Sean Connery at 80

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Sean Connery at 80

Post by Blowfeld »

A Sean Birthday themed thread
Daniel Read and Emily Dugan shake up 80 stirring facts to mark the actor's birthday this week

Sunday, 22 August 2010
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1. His first bed was the bottom drawer of the family wardrobe.

2. James Bond casters initially wanted a well-established British actor for the role, but with the coffers empty they plumped for the little-known Connery.

3. He writes poetry (but won't let anyone see it).

4. He left school at the age of 12 – three years after taking up smoking.

5. His brief spell in the Navy ended in two tattoos, one saying "Scotland Forever" and the other "Mum and Dad".

6. As an oversized teenager he acquired the nickname "Big Tam".

7. His fanaticism for football was so great he deliberately failed his grammar school exam because they played rugby.

8. He once worked as a nude model for art students.

9. His first name is Thomas.

10. In 1953 he entered Mr Universe, coming third in the tall men category.

11. His first acting role was in the male chorus of South Pacific at the Drury Lane Theatre in London.

12. Sean's silky soccer skills got him a trial with Manchester United. Luckily he stuck with acting.

13. He claims he will not return to Scotland until it is fully independent.

14. Sean used to practise dialogue with a portable tape recorder.

15. Bond creator Ian Fleming did not at first approve of Sean in the role. He soon changed his mind.

16. Connery shares his birthday with US film director Tim Burton.

17. He passed on the role of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings allegedly because he had difficulty understanding the novels.

18. When he starred in Requiem for a Heavyweight in 1957, casters struggled to find anyone willing to face him in the ring, thanks to his Navy-learnt boxing prowess.

19. He is a sun-chaser, swapping his home in Spain for the Bahamas.

20. Connery was on the board of directors for The Independent.

21. After joining the Navy at 16, he had to leave three years later because ulcers made him unfit to serve.

22. He got his first job at nine, delivering milk via horse and cart.

23. Sean's first foray into Hollywood was in the 1958 film Another Time, Another Place.

24. United Artists was so sceptical of his Bond that it premiered Dr No in the Midwest to avoid attracting scorn.

25. Both he and his son, Jason, have played Robin Hood.

26. He finally broke the James Bond mould in 1975 by starring in The Man Who Would Be King.

27. After Terry Gilliam wrote that the part of King Agamemnon in Time Bandits would look "exactly like Sean Connery", Sean found out and asked to be in the film.

28. He delivered milk to Fettes College in Edinburgh, the same school attended by a young James Bond in a novel depicting his expulsion from Eton.

29. He regards the American Bill of Rights as one of the greatest political documents.

30. Stanley Baker was his first acting idol.

31. He is a member of the Scottish National Party.

32. His first wife, Diane Cilento, alleged he beat her during their marriage. He agreed in a 1987 interview that it was acceptable to "shlap" women.

33. The role of the ill-fated Jimmy Malone in The Untouchables finally won him an Oscar.

34. His son Jason keeps his father's Oscar at his home in New York.

35. Connery's wife, Micheline Roquebrune, is French, but he cannot speak the language.

36. He supports Celtic football club.

37. He was voted Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine.

38. He started losing his hair at 21.

39. His star sign is Virgo.

40. His "Oirish" accent in The Untouchables won him Empire magazine's accolade of the Worst Accent in Film History.

41. He has survived cancer in his vocal chords and his kidney.

42. Connery grew up in a tenement in Edinburgh with no hot water or electricity.

43. As 007, his hair was always a wig.

44. After receiving £250,000 for two days' work on Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, he gave it to charity.

45. Steven Seagal broke Sean's wrist during a martial arts lesson.

46. His knighthood in July 2000 was reportedly delayed because of his staunch nationalism.

47. He is bored of Bond films and thinks Quentin Tarantino should direct them.

48. He had planned to make a film of Shakespeare's Macbeth but was beaten to it by Roman Polanski in 1971.

49. In 2004 he spent a year writing his autobiography, despite previously saying he would never attempt to.

50. Legend has it he was pulled over for speeding by a police officer named James Bond.

51. His mother was a cleaner; his father a lorry driver.

52. He is an obsessive golfer.

53. Of the six actors to play the role of Bond, Connery is the only one to serve in the Navy like Bond himself.

54. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (2003) was a "nightmare" that partly led to his retirement, he claimed.

55. In 1999 he implored the Scottish Parliament to enact a total ban on handguns.

56. He admits to being fond of a drink.

57. His childhood home was close to a brewery, whose pungent fumes caused upset stomachs and fainting.

58. George Bernard Shaw is one of his favourite authors.

59. He was considered for the part of Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1965).

60. Empire magazine voted him 14th in its "Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time".

61. Connery took dancing lessons for 11 years.

62. Sean once claimed he hated the character of Bond.

63. A plan for the Edinburgh Filmhouse to be renamed "The Sean Connery Filmhouse" was rejected in 2005.

64. The renowned ladies' man cannot recall who he lost his virginity to.

65. In the novel Scorpius, Connery was said to be one of James Bond's favourite actors.

66. He once had a relationship with Julie Hamilton, the step-daughter of former Labour leader Michael Foot.

67. Connery has campaigned for the World Food Programme.

68. His younger brother Neil, a plasterer, has also acted.

69. Several films feature characters doing impressions of Connery, including Jonny Lee Miller in Trainspotting and Mel Gibson in What Women Want.

70. After befriending actress Lana Turner – then girlfriend of American gangster Johnny Stompanato – he had to go into hiding from the mob.

71. Creepy crawlies meant he hated acting in Medicine Man, which was shot in the rainforest.

72. As a child he used to fish in the Union Canal using his mum's old nylon stockings.

73. He believes he should have won an Oscar for The Man Who Would Be King.

74. He turned down $5.5m to play 007 in Live and Let Die.

75. The film title for Never Say Never Again (1983) was suggested by his wife. Sean had considered his Bond days over.

76. After the Navy he trained as a French polisher, working on the finishes for pianos and coffins.

77. His favourite Bond film is Thunderball.

78. Sean was the most popular British film actor in the Orange Movie Survey.

79. He was offered a role in Rob Roy.

80. In 1993 he appeared on US TV to deny news agency reports that he was dead.
This story can be found at http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 58837.html
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"Those were the days when we still associated Bond with suave, old school actors such as Sean Connery and Roger Moore,"
"Daniel didn't have a hint of suave about him," - Patsy Palmer
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The films that got away from Scotland's greatest movie star

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Aug 22 2010 John Millar, Sunday Mail

His licence to thrill as the original, and the best, 007, made him a big-screen icon. But Sean Connery's impact on the film world could have been even greater.

For instance, Connery could have weaved his magic on a whole new generation of movie fans if he hadn't turned down the role of Gandalf in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

That way, he would have starred in two of the greatest film franchises - the adventures in Middle Earth and 007's secret agent thrillers.

Although it's almost 30 years since his last James Bond adventure, Never Say Never Again, Edinburgh's most famous son remains tied to that role.

It's indisputable that Dr No launched him into superstardom - but there's more to Sean Connery, knight of the realm and Oscar winner, than Bond.

It could even be said that Connery is Scotland's answer to John Wayne because, like The Duke, he never went down the method-acting route of having to master all manner of accents to get under the skin of characters.

Instead, he always brought an awesome presence and that indefinable element called star quality to the screen.

After Bond, and without ever losing the slightest trace of his soft Edinburgh burr, he was a Lithuanian submarine commander in The Hunt For Red October and an Arab sheik in The Wind And The Lion.

Years before Russell Crowe took us on a tour of accents of the British Isles in the recent Robin Hood epic, Connery, still as Scottish as ever, was an ageing hero of Sherwood Forest in Robin And Marian.

Then, in The Untouchables, he was a tough Irish American cop - sounding closer to Dunbar than Dublin - and deservedly earned an Academy Award.

And the best double act of his career came when he teamed up with Michael Caine for that glorious Raj romp, The Man Who Would Be King. They gelled so perfectly that it's astonishing they were never cast together again.

These films, and the Bonds, of course, are rightly considered the cinematic cream of his output. But scratch the surface and there's a lot more.

The gritty side of Connery is seen to great effect in the military prison drama The Hill. And in the dark drama The Offence, he gave what was probably his finest performance, as a policeman at breaking point.

Of course, there have also been times spent in the doldrums - like when he starred in duds like Meteor and Cuba and the atrocious big-screen version of The Avengers. But happily the good stuff far outweighs the dross.

There might have been even more to celebrate if Connery hadn't rejected a bunch of films - including Lord Of The Rings, which he supposedly turned down because he didn't fancy being in New Zealand for more than a year.

The combination of Connery and Barbra Streisand sounds irresistible - and it might have happened if, as claimed, he'd agreed to star alongside the diva in Funny Girl. The role went to Omar Sharif.

We could also have seen him star with Faye Dunaway in classic caper The Thomas Crown Affair. When he declined, Steve McQueen stepped in.

Another rejection was the role that Richard Attenborough eventually played in Jurassic Park.

But as he prepares to blow outthe 80 candles on his birthday cake, Sean Connery can have few regrets as he looks back on a life in film that has always had audiences shaken and stirred.
This story can be found at http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/edito ... -22505795/
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"Those were the days when we still associated Bond with suave, old school actors such as Sean Connery and Roger Moore,"
"Daniel didn't have a hint of suave about him," - Patsy Palmer
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The A-Z of Sean Connery

Post by Blowfeld »

The A-Z of Sean Conner

Published Date: 22 August 2010
By Siobhan Synnot
As the world's best James Bond turns 80 this Wednesday, we examine his life and work… occashionally in the shtar's very own words.
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• Sean Connery turns 80 this week

Accents
Whether he's playing a magnificently toupéed Russian submarine commander, an irascible Irish cop or an anachronistically-chivalrous North African Berber prince, you might as well add "from Fountainbridge" to the end of all of them. Yet Connery remains defiant. "If I didn't talk the way I talk," he has said, "I wouldn't know who the f*** I was."

Bond
During the Seventies and Eighties, Connery regarded 007 as a millstone rather than a milestone in his movie career. In the beginning, however, he admits he enjoyed himself. "The first two or three were fun," he says. "The cast made it fun. Jumping out of planes was entertaining, although it was tough on my hairpiece." He won the role despite the initial disapproval of author Ian Fleming, who would have preferred Cary Grant or Trevor Howard rather than "an overgrown stuntman".

Coffin Polisher
Just one of the jobs Connery had before he broke into acting. Aged nine, he had a milk round in Edinburgh. At 13, he left Glen Darroch school and became a steel bender, a cement mixer, a lifeguard, a life model and spent two years in the Navy. He got his first acting job in the he-man chorus of South Pacific. When he was offered the job, his first question was: "What's the wage?" The producer airily replied: "It really doesn't concern me." "Well," barked Connery, "it concerns me."

Diamonds Are Forever
Eventually Connery grew bitter about the profits Bond was generating for Cubby Broccoli, and he was only enticed into returning for Diamonds Are Forever by an unheard of paypacket, which he used to set up his charity the Scottish International Education Trust. "I admit I'm being paid well, but it's no more than I deserve," he remarked. "After all, I've been screwed more times than a hooker."

Edinburgh Film Festival
Since retiring from acting five years ago, Connery has been able to devote more time to the Edinburgh International Film Festival, of which he is a patron. Sadly, this year he announced he will be taking a back seat in future. He brought a regal glamour to parties and premieres but also revealed a playful side when he hosted the closing awards. Hugging winners bearishly, he shamelessly touted for work and was entranced by a clip of Werner Herzog's Encounters At The End of the World, where a penguin broke away from the rest of the flock and waddled off purposefully into the unknown. "Sometimes," confided Connery, "I feel like that penguin."

From Russia With Love
Argyll stood in for the Russian countryside and Connery did most of the stunts himself in his second Bond film until an inexperienced pilot got too close during the helicopter chase, and almost killed him.

Golf
"I met my wife (Micheline Roquebrune] 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."

Hairloss
Balding from his late teens, Connery has spent most of his life offering hope to the follicly challenged: although not everyone can pull off the beard and barehead combo without looking like Ming the Merciless.

Indiana Jones
Along with The Name of the Rose (1986), and The Untouchables (1987), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) turned Connery into the movies' most potent father figure – capable, supportive, but not altogether benign. "Indiana?" scoffs Henry Jones at the end of Last Crusade. "We named the dog Indiana".

Jason
Connery's only son, from his first marriage to Diane Cilento. Educated at Gordonstoun, based in Los Angeles and an actor in his own right, in an Oedipal twist Jason once played Ian Fleming in a TV movie.

Knighthood
Connery has never forgiven Donald Dewar for blocking his knighthood when it was first mooted, but even the Queen couldn't resist a dig when dubbing Sir Sean at a ceremony in Edinburgh. "Do you get up here often?" she inquired.

Leading ladies
Connery appears to have got on well with all his co-stars except Lorraine Bracco who appeared in the eco-dud Medicine Man. Bracco irritated the meticulous Connery by failing to prepare adequately before filming. "She would mix her lines up while I'm stuck 50ft up a tree in the jungle," he growled.

Memoirs
Twice Connery has flirted with the idea of an autobiography then thought better of it. Being A Scot, a compromise collaboration with his old pal Murray Grigor published last year seemed to confirm Connery as a man who did not enjoy introspection. According to Meg Henderson, the first author he approached to shape his memoirs, Connery is less concerned about setting the record straight, and more anxious about having his shortcomings exposed.

Never Say Never Again
Throughout his career Connery took a keen interest in the financial performance of each of his films. Perhaps that's why in 1983, he had one last fling with 007. For legal reasons, it was a remake of Thunderball, and renamed Never Say Never Again, a self-admonishing title suggested by his second wife.

Ooyah
While teaching Sean Connery martial arts, the instructor broke Connery's wrist. Connery didn't complain and the injury was not detected for years. The instructor was Steven Seagal.

Paramount
The only major studio Connery hasn't taken to court over missing profits or a salary dispute. Over the years his courtroom wins and settlements would make Erin Brokovich swoon with admiration. In particular he bankrupted Allied Artists after suing the studio that produced The Man Who Would Be King for cosmetic bookkeeping.

Q
When he first played the boffin in From Russia with Love, Desmond Llewelyn claims Connery would fiddle distractingly with the gadgets while Llewelyn was trying to remember his lines. Finally he snapped "Pay attention, 007!" It became his catchphrase for the rest of the series.

Reading Room
Determined to improve himself while he was touring in South Pacific, Connery visited a library every day. "The first thing I had to get was a dictionary because I didn't understand half of the words. But when I started going into James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, even the dictionary wasn't much help." He also bought a tape recorder to refine his accent.

Scotland
He's got the keys to his home city and has financially supported the Scottish National Party for years (he has "Scotland Forever" tattooed on his arm). "I can't imagine that anyone who lives in Scotland can really not want to be independent," he stated in their 1992 manifesto, without acknowledging any incongruity to his independent life thousands of miles away, as a longtime resident of first Spain and now the Bahamas.


Tom
Although he was christened Thomas Connery, he maintains that he was called Sean long before he became an actor. "I had an Irish buddy when I was 12 named Seamus. So they nicknamed us Seamus and Sean and it stuck."

Untouchables
"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."

Vices
"I did smoke pot a few times but nothing else. I would never inject. I'm too fond of the drink. At times I can go two weeks or more without it, but then I'm quite enthusiastic to get back to the taste again."

Women
Over the years, Connery has sparked controversy with comments about violence and women. He told Playboy magazine: "I don't think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman – although I don't recommend doing it in the same way that you'd hit a man. An open-handed 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." Connery later backtracked, saying he was not advocating violence against women, but the damage was done.

X-factor
Voted Sexiest Man Alive, Connery countered: "Well there aren't many sexy dead men, are there?"

You're The One That I Want
Connery can be rather picky about his male dance partners. While filming The Man Who Would Be King, he and Michael Caine ended up in a small town at the edge of the Sahara with nothing to do except go to the local disco. Recalls Caine: "It was men dancing with men because women weren't allowed out at night. So we're standing at the bar watching all these guys dancing, when Sean leans over and says to me, 'Do you mind if I dance with your driver? Mine's too ugly.'
More recently, Connery insisted John Travolta waltz with him "so I can find out what the fuss is about". Travolta meekly obliged, admitting: "And of course, I let him lead."

Zardoz
What does the future hold? According to this infamous 1970s sci-fi movie, Connery will don a long pigtail, a biker moustache and a red nappy.
This story can be found at http://news.scotsman.com/15598/The-AZ-o ... 6487706.jp
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"Those were the days when we still associated Bond with suave, old school actors such as Sean Connery and Roger Moore,"
"Daniel didn't have a hint of suave about him," - Patsy Palmer
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Re: Sean Connery at 80

Post by Blowfeld »

Sean Connery 'close to Bond snub'
Published Date: 23 August 2010
SEAN Connery almost missed out on the role of his life because decision makers thought they could "do better" in their quest for a James Bond star.
It was only when the producer's wife said the Fountainbridge-born star was "to die for", memos have revealed, that he secured the part.

A new biography about Sir Sean also tells how New York money men referred to him as "that truck driver" and told filmmakers to "keep trying" to find an better alternative.

The memos add that Michael Redgrave and Roger Moore were considered for the role.



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* Last Updated: 23 August 2010 11:19 AM
* Source: Edinburgh Evening News
* Location: Edinburgh
* Related Topics: Sean Connery
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"Those were the days when we still associated Bond with suave, old school actors such as Sean Connery and Roger Moore,"
"Daniel didn't have a hint of suave about him," - Patsy Palmer
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Saluting Sir Sean Connery

Post by Blowfeld »

Christopher Bray


23 Aug 2010

As the actor turns 80, we look at how he redefined masculinity – and put Scotland on the global stage.

When The New Yorker magazine’s distinguished critic Pauline Kael was reviewing Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade she mentioned “a friend … who’s in his early fifties … who says that when he grows up he wants to be Sean Connery.” Him and every other guy born in the past half century or so.

From the moment I first set eyes on Connery, in a clip from Diamonds Are Forever on the BBC children’s movie quiz Screen Test in late 1971, my fate as a dreamer was sealed. Whoever this man was (“He’s a has-been,” my father told me over dinner), he had shown me a vision of the man I wanted to be.

As Philip Kaufman, who directed Connery in Rising Sun, once said: “People are very attracted by the way Sean behaves … They would like to feel that they have his qualities, his grace under pressure.”

I know I do. I like watching Sean Connery. I like watching him move through and around a room. I especially like watching him open and close doors. I like the idea of a big, big man being so light on his feet. Part of the reason I like it is because I wish the same could be said about me – average height, clumsy, heavy-footed. Oh, sure, as my wife is forever telling me, another part of the reason is that I – like every other man she knows – fantasise about being a jetsetting secret agent. But not just any jetsetting secret agent. If part of wanting to be Connery is wanting to be James Bond, the whole of wanting to be Bond is wanting to be Connery. Nobody ever fancied themselves the new Roger Moore.

Not that Connery ever fancied himself as James Bond. Nothing in his training – largely classical theatre and romantic melodrama – let alone his background had prepared him for playing a part that Michael Caine remembers everyone thinking would go to Rex Harrison. Nor did Connery help matters when he turned up to audition for the part of Ian Fleming’s gentleman spy wearing a lumber jacket and torn jeans. “You take me as I am or not at all,” he told the producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, but though they were eventually won over by what Broccoli called “the most arrogant son of a gun you’ve ever seen”, Fleming himself remained unconvinced. Not until the Bond movies were earning him far more money than his books ever had would he stop referring to Connery as “that f***ing truck driver”.

In point of fact, Connery was the son of a truck driver – born into the poverty of a two-roomed, cold-water tenement flat in Edinburgh’s Fountainbridge 80 years ago this week. Not, it should be said, that Connery has ever bigged up his origins. As he has several times sagely pointed out, you don’t know you’re poor when everyone you around you is poor, too. And anyway, judging by the childhood photographs Connery used to illustrate Being A Scot (his idiosyncratic history of his homeland), he was by some measure the most smartly turned-out kid on the block – hair combed and parted, tie neatly knotted. Still, though he won a scholarship place at Boroughmuir High School, he elected to attend the rather more downmarket Darroch – so he could play football rather than the rugby Boroughmuir insisted upon.

In fact, Connery could have become famous for football rather than acting. In his early twenties, he was spotted by a talent scout for Manchester United’s then manager Matt Busby and offered a trial at Old Trafford. Happily for movie history, Connery chose to stick it out in the chorus line of the touring production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. Subsequently, he won a few speaking parts on the London stage, before lucking out big time when Jack Palance dropped out of a BBC Sunday Night Theatre production of Requiem For A Heavyweight. The director, Alvin Rakoff, knew Connery well through a poker group they both played in, but he never thought to use him as a replacement for Palance’s punch-drunk fighter until his wife told him “the ladies would like it”.

And not only the ladies. The next morning the phone at Connery’s agent’s office didn’t stop ringing as one studio after another bid on the man they saw as the next big thing. Soon enough, the 26-year-old Connery had signed a seven-year contract with Twentieth Century Fox worth around £6,000 a year (more than £100,000 today). Six months later he was chosen – by the lady herself – to star opposite Lana Turner. Alas, Another Time, Another Place turned out a stinker, and there would be another five years of thankless slog before Connery scored the part that made him.

He made the part, too, of course. Had Rex Harrison actually been cast as James Bond in Dr No (or Dirk Bogarde or David Niven or Richard Todd – all of whom were on Saltzman and Broccoli’s wish-list) there would have been no From Russia With Love, let alone any Daniel Craig. “Sean Connery IS James Bond” screamed the posters for Thunderball and You Only Live Twice, and more than four decades later 007 aficionados are agreed that no-one else has ever held a candle to the original.

How did the low-born Connery come to be the living embodiment of Fleming’s clubland snob? Partly by playing the role for laughs – Bond’s cynical wisecracks were Connery’s idea – and partly by emblematising the meritocratic spirit of sixties Britain – the voice Connery found for Bond was as east-coast American as it was Edinburgh.

Mostly, though, it was Connery’s sheer animal grace that wowed audiences. Looked at in the abstract, Dr No is little more than “the grade-B Charlie Chan mystery” Joseph Wiseman (who played the titular villain) labelled it. All that really counts about this otherwise rather dull film is the silky mobility of its leading man. Witness Connery’s Bond padding around his hotel room – stretching upwards from the balls of his feet to peer out of a window like a dancer at full height, dipping swan’s neck style down to his knees to booby-trap a door. The men who had worshipped Fleming’s Bond hadn’t really wanted much more than to know their way round a wine list. Connery’s Bond mocked such social-climbing antics while appealing to the instinct for elegance that men had hitherto been able to allow themselves – and even then only surreptitiously – at fights and football matches.

So it is that for almost 50 years, men around the world have been measuring themselves against a masculinity Connery’s Bond defined. Indeed, over recent years he has made movies about that very subject. Since the mid eighties, when he returned to Scotland for Highlander, Connery has played variants on what we might call his mentor figure. The Name Of The Rose, The Untouchables, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, The Hunt For Red October – in all these and more Connery plays a man younger men look up to and want to be. What better definition of movie stardom is there?

“I have no illusions,” Connery told an interviewer, “that anything I’m going to do will give me this completeness that you’re implying I’m in search of.” But we are all in search of such completeness – and at least occasionally and momentarily we find it by gazing at the secular saints of the cinema. For the essential function of the movie star is to body forth to the world a (doubtless chimerical) vision of a unified self on to which can be projected a million and one atomised fantasies. Not since the days of Bogart and Cary Grant, of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, has anyone fulfilled that function as frequently and as potently as Sean Connery. Maybe he really does have no illusions. We should be thankful, though, that for almost half a century now he has granted us so many of our own.

Sean Connery: The Measure Of A Man by Christopher Bray is published by Faber and Faber, priced £20.



Seven Connery Classics

Dr No 1962

The first of seven Bonds for Sean Connery, and the one that established the audience-wowing formula. It’s all here: exotic location, theme tune, gadgets, quips, provocatively named female sidekick, crazed villain and a pining Miss Moneypenny.

From Russia With Love 1963

By now, the whole “would Cary Grant have made a better 007?” debate was dead in the shark-infested waters. Connery was in, and in this Cold War tale, reportedly his favourite Bond, he’s having the time of his 33-year-old life.

Marnie 1964

Hitchcock looked for ice in his blondes and fire in his male leads. Connery sizzled as Mark Rutland, the suave publisher who marries a kleptomaniac. Too bleak for audiences of the time, but Connery had shown there was more to him than muscle.

Goldfinger 1964

Guy Hamilton’s actioner upped the glam factor in the Bond series, and in its despatch of Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson, the franchise added an element of steeliness to the mix.

The Man Who Would Be King 1975

Connery has given the Edinburgh International Film Festival much needed star wattage over the years. This year, as a thank you, schedulers screened John Huston’s epic adventure, starring Connery as the squaddie with ambition.

The Untouchables 1987

“You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” Connery’s straight arrow Irish cop won him his only Oscar.

Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade 1989

One of the century’s most beloved action figures needs a father figure. Who else was Spielberg gonna call? Harrison Ford, Connery’s screen son, led the tributes when daddy cool was given the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. Alison Rowat, Herald Film Critic



The underside of Connery’s charisma

It is one of life’s small injustices that women are presumed to lose their looks as the years roll on while men of a certain age are said to acquire the patina of suave distinction. Enter Sean Connery, who from the moment of ditching the toupee he wore for all the Bond films found permanent residence in the pantheon of Scots with sex appeal.

Connery is now the pin-up pensioner with the enduringly prosperous aura: tanned, exquisitely tailored, the beard turned to silver, the gravelled voice a blend of urban Scottishness and well-travelled inflexions. Indeed senior citizenship for the emeritus James Bond has become the third age of conquest. Other Bonds may come and go but, fixed in the universal psyche, Connery’s 007 is peerless.

But there is a dark side to Connery, a glowering machismo which studio publicists like to call his “smouldering Scottish allure”, but the phrase does little to ameliorate an aggressive churlishness towards women which is perceived as a national characteristic out of order and out of time. According to a recent survey led by Dr Lisa DeBruine of the University of Aberdeen, six out of 10 women in Britain prefer more sensitive-looking men to those of the “manly” stereotype. In DeBruine’s view this could account for why today’s stars such as Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom are popular while the likes of Connery and Clark Gable are regarded as cliched period pieces. Seen in those terms Connery, a bodybuilder in his youth, is not that far removed from Tarzan narcissism; a pumped-up masculinity untroubled by culture, civilisation or women.

Not that women were missing from the picture, but no matter how glamorous they were, the women on screen were merely accompaniments to illustrate men’s control over them. Hence in Connery’s Bond adventures there was often a shiver of violence in the air when a yet-to-be-tamed beauty was in the frame. Which leads us back to the tricky underside of Connery’s charisma. While on the set of Thunderball, he told Playboy magazine in 1965 there wasn’t “anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman”. Was this life imitating film scripts? If he meant it, our hero must have known he wasn’t alone. In sixties Scotland “zero tolerance” of domestic violence wasn’t even articulated by the judiciary, police or victims themselves. The ugliness of such fury ran right through society: men hit women because women were asking for it. Tackled further about this impulse, he said: “If a woman is a bitch or hysterical or bloody-minded continually, I’d do it.” No sign of remorse there, then, and in 1987 he told America’s doyenne interviewer Barbara Walters that “it would be acceptable for a man to hit a woman with an open hand if she continued to provoke him after he had conceded an argument to her”.

By 2006 his first wife, Diane Cilento, was claiming in her autobiography that Connery had beaten her on several occasions, charges he vehemently denied. Her allegations did little to erode her ex-husband’s fan base. Connery’s 2008 memoir, Being A Scot, avoids mention of these marital battles, a shrewd tactic which implies Cilento’s book is opportunist.

Should any of this be regarded as something other than the film world’s squalid brawling? Well, yes. Connery may have mellowed, but the credo he revealed in his heyday did nothing to send misogyny packing. In the minds of certain men it reaffirmed it. Connery and Cilento were divorced in 1973 and two years later he married artist Micheline Roquebrune. “I met my wife through playing golf,” he said. “She’s French and couldn’t speak a word of English, and I couldn’t speak French so there was little chance of us getting involved in boring conversation – that’s why we got married really quickly.” A further remark, in which Connery declared he liked women but didn’t understand them, revealed a shift from outright machismo.

Today there is no modern Scottish equivalent because that brand of conspicuous manhood is out of favour. Yet something of the stardust remains. Now, when he appears beneath the arc lights, photographers still swarm and, for a moment, Sean Connery reminds us of that screen god once so accustomed to having women draped around him like votive offerings. Anne Simpson





What Connery means to Scotland

Here’s the question. Where would Scotland be without Sean Connery? Put aside his patriotic utterances (I’ll come back to them later) and don’t worry about Sir Sean the benefactor of various charities. Concentrate, instead, not on what he has done, but on what he represents. Because isn’t there an argument to be made that for many people, particularly those who don’t live on this little parcel of land, Sean Connery is Scotland? That he embodies the nation, or at least a particular vision of the nation. And, further, that Scotland and Scottishness, or at least a modern Scotland and Scottishness, begins with him.

It doesn’t end with him but that’s only because he blew the doors off, ensuring others could follow him through. Would actors such as Dougray Scott, Ewan McGregor, maybe even Gerard Butler, have the careers they have now if Connery hadn’t paved the way for them, hadn’t proved to the world – first as James Bond and then in a whole variety of roles in which he was usually first and foremost himself – that stardom could come with a Scottish accent?

That’s what film stars do, of course. They don’t act. That’s not the point of stardom. It’s about being oneself, always. It’s about embodying an image, refining it through different character types. When he came to prominence playing Bond, Connery embodied a version of Scottishness – a tough, clean-lined, straightforward masculinity very much of its time, that time being the early sixties. It happened to chime with the emerging declasse nature of celebrity. Connery was Stanley Baker mark two – the international version of the hard man, able to wear fitted suits and finesse high-born women. Connery as Bond represented the sixties vision of modern man – a playboy, a traveller at home in the casino, the bedroom and battle. Connery took Scottishness out into the world, made it something attractive, desirable, made it something hip. It’s significant that when Irvine Welsh was writing Trainspotting he used Connery as a totem in Sick Boy’s head.

It’s a very sixties modernity, all the same, one that has now inevitably aged. When author Christopher Bray says he grew up wanting to be Connery it’s not something I – another fortysomething – recognise. Connery seemed too much like my father’s generation. While I loved my father I never wanted to be him.

When I came to Scotland there were other models of masculinity – the highbrow dandyism of Edwyn Collins, the heart-bruised romanticism of Roddy Frame, the gawkiness of John Gordon Sinclair in which I could (all too unfortunately in the case of Sinclair) recognise myself, or perhaps see something I might want to aspire to. Connery felt old school. At least he was true to that old school. For all those Bond one-liners he never succumbed to parodying himself for the new lad generation.

The same could be said about his nationality. “Scotland Forever” reads the tattoo on his arm. He means it, too, and has put his money where his mouth is to fund the SNP. Yet Connery gets grief for voicing his opinions. There’s a Facebook page called Sean Connery Is An Arse, moaning about the man’s contradictions – happy enough to voice his opinions about how the country should be governed, but not happy enough to live and pay tax here etc. McGregor has said much the same thing about Connery once or twice. And yet it’s a ridiculous notion. As if we can only have opinions about places we actually live in.

The danger here is that we’re dealing with a particularly Caledonian version of the tall poppy syndrome. Connery is – or was – the international vision of Scottishness, but it’s his internationalism that for some seems to be the problem. Yet the fact he no longer lives in Fountainbridge shouldn’t be held against him. What a mean, crabby vision of human possibility that would represent. You can, of course, take issue with a nationalist who is happy to accept a knighthood from a Labour government , but in the end it’s the icon not the man who resonates. The icon is the embodiment of the idea that Scots can go out in the world and be someone. Someone with a capital S. And isn’t that the Scottish story throughout history? Teddy Jamieson
this story can be found at http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents ... -1.1050012
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Re: Sean Connery at 80

Post by Dr. No »

Happy Birth Day Sean!!!! (tomorrow)
:happybd: :cake: :yay: :happybd: :cake: :yay: :db5: :yay: :cake: :happybd: :martini: :britflag:

Saw this and thought it would be interesting to all of you.
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In this week's edition of COMIC BOOK LEGENDS REVEALED, we see that waaay back in 1963, DC regrettably forgot about their ability to produce a JAMES BOND comic book. And the character would have looked like Sean Connery. It seems that a comic adaptation of the first Bond movie, Dr. No, was made for a British company, who then gave it to DC to use in the United States. They didn't promote it very well, blah blah blah, the movie was a huge hit later in the year. Everyone had forgotten this thing even existed!

DC did not do anything with the option and seemed to have forgotten about it, even as the Bond films became international smashes throughout the 1960s. Finally, with the option set to expire in 1972, DC seriously considered doing a comic book based on Bond (hoorah! wait...awww.), but with Sean Connery announcing he was leaving the series (sheeya later, schkaliwags!), they decided against it (dumbasses.).

What would the world be like if a James Bond comic had become reality? Would he have solved villainous plots alongside Batman, or perhaps joined The Spirit in a "time-travel gone wrong" scenario? Would the comic still be published today?!? So many questions, Tyrants, and here I am, without the answers...
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Re: Sean Connery at 80

Post by FormerBondFan »

Happy Big 8-0 Birthday Mr. Connery!
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Re: Sean Connery at 80

Post by carl stromberg »

Happy Birthday to Sean Connery!

We will have to make some avatars from the Conery comic strip Dr.
Bring back Bond!
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Happy 80th birthday to Sean Connery, the real reel Bond

Post by Blowfeld »

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You can't escape it: as I'm typing this post a newscaster just referred to the murky death of a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service as a "James Bond mystery." On Sean Connery's 80th birthday I want to note the vigorous, inspiring post-Bond career he forged with terrific work for legendary directors like John Huston in "The Man Who Would Be King," Brian De Palma in "The Untouchables," Fred Schepisi in "The Russia House," Philip Kaufman in "Rising Sun" and Steven Spielberg in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." But none of that would have happened had Connery not created the rare screen persona that genuinely demands to be called "icon," 007.

Connery knew exactly what he was doing when he made "Dr. No" (1962), "From Russia With Love" (1963) and "Goldfinger" (1964). The actor said he was playing Bond as "a complete sensualist, his senses highly tuned and awake to everything. He liked his wine, his food, his women." (That's Connery's Bond with Honor Blackman's Pussy Galore in "Goldfinger," left.)

Yet Connery's Bond brought off his all-knowing manliness with a smile. The star said his great gift to 007 was "a sense of humor." Striding through the brisk and volatile "Dr. No," Connery already moved with seasoned confidence. He drawled out his introduction with blase machismo: it remains a funny thrill to hear him say that his name is "Bond. James Bond."

For some fans of Ian Fleming's original spy novels, the gusto of Connery's screen presence gave off an unsettling whiff of non-gentility. Kingsley Amis in his acute, disarming "The James Bond Dossier," wrote in 1965 of Connery's "total wrongness" for the part: "Mr. Connery could put up a show as a Scottish businessman, but never as a Scottish baronet." Connery did spoof the worldliness that Fleming laid on thick. But rather than pollute the books' air of hedonistic omniscience, Connery made it easier to breathe.

Sadly, claiming Bond fatigue and feeling exploited, Connery left the series after Bond #5, "You Only Live Twice" (1967). For Bond fans, it was terrible timing. If Connery and not the smug, obtuse George Lazenby had starred in the otherwise electrifying "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (1969), the doomed love affair of Bond and the mobster's daughter played by Diana Rigg could have set off a sensation. But as composer John Barry remarked, "George Lazenby couldn't have created a boiled egg."

Connery had already been lending his character increasingly humane, ironic undertones. The movies expanded and got grander the more Connery relaxed and filled out, physically as well as emotionally. ("You Only Live Twice," right, is one of the series' unsung high points.) When Connery came back to the shambles of Bond #7, "Diamonds Are Forever," he gave Bond a been-there, done-that attitude that signaled wry experience, not boredom. And a dozen years later, in the first section (the only great section) of "Never Say Never Again," Connery proved how restorative it could be to have a Bond who needed a physical tune-up and a stay at a health farm.
This can be found at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/enterta ... y_the.html
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Re: Sean Connery at 80

Post by Kristatos »

Dr. No wrote: What would the world be like if a James Bond comic had become reality? Would he have solved villainous plots alongside Batman, or perhaps joined The Spirit in a "time-travel gone wrong" scenario? Would the comic still be published today?!? So many questions, Tyrants, and here I am, without the answers...
You do know that there have been several James Bond comics, right? Beginning with the Daily Express newspaper strip, which continued with original stories after the Fleming Bonds had all been adapted.
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Re: Sean Connery at 80

Post by Dr. No »

Kristatos wrote:
Dr. No wrote: What would the world be like if a James Bond comic had become reality? Would he have solved villainous plots alongside Batman, or perhaps joined The Spirit in a "time-travel gone wrong" scenario? Would the comic still be published today?!? So many questions, Tyrants, and here I am, without the answers...
You do know that there have been several James Bond comics, right? Beginning with the Daily Express newspaper strip, which continued with original stories after the Fleming Bonds had all been adapted.
That is from the place i found the pictures. I know about the other Bond comics, I remember a special GE comic. I have to agree DC would have made some bad crossover stories. Bond as part of the Justice League? :007:
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Re: Sean Connery at 80

Post by mcbride007 »

Happy Birthday to Sean. :cheers:
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Sean was 'the best actor that Bond ever had'

Post by Blowfeld »

Author Christopher Bray has said that Scottish actor Sean Connery was the “best actor that Bond ever had”.

The legendary actor, who shot to fame in the movies based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, turned 80-years-old on August 25.

And Bray - who releases the biography The Measure of a Man, based on the actor’s life over the last 50 years on, on September 2 this year – paid huge tribute to him, claiming that Sean’s portrayal of 007 was the reason the movies turned into a massive hit.

“He is far and away the best actor that Bond ever had. Remember, he created the role. If you read the Ian Fleming novels, Bond doesn’t really exist. If fact Fleming himself called him a ‘cardboard booby’ on which he just hung his own peculiar fantasies. It was up to Connery to flesh that out,” Bray explained.

He added: “I think that what he did most of all is add what is absolutely missing from the Fleming novels - a sense of humour. He (Connery) can’t say anything without mocking Bond at the same.

“I think if they’d played it straight like the Bond of the Felming novels, I don’t think they’d have had the movies that they had, they wouldn’t have had the success that they’ve had. Also I don’t think they’d have had it if it had been anyone other than Sean.”

Following his time as James Bond, Connery went on to appear in a number of other movie roles, most of them much less successful. He then decided to quit acting, and recently said that he doesn’t ever think he’ll step in on stage or in front of the camera again – something which Bray believes is a big mistake.

“I think he was unwise to jack the career in five or six years ago, I think he could have gone on, and could have been going on for the past ten or 12 years as one of the cinema’s great old men,” Bray said.

“But that would involve a move into character parts rather than the big hero. And in his last picture six or seven hears ago, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – mega flop by the way – he still insisted on being the big hero. The producer famously said ‘he wants a bigger explosion in every film this guy’, and he wasn’t joking.”

Bray also discussed Sean's rise to fame from humble beginnings, how he thinks he is coping with turning 80, and what he makes of the patriotic Scot failing to live in his home country.
This can be found at http://entertainment.stv.tv/showbiz/194 ... -ever-had/
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Re: Sean Connery at 80

Post by James »

You can buy the Express Yaroslav Horak strips as graphic novels now. They are good fun.

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