I woke up this morning to the news that veteran actor Sean Connery, 90, had died. He was in many films over the years, and even on television once in a while (he had a bit part in a hilarious Jack Benny episode when Benny and wife Mary Livingstone were in Rome), but he was best known as the debonair James Bond in several 1960s films. He was the "original" actor who played the Ian Fleming creation. He was good looking, with or without a toupee, and his part called for being quite the ladies man while saving the world or whatever he was supposed to do.
It's hard to overstate how much of a 1960s icon he was.
It's also hard to admit that I am one of the very few people in the western world who has NOT seen a single James Bond film, with or without Connery. I have meant to see them, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Connery was in seven "Bond" films between 1962 and 1983. Somewhere along the way he ditched his rug, and he discovered going around in his natural bald state didn't harm his career at all.
Connery was born in Scotland August 25, 1930, and he died early this morning, Halloween, at his home in the Bahamas. He had been sick for quite some time, but the cause of his death was not made public. He had a long, fully distinguished life. He was married only twice, first to actress Diane Cilento (who said Connery had abused her, and he was quoted as saying hitting a woman was "no big deal" which endeared him to no one) and then permanently (from 1975) painter Micheline Roquebrune, who was born a year before her husband. He had one child, Jason, who is an actor and director, who in turn is the father of actor Dashiell Connery. He had three stepchildren from his marriage to Roquebrune, who was married twice before Connery. His son, at least one of his stepchildren, his wife, and a brother survive him.
Sean Connery won an best supporting Oscar for his role in 1988's The Untouchables. He retired from acting in 2006.
For the record, his seven "Bond" films are the following:
Dr. No (1962)
From Russia With Love (1963)
Goldfinger (1964)
Thunderball (1965)
You Only Live Twice (1967)
Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Never Say Never Again (1983)
Sean Connery, the Scottish actor whose five-decade long movie career was dominated by the role of James Bond, has died at the age of 90, according to the producers of the James Bond series.
Connery, who was awarded a knighthood in 2000 for his contribution to the arts, played the British spy in seven movies, beginning with "Dr. No" in 1962, the first of the Bond movies.
He wasn't just Bond, of course. Connery starred in an Alfred Hitchcock film, 1964's "Marnie," opposite Tippi Hedren; was part of the all-star cast in 1974's "Murder on the Orient Express"; played Indiana Jones' father, in 1989's "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"; and won an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his performance as Chicago cop Jim Malone in the 1987 film "The Untouchables."
Connery was cast in the role of Bond thanks to the actor’s “animal magnetism,” Bond producers told Rolling Stone in 1983. The choice was a surprise as, years earlier, the actor had been forced out of Hollywood following a threatening phone call from mob boss Mickey Cohn, who blamed the actor in part for the death of gangster Johnny Stompanato, who was stabbed to death by the daughter of Lana Turner; that actress had handpicked Connery to be her love interest in 1958’s Another Place, Another Time. Leaving Hollywood in the midst of a Twentieth Century Fox deal, Connery reestablished himself in British cinema before landing the Dr. No gig.
During his Bond tenure, Connery also starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie and Sidney Lumet’s The Hill and The Anderson Tapes, but the public pressures of playing Bond eventually wore on Connery, who called the role a “Frankenstein monster.” “I’d been an actor since I was 25,” Connery told Rolling Stone in 1983, “but the image that the press put out was that I just fell into this tuxedo and started mixing vodka martinis. And of course, it was nothin’ like that at all. I’d done television, theater, a whole slew of things. But it was more dramatic to present me as someone who had just stepped in off the street.”
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Getting back to his sexist attitudes regarding women, we can't whitewash it. He was this way for most of his life. He did condemn violence against women in 2006, but his previous statements were seared into the public consciousness.
This is why it is best for public figures to keep their mouths shut in the first place.
He never lived this down. This was from 1987, so he had time to be sorry for what he said in his later years:
He was born Thomas Sean Connery on Aug. 25, 1930, and his crib was the bottom drawer of a dresser in a cold-water flat next door to a brewery. The two toilets in the hall were shared with three other families. His father, Joe, earned two pounds a week in a rubber factory. His mother, Effie, occasionally got work as a cleaning woman.
At the age of 9, Thomas found an early-morning job delivering milk in a horse cart for four hours before he went to school. His brother, Neil, had been born in December 1938, and the usual meals of porridge and potatoes had to be stretched four ways. Once a week, if the family had a sixpence to spare, Thomas would walk to the public baths and swim “just to get clean.”
Like the months that 12-year-old Charles Dickens spent working in a factory that made shoe blacking, Mr. Connery’s deprived childhood informed the rest of his life. When he was 63, he told an interviewer that a bath was still “something special.”
His anger was never far below the surface. What he called his “violent side,” he told The Times, may have been “ammunitioned” by his childhood. (He sometimes acknowledged that side in shocking ways. In a 1965 interview, he said, “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman”; asked about those words by Barbara Walters in 1987, he said, “I haven’t changed my opinion.” He did eventually say he had been wrong, but not until many years later.)
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