Sean Connery

Sean Connery: The Milkman Who Became Bond

In 1953 a twenty-three-year-old Scot who had polished coffins, delivered milk and posed for art students entered the Mr Universe contest. Nine years later he walked into a London casino, lit a cigarette and said his own surname twice. The line survived him by decades and made him, in the estimate of most of the twentieth century, the definitive screen version of masculine cool. He spent the following forty years trying not to be defined by it, and largely succeeded.

Fountainbridge

Thomas Sean Connery was born on 25 August 1930 in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh, to a working-class family. There was no money and no theatrical connection. Before acting he worked as a milkman, a coffin polisher and an artist's and catalogue model, and he served three years in the Royal Navy from 1946. Two tattoos from that period tell you most of what you need to know about him: one honouring his parents, the other reading Scotland Forever. He kept both for seventy years.

Bodybuilding was the accidental door. It took him to the 1953 Mr Universe competition and, through the physique, into modelling and then onto the stage. He took a small part in a production of South Pacific in 1954 that grew into the leading role. His first real critical notice came on television, in the BBC's 1957 adaptation of Requiem for a Heavyweight, where he played the washed-up boxer Mountain Rivera, a performance of considerable pathos from a man later accused of only being able to play himself.

Bond, and the Trap

His film work through the late 1950s was minor: a debut in Lilacs in the Spring in 1954, Darby O'Gill and the Little People in 1959, top billing in On the Fiddle in 1961, a small part in The Longest Day in 1962. Then, in 1962, he was cast as agent 007.

The director Terence Young is generally credited with the refinement, coaching a rough Edinburgh actor into a man who could wear a dinner jacket as though he had been born in one. What Connery supplied was the thing that could not be taught: the suggestion of violence beneath the tailoring, a physical menace that made the elegance credible rather than decorative. He played Bond in seven films: Dr. No in 1962, From Russia with Love in 1963, Goldfinger in 1964, Thunderball in 1965, You Only Live Twice in 1967, Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 and, after a twelve-year gap, Never Say Never Again in 1983.

After Dr. No he became one of the largest sex symbols on earth, and he hated the consequence almost immediately. He was, by his own account, fed up to here with the whole Bond bit. The franchise had given him everything and threatened to take the rest.

Escaping 007

His response was to work with directors who had no interest in glamour. He made Marnie for Alfred Hitchcock in 1964, playing a man whose charm is a form of coercion, and The Hill for Sidney Lumet in 1965, a brutal, unglamorous prison drama in which he is stripped of every Bond attribute at once.

The 1970s were a long, deliberately strange detour: the labour drama The Molly Maguires in 1970, the science-fiction curio Zardoz in 1974, Murder on the Orient Express the same year, John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King in 1975, The Wind and the Lion in 1975, Robin and Marian in 1976, The First Great Train Robbery in 1978, and Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits in 1981. Some were hits and many were not, but cumulatively they did the job. By 1980 he was no longer principally a spy.

The Second Career

The resurgence began with The Name of the Rose in 1986, as the Franciscan detective William of Baskerville, which won him a BAFTA. The following year he played the Irish-American Chicago beat cop Jim Malone in The Untouchables and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was fifty-seven, and had just become more sought-after than at any point since 1965.

What followed was a decade as cinema's most bankable elder: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for Steven Spielberg in 1989, in which he played Harrison Ford's father and comprehensively stole the film; The Hunt for Red October in 1990; Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in 1991; First Knight in 1995; The Rock and Dragonheart in 1996; Entrapment in 1999. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 1999 and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 2000. He retired after The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2003, returning only for occasional voice work.

Scotland

He was an outspoken advocate of Scottish independence and a committed supporter of the Scottish National Party throughout his career, at a time when that position carried real professional cost in London and Los Angeles. He never lost or softened the accent, in any role, in any period, on any continent. He married the Australian actress Diane Cilento in 1962, a marriage that lasted until 1973, and the French-Moroccan painter Micheline Roquebrune in 1975, remaining with her until his death.

Why Sean Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is presence, which is a craft skill rather than an intellectual one, and it is worth defining because it gets used lazily. Presence is the ability to alter the meaning of a scene without doing anything visible: to make stillness read as threat, or a pause read as contempt. Connery had it to an almost unfair degree. The clearest evidence is what happened to the Bond films after he left them: the same scripts, the same producers, the same gadgets, and something essential gone. He also refused to sand off the Edinburgh vowels, playing a Lithuanian submarine commander, a medieval English monk, a Spanish immortal and an Irish-American policeman in the same voice, and audiences accepted every one. That is not versatility in the conventional sense. It is the rarer trick of being so specific that specificity stops mattering.

The counter-case is exactly the one his critics have always made. He had limited range and made no serious attempt to conceal it; he did not disappear into parts, he absorbed them. The Oscar came for a supporting role, not a lead, and arrived arguably as recognition of a career rather than of one performance. A great deal of his late work was frankly commercial. He was not an actor's actor in the manner of Olivier or Brando, and he would not have claimed to be. What he possessed was something closer to the gift of a great athlete: an instrument so distinctive that its mere deployment was worth the ticket. That is a legitimate form of genius. It is simply not the intellectual kind, and dressing it up as such does him no favours.

Legacy

He died on 31 October 2020 at his home in Nassau, in the Bahamas, aged 90; the causes recorded were pneumonia and respiratory failure, and his son said he had gone peacefully. He left behind a role that has now been played by six other men and is still measured against him, an Oscar won at fifty-seven, and the most imitated speaking voice in the history of English-language cinema. He also left a template, still followed, for how an actor escapes a franchise: not by disowning it, but by outworking it for forty years.

Achievements

• Affiliated with St. Cuthbert's Co-operative Society
• Educated at Tollcross Primary School
• Worked as film actor, character actor and actor