Saluting Sir Sean Connery

     

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.

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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.”

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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August 26, 2010