Sir Sean Connery died in his sleep on October 31, 2020, at his home in Nassau, in the Bahamas. He was 90 years old. I never met him. He’s still one of my very favorite actors, and as far as I’m concerned, he sits right at the pinnacle with the very greatest who ever stood in front of a camera.
If Sean Connery was in a movie, I’d watch it, no matter how crappy it was. Some of them were pretty crappy. I watched them anyway, because he was in them, and he was always worth the price of the ticket.
I don’t follow directors that way, and I don’t follow writers that way, even the ones I love. A bad script is a bad script. With Connery, the script almost didn’t matter. He’d walk on screen and the movie got better, because he was in it and he was trying.
His career ran more than forty years. He started in bit parts and live television in the 1950s, became the first screen James Bond in 1962, won an Oscar in his late fifties and was still a box office draw in his sixties. Very few actors last that long at the top. Fewer still get better as they get older, and he did.
He knew how to act, and he knew how to carry himself, on screen and off. He didn’t turn up in the papers for the kind of scandals that sink careers. He always struck me as a good all-around guy who also happened to be a great actor, and that’s a rare combination in Hollywood.
He never pretended to be anything other than a Scot from Edinburgh, either. When the Queen knighted him at Holyrood Palace in 2000, he wore a kilt.
Plenty of stars were bigger in a given year. Very few were better.
Who was Sean Connery?
He was born Thomas Connery in the Fountainbridge district of Edinburgh on August 25, 1930. His mother cleaned houses and his father worked in a rubber factory and drove a truck. The family lived in a tenement with a shared toilet, and money was always short. His first job, as a boy, was delivering milk from a horse-drawn cart.
He joined the Royal Navy at sixteen and was discharged at nineteen with an ulcer. Then he took whatever work was going. He drove a lorry, worked as a lifeguard and a laborer, posed as an artist’s model and polished coffins. He also played football well enough that Manchester United’s manager, Matt Busby, reportedly offered him a contract. He turned it down, figuring a footballer’s career was over by thirty and an actor’s wasn’t.
He’d taken up bodybuilding, and in 1953 he went to London for the Mr. Universe contest. While he was there, he heard about auditions for a touring production of South Pacific, and he landed a place in the chorus. That was the start. He spent the rest of the decade in small stage parts, television dramas and minor films, learning the trade from the bottom.
Nobody handed him anything.
A working-class kid from Edinburgh became the most famous spy in the world, then spent the next forty years proving he was a lot more than the spy. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Untouchables and a BAFTA for Best Actor for The Name of the Rose. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1999, was knighted in 2000 and got the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 2006. People magazine named him the Sexiest Man Alive in 1989. He was 59.
Was Sean Connery the best James Bond?
For me, yes, and it isn’t close. He walked into a casino in Dr. No in 1962, lit a cigarette and said his name, and a sixty-year franchise started right there.
He wasn’t the obvious choice. The producers, Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, picked a relatively unknown Scottish actor over bigger names. Ian Fleming, who wrote the books, reportedly thought Connery was too rough for his polished, upper-class spy. After Dr. No came out, Fleming changed his mind so completely that he gave Bond a Scottish father in a later novel.
Connery played Bond in six official films, from Dr. No through From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever. By the late 1960s he was tired of the role and of the press following him everywhere, and he walked away. He came back for Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 for a record fee and gave the money to a charitable trust he’d set up to help young Scots get an education.
Then he returned once more at fifty-two for Never Say Never Again, a Bond film made outside the official series.
Every Bond since has been measured against him. He made Bond dangerous and amused at the same time, a man who could kill you and then straighten his cuffs. He looked like he could win a fight, so you believed the danger. He never took the world quite as seriously as the villains did, so you got the joke.
The later actors had their moments. Connery was the original, and the rest were following his lead. I gave From Russia with Love and Goldfinger a 9 out of 10, and his presence is most of the reason. Goldfinger has the laser, the Aston Martin and the best villain line in the series, and Connery holds all of it together.
Henry Jones Sr. and Indiana Jones
I loved him in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He played Indy’s father, Professor Henry Jones Sr., a bookish medievalist who’d spent his life chasing the Holy Grail and had never once had time for his son.
The casting made sense the moment you heard the reasoning. Steven Spielberg had created Indiana Jones partly because he wanted to make a James Bond film. So who should play Indy’s father? Bond, of course. The joke is that Connery was only about twelve years older than Harrison Ford, and he still played the father so completely that you never questioned it.
Watch the two of them together. Ford is the action hero, and Connery steals every scene anyway, with a raised eyebrow or a muttered “Junior.” He sits tied to a chair in a burning castle and complains. He scatters a flock of seagulls with an umbrella to bring down a German plane and quotes Charlemagne while he does it. He plays a man who is brilliant, stubborn and useless in a fight, and he makes all three of those funny.
The bickering between them is the heart of that film. Underneath it is a father and son who don’t know how to talk to each other, and by the end, they do. Connery plays that last part with almost no dialogue.
A look between them does more than any of the action.
It’s a big reason I rate the whole Indiana Jones trilogy a 10 out of 10.
What were Sean Connery’s best movies?
He made dozens, and he was good in most of them. These are the ones I’d hand anybody who only knows him as Bond.
The Man Who Would Be King, from 1975, with Michael Caine and directed by John Huston from a Rudyard Kipling story. Two British soldiers con their way into being worshipped as kings in a remote country, and it goes exactly as badly as you’d expect. It’s a 10 out of 10 for me, and Connery’s slow slide from scoundrel to believing his own legend is the best thing in it.
The Untouchables, the role that won him his Oscar. He played Jim Malone, the old Irish beat cop who teaches Eliot Ness how Chicago really works. “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” Every line out of his mouth in that movie is quotable, and Kevin Costner, who had the lead, spends half the film looking at Connery the way the audience does.
The Name of the Rose, where he played William of Baskerville, a Franciscan monk solving murders in a medieval monastery, and Highlander, where he played a Spanish-Egyptian immortal with a Scottish accent, teaching a Scottish immortal played by a French actor. On paper that’s ridiculous. On screen it works, because he sells it. Both are 9s for me.
Then there’s The Hunt for Red October, where he played a Soviet submarine captain, again with that unmistakable Scottish voice, and nobody cared, because he was that good. There’s The Rock, an action film he carried at sixty-five as an old SAS prisoner who’d escaped from Alcatraz once and has to break back in. And there’s The Hill, a brutal 1965 prison camp drama that showed what he could do the moment he stepped out of the tuxedo.
Zardoz is the one everybody brings up when they list the crappy ones. Fair enough. He’s still worth watching in it. You can’t say that about most actors in most bad movies.
A question my wife answered without hesitation
One evening my late wife, Claudia, and I were kidding around, the way couples do. I asked her a question. If she had the chance at a one-day affair with Sean Connery, would she take it?
She didn’t even pause. “Of course,” she said. “To hell with everything. If Sean Connery was coming on to me, he can have me.”
Then she turned it around and asked me who my actress would be.
Mine was Catherine Zeta-Jones. A beauty.
The funny part is that the two of them made a movie together. Entrapment came out in 1999, a heist film with Connery as an aging master thief and Zeta-Jones as the insurance investigator who sets out to catch him. He was 69 and also produced it. Claudia and I picked our dream partners, and Hollywood had already paired them up.
That’s the kind of hold Connery had on people. He was nearly seventy when he made that film, and he was still the man people picked. A woman who’d never met him could answer that question in half a second.
What made Sean Connery such a great actor?
He could truly act. That sounds like it should go without saying, and it doesn’t. Most movie stars find one persona that works and play themselves in every film, with a different costume and a different name on the poster. They’re pretending to act, and Connery never did. He put himself into the part.
Look at the men he played, and you’ll see it. James Bond is cold and amused. Henry Jones Sr. is a fussy scholar who’d rather read a diary than talk to his own son. Jim Malone is a tired, honest street cop who has watched Chicago rot for decades. Danny Dravot in The Man Who Would Be King is a cheerful rogue who slowly convinces himself he’s a god. Same face, same voice, four completely different men. You never caught Sean Connery standing in the scene being Sean Connery.
And he looked like he was having fun. That came through the screen every time. He had an affinity with the audience, a warmth that reached right past the camera, and you felt like he was enjoying every minute of the work and wanted you to enjoy it with him. Watch him mutter “Junior” at Harrison Ford and try not to grin. An actor who is having a good time is contagious, and Connery was the most contagious of them all.
Then there was the presence. Some actors have to work to make you look at them. Connery walked into a frame and owned it. He didn’t waste motion, and he didn’t overplay. He’d let a pause do the work, or a look, and the scene would tilt toward him.
He also never apologized for that Scottish accent. He kept it whether he was playing an Irish cop, a Russian captain, a Spanish immortal or an English spy, and audiences went along with it every time, because he’d already convinced them of the man underneath. Most actors would have been laughed off the screen for that. He made it a trademark.
And he knew when to stop. He turned down roles he didn’t understand, including Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. After The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2003, he retired from acting on screen, and apart from one voice role in a Scottish animated film, he stayed retired. He didn’t hang around making bad sequels for the money. He left at the top and let the work speak.
Thank you, Sean
I never met him. I knew Bond lighting that cigarette, Henry Jones Sr. calling his son “Junior,” and Jim Malone dying on the floor of his apartment with one last bit of advice for Ness. That was plenty.
He gave audiences more than forty years of work, and he gave it everything every time, in the great films and in the ones nobody remembers. A professional does exactly that. He showed up and did the job right, whatever the job was.
And I knew my wife’s answer to that question.
He gave us that, too.
Rest in peace, Sir Sean. Thank you for every one of them, even the crappy ones.
