SEAN CONNERY

Photo by Anne Leibowitz

DAVID HUDSON, CRITERION

In a primer for the New York Times on the seven films featuring Sean Connery as the first and, in the eyes of most, best James Bond, Thomas Vinciguerra notes that Connery once referred to the role that made him an international star as “a cross, a privilege, a joke, a challenge. And as bloody intrusive as a nightmare.” Nearly every tribute and remembrance that has appeared since Connery passed away on Saturday—he’d turned ninety in August—emphasizes the richness of a filmography that extends far beyond the character Ian Fleming created in a series of novels and short stories beginning in 1953, Agent 007 of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. “But for an enduring, vodka martini-soaked franchise built on one man’s tightly wound toughness, womanizing charisma, tongue-in-cheek one-liners and exquisite tastes,” writes Vinciguerra, “Connery was the Fleming word made cinematic flesh.”

Thomas Sean Connery, born to a Catholic factory worker and a Protestant cleaning woman, spent the first nights of his life sleeping in the bottom drawer of a cupboard in a modest flat in Edinburgh. By the time he was eight, he was rising before the sun to deliver milk before school and then working in a bakery in the evenings. At thirteen, he left school for a series of odd jobs—mixing cement, laying bricks, driving trucks, polishing coffins. At sixteen, he joined the Royal Navy and got himself a couple of tattoos, one of them reading “Scotland Forever.” In his late teens, he started working out and posing for students at the Edinburgh College of Art. “On the one hand,” wrote Geoffrey Macnab in a piece on these early years for Sight & Sound in 1992, “Connery’s image is of a dour, reserved man with a Calvinist attitude towards work who achieved success through sheer toil. On the other, he is an exhibitionist who became famous by offering his body as a fetish object.”

It was at a bodybuilding competition in London in 1953 that Connery caught wind of auditions for a production of South Pacific. He scored a small role in the chorus and caught the bug. An American actor in the cast, Robert Henderson, advised him to read Stanislavski on acting as well as the complete works of Shakespeare and Shaw, Ibsen and Wilde, and Joyce and Proust. He began to land more significant roles on the stage and his first small parts on the screen. The breakthrough came in 1957, when Jack Palance had to back out of a live BBC broadcast of Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight and Connery stepped in to take the lead. Later that year, he worked for the first time with director Terence Young on a forgettable feature, Action of the Tiger.


Dr. No

When Young signed on to direct the first Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), he lobbied producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman hard on behalf of Connery. Broccoli and Saltzman were thinking more along the lines of a Cary Grant or a David Niven for the role, and Ian Fleming agreed that Connery seemed a little too rough around the edges. But Broccoli’s wife, Dana, and Fleming’s girlfriend, Blanche Blackwell, assured the men that Connery seethed with sexual charisma. Young taught Connery to combine that charisma with sophistication, teaching him how to wear the right clothes, how to select, order, and then eat and drink the proper dishes, wines, and of course, the martinis, “shaken, not stirred.”

Connery played James Bond in the first five 007 films: Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964),


Thunderball (1965) [above],


and You Only Live Twice (1967). He returned for Diamonds Are Forever (1971) [above] and Never Say Never Again (1983).

Sheila O’Malley has pulled up Oriana Fallaci’s 1965 interview with Connery in which he found himself having to insist that he was “not in the least ashamed of the Bond movies. They’re amusing, intelligent, each one is more exacting than the last, each one is of better quality than the last.” And they were a lot of work. If he “hadn’t acted Shakespeare, Pirandello, Euripides, in short, what is classed as serious theater, I should never have managed to play James Bond. It’s not so easy, that role. It’s a role for a professional.” In the New York Times, Aljean Harmetz quotes Sidney Lumet, with whom Connery worked on five films. “Nonprofessionals just didn’t realize what superb high-comedy acting that Bond role was,” said Lumet. “It was like what they used to say about Cary Grant. ‘Oh,’ they’d say, ‘he’s just got charm.’ Well, first of all, charm is actually not all that easy a quality to come by. And what they overlooked in both Cary Grant and Sean was their enormous skill.”

Another 1965 interview, this one for Playboy, would shadow the rest of Connery’s life and career. “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman,” he said. “An openhanded slap is justified—if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I’d do it.” When Barbara Walters asked him about these comments in 1987, he doubled down. And Connery’s first wife, the actress Diane Cilento, recalled his physically abusing her in her 2006 autobiography, My Nine Lives.

In an excellent, tough-but-fair remembrance at RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz writes that “Connery’s brutish persona offscreen will be forever fused to his image as a leading man: patriarchal, reactionary, a lad, a boss; a self-satisfied asshole, often a bully; the best friend, the big brother, the mentor; the taskmaster and shit-stirrer; a man who considers fists an extension of words; and, virtually without exception, the type of person who rarely questions himself, and does not take kindly to being questioned.”
Mark Rutland (Connery) marries Marnie Edgar (Tippi Hedren), who he doesn’t know is a thief and a liar. After looking into her past with a private detective, he tries to help her solve her psychological problems and mental issues.

Keith Phipps, writing for GQ, finds that Connery was “ideally cast” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), “in which the abuse and sexual domination beneath the surface of so many Hitchcock films comes bubbling to the surface. In role after role, he brought out the hardness and meanness at the core of his characters Marnie appeared after the second Bond movie, From Russia with Love (1963), and Connery took the role in part to avoid being typecast as the suave spy.
Set during World War II, The Hill centers on five prisoners who are new to a military prison camp in a Libyan desert who struggle to survive in the face of brutal punishment and sadistic guards.

After Goldfinger (1964), Connery played a British officer sent to a prison camp for deserters in Sidney Lumet’s World War II drama The Hill (1965), which Glenn Erickson has called “one of the roughest, most credibly brutal dramas ever about the downside of army discipline.” The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang observes that there was nearly always “a steely, sinister edge to Connery’s screen presence, a hint of sadism beneath all his beauty, wit, and physical grace. Not enough filmmakers tapped into that darkness over the years, though Lumet was, again, an exception:
In 1973’s The Offence, (Lumet again) Connery played a detective who brutally confronts a child predator for reasons that become ever more disturbingly murky in one of the actor’s darkest, most frightening performances. It’s not too many people’s favorite Sean Connery, I imagine, but it’s one that deserves to be remembered.”
The Man Who Would Be King (1975) follows Daniel Dravot (Connery) and Peachy Carnahan (Michael Caine), two ex-soldiers living in India under British rule who start to feel that the country is too small for them. They head off to Kafiristan and become kings in a land where no white man as set foot since Alexander. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards.

In John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, Connery and his good friend Michael Caine play former British Army officers who wander into an abandoned swath of Afghanistan where the locals take Connery’s Daniel Dravot for a god. “It’s both an epic romp filled with thrills, spills, and derring-do, and a tongue-in-cheek take on the empire’s less-than-moral misadventures in foreign lands,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Fear. “Connery lets you see how the good fortune his con-artist colonialist has stumbled on warps him, and eventually sends him to a tragic end.”

Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian (1976) is a lovely yet almost mournful romantic swoon in which Connery’s aging Robin Hood reunites with his long lost love, Maid Marian, played by Audrey Hepburn, For Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, this entire period of Connery’s career “now feels like his wilderness years, as if the manly ideal he represented in the 1960s had been overtaken by a more sinister and uncertain climate, leaving him behind his times.” But in the 1980s, “the man came back, an elder statesman finally embracing his age, and actually showing some versatility.”
A Bridge Too Far' (1977) In September 1944, Allies attempted to capture several strategically important bridges in the Netherlands in the hope of breaking German lines known as Operations Market Garden. However, the poor planning resulted in failure. The film was adapted from Cornelius Ryan's book of the same name.

In 1997, Mark Cousins filmed an interview with Connery for the BBC and asked him if his comeback might be credited to a new agent. “No,” smiled Connery slyly, “otherwise you would have filmed him.”

The Name of the Rose (1986), Set in 1327, monks are convinced the apocalypse is coming after the death of Benedictine Abbey. William Baskerville (Connery) and his young novice must race against time to prove the innocence of the unjustly accused and avoid the wrath of the Holy Inquisitor Bernardo Gui.

During the 1920s prohibition in Chicago, Federal Agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) sets out to stop Al Capone (Robert De Niro). He chooses four men to battle Capone and his empire. Connery won an Academy Award for best actor in a supporting role for his portrayal of a tough, Irish cop who mentors Ness. The film was nominated for three additional Academy Awards.

The 1980s saw Connery winning a Bafta for his performance in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1986), and an Oscar for his role in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987).

Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) learns that his father, Henry Jones Sr. (Connery), a Holy Grail scholar, has disappeared while on a quest to find the ancient artifact and sets out to find them both. The movie was nominated for three Oscars and won for best sound effects.

Connery then won over a fresh wave of fans playing Harrison Ford’s father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). “Steven Spielberg’s decision to cast Connery as Professor Henry Jones in the third Indiana Jones movie might have come off as a stunt if the veteran actor hadn’t been such a perfect fit—instead, it comes off like a coup,” writes David Fear.

In November 1984, the Soviet Union creates a new nuclear submarine that runs silently underwater. The captain’s goal is to take the submarine to the United States to prevent the Russians from using it to start a war. The film was nominated for three Oscars, winning for best effects.

The hits kept coming in the 1990s. Connery played a Soviet naval captain—with a Scottish-tainted accent, of course—in John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October (1990);

a British publisher in Moscow who finds himself working for the Secret Intelligence Service and falling for Michelle Pfeiffer’s Katya Orlova in Fred Schepisi’s 1990 adaptation of John le Carré’s novel, The Russia House;

Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), a biochemist who works for the FBI, finds out that San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island has been taken hostage. He teams up with with the only person who can show him the inside of the prison, a prisoner named John Patrick Mason (Connery) who escaped from Alcatraz three decades earlier.

SAS Captain John Patrick Mason, the only person to have ever escaped Alcatraz, in Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996). The plot of The Rock “hinges on an outrageous villainous plot, a ludicrous heroic mission, and a protagonist whose stature is downright mythic,” writes Nick Schager at the Daily Beast. “To that end, it’s the perfect late-career role for Connery.”

In the Hollywood Reporter, Bay looks back on nervously shooting his second movie with a legend. At one point, he told Connery that Disney was getting all over his case for running two days over schedule. So Connery helped him arrange a meeting. “In classic Sean Connery style,” writes Bay, “he belts out in his Scottish brogue: ‘This boy is doing a good job, and you’re living in your Disney Fucking Ivory Tower and we need more fucking money!!’ Without missing a beat, they responded. ‘OK. How much?’”

Brian Koppelman, the cocreator of Showtime’s Billions, tells another story about his and cowriter David Levien’s involvement in a movie that Connery would have starred in if the director hadn’t infuriated him. What comes through first is just how seriously hard Connery worked on drafts and rewrites before he would approve a screenplay. Second, the man was funny. A few months after Connery bailed on the project, Levien paid him a call in the Bahamas. “When the director’s name comes up,” writes Koppelman, “Mr. Connery gives us one last great line, ‘Ah, him, that guy, he’s a bucket of smoke.’” This was 2004. Two years later, as he received the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Connery announced that he was retiring from acting. “He’s gone now,” writes Keith Phipps, “leaving only the performances behind, a collection of classic turns we can watch with a love that’s both unsettling and undeniable.”