Sean Connery

• 1. Introduction

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  Sir Sean Connery was the first actor to play James Bond in the cinema, and the role followed him for the rest of his life. In 2009, he described a taxi ride during the Edinburgh Film Festival. The driver was amazed that Connery could name every street they passed. "As a boy I used to deliver milk round here", Connery told him. The driver asked, "So what do you do now?" Connery admitted that was rather harder to answer. The answer fills this documentary. How did a boy from a Fountainbridge block in Edinburgh become Bond? Why did he come to resent the part that made him famous? And what did he do once he stepped out of its shadow?

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• 2. Fountainbridge Boy

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  The block at No. 176 Fountainbridge, where Connery grew up, has since been demolished. He was born Thomas Sean Connery at the Royal Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh on the 25th of August 1930, and he was named after his paternal grandfather. His mother, Euphemia McBain "Effie" McLean, was a cleaning woman. His father, Joseph Connery, worked in a factory and drove a lorry. The parents differed in faith, since the father was a Roman Catholic and the mother a Protestant.

  Two of Connery's paternal great-grandparents had come to Scotland from Wexford, Ireland, in the mid-19th century. His great-grandfather James Connery was an Irish Traveller. His maternal great-grandparents were native Scottish Gaelic speakers from Fife and Uig on Skye. Connery had a younger brother named Neil, and in his youth people usually called him "Tommy".

  He was small at primary school, then grew rapidly around the age of 12. By 18 he had reached his full adult height of 6 ft 2 in. In his teens he was known as "Big Tam". The name Sean came from a childhood friend named Séamus. When the two boys were together, people who knew them both used Connery's middle name, stressing how the two names echoed each other. He preferred it from then on.

  In 1946, at the age of 16, Connery joined the Royal Navy. He trained at the naval gunnery school in Portsmouth and served in an anti-aircraft crew. He was later assigned as an Able Seaman on HMS Formidable. He also acquired two tattoos, which read "Mum and Dad" and "Scotland Forever". His official website describes them as tributes to his family and his country. A duodenal ulcer got him discharged on medical grounds at 19. The condition had affected most of the men in earlier generations of his family.

  After the navy he went back to the co-op. He also drove a lorry, worked as a lifeguard at Portobello swimming baths, and took labouring jobs. He modelled for the Edinburgh College of Art at 15 shillings an hour. The former Mr. Scotland, Archie Brennan, suggested another job, and Connery spent a spell polishing coffins. Richard Demarco, then a student, painted several early pictures of him. Demarco described the model as "very straight, slightly shy, too, too beautiful for words, a virtual Adonis".

  Connery began bodybuilding at 18, and from 1951 he trained heavily with Ellington, a former gym instructor in the British Army. His official website says he placed third in the 1950 Mr. Universe contest. He said he soon lost enthusiasm, because Americans often beat him on sheer muscle size. Unlike him, they refused to play any sport that might cost them muscle mass. Most sources date his Mr. Universe appearance to 1953 instead. They have him either third in the Junior class or unplaced in the Tall Man class.

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• 3. Chorus Line To Leading Man

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  Auditions for the musical South Pacific reached Connery by word of mouth, from a fellow competitor at a London bodybuilding event in 1953. He had already helped out backstage at the King's Theatre in late 1951 to supplement his income. Now he landed a small part as one of the Seabees chorus boys. By the time the show reached Edinburgh, he played Marine Cpl. Hamilton Steeves and understudied two of the juvenile leads. His weekly pay rose from £12 to £14-10s. The production returned the following year by popular demand, and Connery was promoted to Lieutenant Buzz Adams, a role Larry Hagman had played in the West End.

  On tour, Connery played in a football match against a local team. Matt Busby, the manager of Manchester United, happened to be scouting there. Connery had played for Bonnyrigg Rose in his younger days and had been offered a trial with East Fife. According to reports, Busby offered him a contract worth £25 a week straight after the game. Connery was tempted, but he recalled: "I realised that a top-class footballer could be over the hill by the age of 30, and I was already 23. I decided to become an actor and it turned out to be one of my more intelligent moves".

  Edinburgh also brought danger. The Valdor gang, one of the most violent in the city, targeted him after he stopped them stealing his jacket in a billiard hall. Six members later followed him to a 15-foot-high balcony at the Palais de Danse. There he grabbed one man by the throat and another by the biceps and cracked their heads together. From then on the gang treated him with respect, and he had a "hard man" reputation.

  Connery met Michael Caine at a party during South Pacific in 1954, and the two became close friends. At the Manchester Opera House, the American actor Robert Henderson lent him plays by Henrik Ibsen, including Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck and When We Dead Awaken. Henderson then listed works by Proust, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bernard Shaw, Joyce and Shakespeare. He urged Connery to take elocution lessons and found him parts at the Maida Vale Theatre in London.

  Money stayed tight. Connery worked as an extra in the 1954 musical Lilacs in the Spring, alongside Errol Flynn and Anna Neagle. He also babysat for the journalist Peter Noble and his actress wife Marianne, for 10 shillings a night. At the Nobles' house he met the Hollywood actress Shelley Winters. She called him "one of the tallest and most charming and masculine Scotsmen" she had ever seen. Henderson next landed him a £6-a-week role in Witness for the Prosecution at the Q Theatre, where he befriended Ian Bannen. Later stage parts included Pentheus in The Bacchae at the Oxford Playhouse, opposite Yvonne Mitchell.

  At Oxford, the Canadian director Alvin Rakoff spotted him and gave him multiple roles in The Condemned. In April 1957, Rakoff was disappointed by Jack Palance and gave Connery his first leading role. Connery played Mountain McLintock in the BBC production of Requiem for a Heavyweight. That same year his agent, Richard Hatton, secured his first film part, as Spike, a minor gangster with a speech impediment in No Road Back. He also played a rogue lorry driver named Johnny Yates in Hell Drivers.

  In Another Time, Another Place (1958), Connery played a British reporter caught in a love affair with Lana Turner. Her possessive gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, visited from Los Angeles and became convinced she was having an affair with Connery. He stormed onto the set and pointed a gun at the actor. Connery disarmed him and knocked him flat on his back. Stompanato was banned from the set, and two Scotland Yard detectives escorted him to the airport. Connery later said he had to lie low after threats from men linked to Stompanato's boss, Mickey Cohen.

  Disney gave him a leading role in Darby O'Gill and the Little People in 1959, a tale of an Irishman's battle of wits with leprechauns. A. H. Weiler of The New York Times praised the cast, except for Connery, whom he called "merely tall, dark, and handsome". Television offered better notices. Connery played Hotspur in the BBC's An Age of Kings, and in 1961 he appeared in Adventure Story and Anna Karenina, the latter opposite Claire Bloom. That same year he played Macbeth in a Canadian television film, with the Australian actress Zoe Caldwell as Lady Macbeth.

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• 4. Becoming Bond

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  Dana Broccoli, wife of the producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, is reputed to have been instrumental in persuading her husband that Connery was the right man for Bond. The author of the books was less sure. Ian Fleming said, "He's not what I envisioned of James Bond looks", and added, "I'm looking for Commander Bond and not an overgrown stunt-man". Fleming considered the muscular, 6 ft 2 in Scot unrefined. His girlfriend Blanche Blackwell told him Connery had the sexual charisma the part required.

  The premiere of Dr. No changed Fleming's mind so completely that he gave Bond a Scottish heritage. In the 1964 novel You Only Live Twice, the agent's father comes from Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands.

  Connery himself was initially reluctant to commit to a film series. He understood, however, that his career would benefit greatly if the franchise succeeded. Between 1962 and 1967 he played Bond in Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice, the first five Bond films from Eon Productions. After leaving the role, he returned for the seventh film in the series, Diamonds Are Forever, in 1971. All of his Bond films were commercially successful, and the American Film Institute later ranked his Bond the third-greatest hero in cinema history.

  Director Terence Young supplied much of the polish. He took Connery in hand and used the actor's physical grace and presence for the action. Lois Maxwell, who played Miss Moneypenny, recalled: "Terence took Sean under his wing. He took him to dinner, showed him how to walk, how to talk, even how to eat". The tutoring worked. After the opening of Dr. No, Connery received thousands of fan letters a week and became a major sex symbol.

  After Dr. No came out in 1962, the line "Bond... James Bond" became a catchphrase across Western popular culture. The critic Peter Bradshaw called it "the most famous self-introduction from any character in movie history". In his view, Connery carried it off with "icily disdainful style, in full evening dress with a cigarette hanging from his lips".

  The job could be dangerous. While filming Thunderball in 1965, Connery's life was at risk in the sequence with sharks in Emilio Largo's pool. He had worried about this when he read the script. He insisted that Ken Adam build a special Plexiglas partition inside the pool, but it was not a fixed structure. One of the sharks managed to pass through it, and Connery had to leave the pool at once. A slower kind of pressure was building as well, the weight of the franchise itself.

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• 5. Beyond Bond

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  "I have always hated that damned James Bond. I'd like to kill him", Connery said, adding that he was "fed up to here with the whole Bond bit". Michael Caine remembered how touchy the subject was. "If you were his friend in these early days you didn't raise the subject of Bond", Caine said. People would stop Connery in the street to say, "Look, there's James Bond", and Caine said that upset him particularly.

  He fought the typecasting with his choice of directors. For Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964), opposite Tippi Hedren, Connery did something that shocked many people at the time. He asked to see a script. He feared being cast as a spy again and did not want a variation on North by Northwest or Notorious. Hitchcock's agent pointed out that Cary Grant had never asked to read even one of Hitchcock's scripts. Connery replied, "I'm not Cary Grant". He later said he was happy with the film "with certain reservations".

  Sidney Lumet's The Hill (1965) was a part Connery used his star leverage to win, because he wanted something unrelated to Bond. The film was not a financial success, but it was a critical one, and it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won Best Screenplay. It was the first of five films Connery made with Lumet, whom he counted among his favourite directors. Lumet said of Connery's performance that playing a character based on charm and magnetism was "the equivalent of high comedy and he did it brilliantly". Peter Bradshaw regards Marnie and The Hill as Connery's two great non-Bond pictures of the 1960s.

  In 1972 Connery shared a Golden Globe Henrietta Award for "World Film Favorite - Male" with Charles Bronson. The 1970s then gave him some of his most varied work. In John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King (1975), he and Caine played two former British soldiers who set themselves up as kings in Kafiristan. Both actors named it their favourite film. In Robin and Marian (1976), he played Robin Hood opposite Audrey Hepburn. Roger Ebert wrote of the pair, "They glow. They really do seem in love". Ensemble pictures followed, including Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and A Bridge Too Far (1977), in which he played a British Army general.

  Then there was Zardoz, John Boorman's 1974 science-fiction thriller. It has often been called one of the "weirdest and worst movies ever made", and it put Connery in a scarlet mankini that caused controversy for its un-Bond-like look. Critics panned it at the time, but it has since gained a cult following. Boorman said Connery wrote poetry in his free time. He called him "a man of great depth and intelligence" with the "most extraordinary memory".

  Connery also showed a sense of humour about his own fame. In Time Bandits (1981) he played Agamemnon, a casting that came from a joke Michael Palin wrote into the script. The joke has the character remove his mask and turn out to be "Sean Connery or someone of equal but cheaper stature". Shown the script, Connery was happy to take the supporting part. In 1982 he took voice lessons for the role of Daddy Warbucks in John Huston's musical Annie, then turned the part down.

  He came back to Bond for Never Say Never Again, released in October 1983. The title was contributed by his wife and referred to his earlier vow that he would "never again" play the role. The film was a remake of Thunderball, produced by Jack Schwartzman's Taliafilm, and it performed well at the box office. Production was troubled, however. The director and producer were at odds, money was short, and the trustees of the Fleming estate tried to halt the film. The fight choreographer, Steven Seagal, broke Connery's wrist. Connery grew unhappy with the major studios and made no films for two years.

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• 6. Late Triumphs

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  A European production brought him back. The Name of the Rose (1986) won Connery the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and his interest in more commercial material revived. That same year, a supporting part in Highlander showed his gift for playing older mentors to younger leads, a type he would return to in many later films.

  In Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987), he played a hard-nosed Irish-American cop beside Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness, with Robert De Niro as Al Capone. Roger Ebert called Connery's the best performance in the movie. In Ebert's words, when Connery was onscreen "we can believe, briefly, that the Prohibition Era was inhabited by people, not caricatures". The role brought Connery the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He became the first Scottish actor to win a major Oscar.

  Steven Spielberg cast him as Henry Jones Sr., father of the hero, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Harrison Ford said Connery's suggestions at the writing stage gave the character "a lot more complexity and value than it had in the original screenplay". Box-office hits followed, among them The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Rock (1996) and Entrapment (1999). He gave the voice of Draco the dragon in Dragonheart in 1996, and he made a brief cameo as King Richard the Lionheart at the end of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).

  Honours piled up. In 1998 he received the BAFTA Fellowship, a lifetime achievement award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. As producer of the play Art, he won the Tony Award for Best Play the same year. The Kennedy Center Honors followed in 1999. A 2003 poll by Channel 4 ranked him eighth on its list of the 100 Greatest Movie Stars.

  Not every project worked. First Knight and Just Cause in 1995, The Avengers in 1998 and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2003 were box-office and critical disappointments. Finding Forrester (2000) earned him positive reviews. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen hurt most. Connery sensed during shooting that the production was "going off the rails", and he said the director, Stephen Norrington, "would have been arrested for insanity". He spent considerable effort trying to rescue the film in the editing process, and he decided to retire from acting rather than endure such stress again.

  Some of the roles he declined became famous. He turned down Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, saying he did not understand the script. He was reportedly offered US$30 million plus 15% of the worldwide box office receipts, which would have earned him US$450 million. He also passed on Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series and the Architect in The Matrix trilogy. In 2005 he still found time to record voiceovers and provide his likeness for the video game of From Russia with Love, working with the recording producer Terry Manning in the Bahamas.

  On the 8th of June 2006, accepting the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, Connery confirmed that he was retiring. He said he had grown disillusioned with the "idiots now making films in Hollywood". On the 7th of June 2007 he denied rumours that he would appear in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, saying "retirement is just too much damned fun". A bronze bust of him was placed in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2010, outside the Scottish Club. In 2012 he briefly came out of retirement to voice Sir Billi in the Scottish animated film of that name. It received negative reviews.

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• 7. Scotland And Money

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  The Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company in Glasgow was facing closure in the mid-1960s. Connery's friendship with the Scottish industrialist Iain Maxwell Stewart, who had befriended him through golf, led him to direct and present a documentary about the company in 1967, titled The Bowler and the Bunnet. It described the Fairfield Experiment, a new approach to industrial relations that Stewart began and that George Brown, First Secretary in Harold Wilson's cabinet, supported in 1966. Brown agreed to provide £1 million so that unions, management and shareholders could try new methods of running the yard.

  Filming in Glasgow's shipyards in 1966, together with his Scottish roots, pushed Connery towards the Scottish National Party, a centre-left party that supports Scottish independence. In 2011 he said The Bowler and the Bunnet "was just the beginning of a journey that would lead to my long association with the Scottish National Party". He backed the party with money and with personal appearances. In 1967 he wrote to George Leslie, the SNP candidate in the Glasgow Pollok by-election, that Scotland had the resources and skills to build "a prosperous, vigorous and modern self-governing Scotland". His funding stopped in 2001, when Parliament passed legislation prohibiting overseas funding of political activities in the United Kingdom.

  Politics may have delayed an honour. Connery was nominated for a knighthood in 1997 and again in 1998, but both nominations were reportedly vetoed by Donald Dewar because of Connery's political views. Queen Elizabeth II finally knighted him at an investiture ceremony at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh on the 5th of July 2000.

  His finances drew scrutiny too. Accused of being a tax exile, Connery released documents in 2003 showing he had paid £3.7 million in UK taxes between 1997 and 1998 and between 2002 and 2003. Critics noted that his rate would have been far higher had he lived continuously in the UK for tax purposes. Before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, his brother Neil said Connery would not come to rally independence supporters. His tax exile status greatly limited the days he could spend in Scotland.

  Spain raised its own questions. After Connery sold his Marbella villa in 1999, Spanish authorities opened a tax evasion investigation, alleging that the Spanish treasury had been defrauded of £5.5 million. Officials cleared Connery. His wife and 16 others were charged with attempting to defraud the treasury.

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• 8. Private Life And Legacy

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  Connery married the Australian actress Diane Cilento in 1962, and the marriage ended in 1973, though they had separated in 1971. They had a son, the actor Jason Connery. Connery illustrated the cover of Cilento's 1967 novel The Manipulator. In her 2006 autobiography, Cilento alleged that he had abused her mentally and physically during their relationship. Connery cancelled an appearance at the Scottish Parliament that year because of the controversy.

  Two earlier interviews fed that controversy. In 1965, Playboy quoted Connery as saying there was nothing particularly wrong in hitting a woman. A 1993 Vanity Fair report had him saying that some women wanted a confrontation and "a smack". In 2006 he disavowed both, saying he had been quoted out of context. "I don't believe that any level of abuse of women is ever justified under any circumstances. Full stop", he said.

  His second marriage, to the French-Moroccan painter Micheline Roquebrune, began in 1975 and lasted until his death. It survived a well-documented affair in the late 1980s with the singer and songwriter Lynsey de Paul, which she later regretted because of his views on domestic violence.

  Connery owned the Domaine de Terre Blanche in the South of France from 1979 and sold it to the German businessman Dietmar Hopp in 1999. In the 1990s he moved to the Bahamas, where he owned a mansion in Lyford Cay. He also kept a villa in Kranidi, Greece, where his neighbour was King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands. The two shared a helicopter platform. Connery held an honorary rank of Shodan (1st dan) in Kyokushin karate.

  His father introduced him to Celtic F.C., and he supported the club as a boy. Later he switched to its bitter rival Rangers F.C. after becoming close friends with the chairman, David Murray. Golf was his other passion. The English professional Peter Alliss gave him lessons before Goldfinger, in which Bond plays golf against Auric Goldfinger at Stoke Park Golf Club in Buckinghamshire. Connery wore a Slazenger v-neck sweater in the scene and became associated with the brand. Jack Nicklaus called him "a pretty darn good golfer". In May 1993, Connery and the driver Jackie Stewart helped Nicklaus open the PGA Centenary Course at Gleneagles.

  Connery died in his sleep on the 31st of October 2020, aged 90, at his home in the Lyford Cay community of Nassau in the Bahamas. His family and Eon Productions announced his death. His son Jason said he had been unwell for some time, and a day later his widow revealed he had dementia in his final years. A death certificate obtained by TMZ a month later listed pneumonia and respiratory failure, with the time of death as 1:30 am. His remains were cremated, and in 2022 his ashes were scattered at undisclosed locations in Scotland.

  Michael Caine called him a "great star, brilliant actor and a wonderful friend". The Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli said he was "undoubtedly largely responsible for the success of the film series". Polls honoured him in life. The Sunday Herald named him "The Greatest Living Scot" in 2004, and People magazine had voted him "Sexiest Man Alive" in 1989. If Never Say Never Again counts, he shares with Roger Moore the record of seven portrayals of Bond. In 2024 the Edinburgh International Film Festival created the Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence. The audience picks a winner from ten world premieres, and the winning filmmakers receive £50,000.

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