeful about Scotland’s prospects. And I now believe more than ever that Scotland is within touching distance of achieving independence and equality... and I am convinced it will happen in my lifetime. “Scotland should be nothing less than equal with all other nations of the world.”
ON WOMEN
“I like women. I don’t understand them, but I like them.”
ON LIFE
“There is nothing like a challenge to bring out the best in man.”
ON TRAVEL
“I haven’t found anywhere in the world where I want to be all the time. The best of my life is the moving. I look forward to going.”
ON EDUCATION
“I left Scotland when I was 16 because I had no qualifications for anything but the Navy, having left school at 13.”
ON AGEING
“Some age, others mature.”
“More than anything else, I’d like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso.”
ON PRIVILEGE
“I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege. Your background and environment is with you for life. No question about that.”
ON PAYING TAX
“I still pay full tax when I work in England and the same when I work in America.”
ON HIS KNIGHTHOOD
“The knighthood I received was a fantastic honour but it’s not something I’ve ever used and I don’t think I ever will.”
ON LOVE
“Love may not make the world go round, but I must admit that it makes the ride worthwhile.”
ON MARRIAGE
“I met my wife through playing golf. She is French and couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak French, so there was little chance of us getting involved in any boring conversations – that’s why we got married really quickly.”
ON RETIREMENT
“If anything could have pulled me out of retirement, it would have been an Indiana Jones film. But in the end, retirement is just too much fun.”
ON HOLLYWOOD
“I’m fed up with the idiots... the everwidening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who greenlight the movies.”
“There’s so much b******t that comes from bad decisions being made at the top. I admire efficiency: like watching a good racehorse or the way Picasso works: where everything functions perfectly within its capacity.
“But talking to some of these moguls about it is like trying to describe to someone who has never taken exercise what it is like to feel fit when you do exercise. They don’t understand.”
ON FAITH
“Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith. For without fear of the devil there is no need for God.”
ON POLITICS
“There’s something fundamentally wrong with a system where there’s been 17 years of a Tory Government and the people of Scotland have voted Socialist for 17 years. That hardly seems democratic.”
ON CLASS
Connery said he had no idea that growing up in a tenement in a poor working class area of Edinburgh was hard.
He said: “When you are growing up, you have nothing else to compare with so you don’t know any better. It’s only when you leave that you can see.
“The problem is not enough people come back to make the changes for the better.”
Being born into those circumstances gave him the “drive” to better himself.
He said: “I got my first job with a milk round at age nine, and when I left school at 13 with little formal education, I got a job driving a horse and cart.
”It was just a straightforward case of economics – you had to do what you could do.
“That’s why drove a horse and cart. I couldn’t wait to go to the war, that’s how smart I was. And when I did, of course there was no future in it.”