So much more than James Bond
Earned Academy Award as wised-up Chicago cop
Over a career spanning seven decades, Sean Connery brought a vital, often subtle fire to his lines of screen work.
More than anything else, the movies’ first official and best James Bond once said, “I’d like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso.”
He got there, all right. Over a career spanning seven decades, Sean Connery — who won his Academy Award as the wised-up Chicago beat cop who joins EliotNess’ underworld crusade in “TheUntouchables” — gave audiences so much that had little to do with his talent.
That face. That Edinburgh Scots burr. The effortless, just-this-side-ofcaveman masculinity. And the charm, wholly distinct from the brittle, moneyed artifice of Roger Moore, a later incarnation of Sir Ian Fleming’s idea of the male paragon with the license to kill.
Connery, who died Oct. 31 at the age of 90, brought a vital, often subtle fire to his lines of screenwork. Before that, he had many others: milkman, enlistee in the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy, 1953 Mr. Universe contestant (he finished third), member of the chorus in the London productionof “SouthPacific.” Then he became an actor. And then an international movie star.
So many of the latter forget the former, or never were much interested in testing themselves after stardom. Connery was different.
Five films into his Bond superstardom, after “Dr. No” (1962), “From Russia With Love” ( 1963), “Goldfinger” ( 1964), “Thunderball” (1965) and “You Only Live Twice” (1967), Connerygrewweary of the spy games. “Looks like you’re out to getme,” he says in his first “Dr. No” scene, cigarette dangling, eyeing a female across the baccarat table. By “You Only Live Twice,” audiences were turning out to get more of him, but mainly theywere there for the toys. Connery wanted more and, in terms of spectacle, less. As early as 1964, while firmly affixed to Bond in the global public eye, he took on “Marnie,” Hitchcock’s fraught, financially unpopular “sex mystery.” Then, with SidneyLumet, another good, tough outing, set in WorldWar II: “The Hill.”
Well before Bond, in 1957 the young actor came to prominence on British television in Rod Serling’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie.” Hehadthe looks, buthe could plausibly handle brutes with hidden sensitivity, beaten out of the charac
ters by circumstance. Connery sang, prettywell, in the 1960 Disney fantasy “Darby O’Gillandthe LittlePeople.” People went for the little people, not for the nascent movie star.
By the time I sawmy first Bond movie at 12, “Live and Let Die” — vicious, racist, salacious and semi-appalling, then and now— Moore hadtakenover, thoughConnery came back for an odd, jokey reprise himself, “NeverSayNeverAgain” (1983). Throughout the 1970s, however, in everything from JohnHuston’s rousing “The Man WhoWould Be King” toLumet’s sterling “Murder on the Orient Express” to Michael Crichton’s minor but diverting “The Great Train Robbery,” the actor proved a constant source of delight to audiences. Even whenthe materialwobbled; he steadied it, all of it.
He’ll be warmly remembered for all sorts of hits. “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), as the Soviet adversary of steel and wiles. Harrison Ford’s father in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). It’s sour revisionism, but Connery and Audrey Hepburn in “Robin and Marian” (1976) warm up an ice-cold subversion of the Robin Hood tale, the way no two other actors ever could.
In “The Untouchables”
(1987), something happens in Connery’s first scene that feels like secret code between actors of different generations. I’ve always loved this scene, filmed on the lower level of the Michigan Avenue Bridge on location in Chicago. As written by David Mamet, it’s a perfect jewel: weary, witty experience, embodied by Connery, patiently schooling the idealistic U.S. Treasury Department greenhorn, Kevin Costner.
It’s also an acting lesson of the highest order. At this point in his career, Costner couldn’t make sense or human rhythms out of Mamet’s dialogue. He tries, but throughout “The Untouchables” he’s outgunned by nearly every scene partner.
Connery, I suspect, sympathized with this much younger actor over his head, charged with headlining a big Brian De Palma/Robert De Ni rog an gland movie. He likely knew that the project could withstand a weak leading man, but barely. So what does Connery do? He helps him out, without any fuss or winking. Connery intuitively makes Costner a better actor, before our eyes, just by being such fun to work with, presumably. And such a pleasure to watch, inarguably.
There was, also inarguably, a dark and abusive side to the man. He admitted it and never apologized. In a notorious BarbaraWalters TV interview, Connery reasserted what he saw as his right to physically assault a woman if a provocation “merits” it. His first wife, actress and “Tom Jones” Oscar nominee Diane Cilento, was married to the actor from 1962 to 1973. Her autobiography contains descriptions of physical and mental abuse, fueled by jealous rages over her own success.
He wasn’t, as she saw it, “able to cope” with what Bond did for him. And to him.
Though he provided the voice of Sir Sean Connery, aka himself, in a 2012 animated feature “Sir Billi,” his last on-screen feature, “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” came in 2013. A flop, it sealed the deal on Connery’s unofficial retirement from screen acting at 73. “I’m fed up,” he said around that time, with “the ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who green-light the movies.”
Like so many, I grew up and then continued to spend untold hours in the company of Connery, watching him kill off hundreds of anonymous Bond villain extras, energizing sublimely ridiculous material (“The Rock,” “Zardoz”), taking on a formulaic heartwarmer (“Finding Forrester”) and somehowactually warming hearts in the process.
I’ve only recently caught up with lesser-known, often wrenching proof that Connery didn’t want to lose sight of his ambitions. No one agrees to star in a harsh procedural like the 1973 drama “The Offence” (Lumet again, in which Connery plays a rage-fueled, disintegrating police detective) because it’ll make money.
The unexpected humor he brought to the humorless Fleming superspy cemented Connery’s stardom. In the eyes of film historian David Thomson, writing in TheNewRepublic, the franchise was from the start “a decisive step forward in camp. The sex and violence flowered because no one regarded them as real — least of all Sean Connery, who was far from English or upperclass. From ‘ Dr. No’ onward, Connery looked at us and winked. The cinema changed, and it’s hard now to make a serious film about spies or secret agents — whichmay allowthem to flourish more in life.”
Maybe you believe that, maybe youdon’t. Thismuch is certain: The man who would be Bond held the screen like few others, maybe no others, of his generation. Hewas a fine, committed actor before, during and especially after Bond made Sean Connery’s name nearly aswell-known.
As he says in “The Untouchables”: Here endeth the lesson.