The Name of the Rose (1986)
Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1986 Eco adaptation. Sean Connery as Franciscan monk investigating monastery murders.
Actor: Sean Connery
Sean Connery played James Bond seven times and spent decades trying to be something else, which he eventually managed more successfully than any of his successors.
The Bond performances are better than nostalgia suggests. There is a genuine coldness in Dr. No and From Russia with Love that the later, lighter entries lost, and Connery played the character as a functional government killer.
The escape came through Hitchcock in Marnie, Lumet in The Hill and The Offence, and John Huston in The Man Who Would Be King, which is probably his best film. He won Best Supporting Actor for The Untouchables playing an ageing Irish beat cop with a Scottish accent nobody remarked on.
He retired in 2003 after The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, an experience he described as sufficient reason to stop.
