Sean Connery – In memory of The Man Who Would be King

Sean Connery in the 1974 film ‘Zardoz’. (Image: IMDb)

By Kalim Rajab

1 Nov 2020

Sean Connery, who died on Saturday at 90, was the greatest interpreter of the James Bond character and served as the template from which almost all future Bonds took their cue. But he was much more besides. We remember the great actor and his achievements - as well as some of his controversies.

“We may be a small country, but we’re a great one too. A country of Shakespeare. The Beatles. Churchill. Sean Connery. Harry Potter. David Beckham’s right foot. David Beckham’s left foot, come to that…”
— Hugh Grant’s irrepressibly nostalgic Prime Minister in Love Actually (2003).

Imagine a sunlit scene from the summer of 1963; a swanky Kensington flat doubling as the photographic studio of Tony, Earl of Snowdon. The Sunday Times has arranged for eight strutting young jousters to gather here. These Adonises are all under 35, and they are the new face of British cinema. They’ve been assembled by the film critic Dilys Powell, selected as representing the sunny hopes of British artistic excellence for the next 35 years.

The gathering, tension-filled as each jostles for position in Snowdon’s frame, feels like a deliberate break from the past; the glistening promise of a new alchemy. Dilys Powell is the peerless critic of her age and so not only has she been asked to chronicle them, but also to end with a prediction of which one, in 35 years, will likely emerge as the greatest star.

Most come from a working-class or underclass background and have come to define the new movement of social realism sweeping through British cinema. There’s Albert Finney, 27, who with his fellow Northerner Tom Courtenay, 26, the rambunctious Irish tyro Richard Harris, 32, and the sardonic Alan Bates, 29, are the proudly grimy faces of the “kitchen-sink” style – the lads not so much bringing as brandishing on to the screen an unfettered, authentic realism never seen before. Finney won acclaim as the hard-drinking, womanising factory worker Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and further brought great relish to the titular role in Tom Jones, the current hit of the season. Courtenay played the rebellious teen in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, railing against authority in the detention centre he’s been sent to, something Harris and Bates have similarly achieved in films like This Sporting Life and A Kind of Loving.

Others can call upon their classical training for legitimacy, and have already been recognised across the pond. Peter O’Toole, at 30, has just been nominated for an Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia, while Terence Stamp (the youngest at 24, and the most beautiful) joined him in being nominated for Billy Budd.

James Fox alone has an upper-class background to rely on for his assuredness. His decadent descent into debauchery in The Servant is also, in its own way, a powerful touchstone of the current British age.

Michael Caine, 30, remains an outsider in the group. He is neither classically trained nor into social realism, and until recently a B-grade star. But promise beckons with the imminent release of Zulu, where he’s impressed with his portrayal of the foppish officer.

The eight are joined by one other. Like Caine, he’s also an outsider, a working-class lad from drab Edinburgh but equipped with neither training nor any apparent technical skill. Ironically, he’s achieved arguably the greatest fame to date, having improbably shot to prominence in two films as a dashing secret agent – Dr No and From Russia With Love. But surely it will prove fleeting?

While Sean Connery at 32 has become a star, the conventional thinking is that as popular as the two 007 films have been, he’ll be typecast for the rest of his career; that when the Bond films lose favour – as surely they must – he’ll be unable to reinvent his career. “An overgrown stuntman” is how Ian Fleming, the character’s creator, had initially dismissed Connery’s talents.

A one-time bodybuilder whose output prior to Bond consisted mostly of hack material, a lasting cultural future does not seem assured. Surely he will be a Robert Taylor, a one-trick pony who’s an eventual footnote to this Sunday Times article. Connery’s middling talent ensures he does not push to make himself at the centre of the grouping for the final shot.

Ms Powell’s prediction eventually zeroes in on two members – Peter O’Toole and Albert Finney. They are the most talented and seem capable of great verve and imagination.

Of course, the notion of being able to answer such questions as put to Powell is absurd, and koanlike, defies any definitive answer. Yet six decades later, there’s a powerful argument to make that the greatest impact on film, and on our cultural imprint, has come from the actor she was most dismissive of – Sean Connery.

Connery, who died on Saturday at 90, was able to assume a mantle few mortals are capable of in their lifetime – that of being a global hero. He’s been almost universally acknowledged as the greatest interpreter of the James Bond character. Few actors can inspire grown men to summon back their youth – as when they first encountered him as James Bond – at will; equally, he inspired their children to be unabashed when, in seeking their own hero, they returned to the path first discovered by their fathers.

And far from being typecast as Bond, he instead perfected the role – a combination of elegance, charm and cruelty – and in so doing served as a template from which all subsequent reincarnations, barring the late Roger Moore, chose to begin.

He starred as Bond in six official outings, starting with Dr No (1962) and ending with Diamonds are Forever (1971), before vindictively allowing himself to be a gun-for-hire in a rival production, Never Say Never Again (1983).

Sean Connery stars in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, a 1971 Bond film. (Photo: IMDb)

Connery in ‘Dr No’, a 1962 Bond film directed by Terence Young. (Photo: Wikimedia)

Connery in ‘Never Say Never Again’, a 1983 Bond film directed by Irvin Kershner. (Image: Wikipedia)

If his artistic output had only been as Bond, then, like Moore, his cultural impact would still have been assured. But Connery’s contribution went so much further than Moore’s did because he was prepared to take risks in the pursuit of adding depth to his craft.

“There’s nothing like a challenge to bring out the best in an actor,” he once said. And Connery the actor seemed to instinctively grasp this, that he needed to prove that he could act to a level of his British contemporaries and not let Bond define him. It was this tension which had bridled him as early as in Thunderball (1965).

At around that time, he tried to work with Hitchcock, but the great director found his performance as a husband-rapist in Marnie unconvincing. The same year as Thunderball, he decided to again go against type and worked in a low-budget, low-angled anti-war picture in which he played a coward court-martialled for desertion. The Hill was critically acclaimed even if his performance was histrionic – he was still years away from being able to bring variety and imaginativeness to his performances.

Connery and Claudine Auger in a scene from the Bond film ‘Thunderball’ in 1965. (Image: IMDb)

He did, however, have that extraordinary, affecting presence which he used as a base from which to extend further possibilities. In the late 1970s, when Roger Moore was infamously asking for fewer scenes, not more, in The Wild Geese lest the paucity of his skills be shown up alongside Richard Burton and Richard Harris, Connery heedlessly agreed to star alongside no fewer than four Oscar winners in Sidney Lumet’s demanding Murder on the Orient Express (1974).

The following year, he displayed great sensitivity as a wandering charlatan in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, based on Rudyard Kipling’s short story. He is wonderful in the caper about two British soldiers in the 1800s who set themselves up in a remote part of India as modern-day equivalents of Alexander the Great. There were missteps along the way too, as when he found himself in a bizarre mankini in the abysmal Zardoz. But along the way, he picked up valuable lessons in adding perceptiveness and alertness to his performances, from his collaboration with fine directors such as Fred Zinnemann and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Connery in the 1974 film ‘Zardoz’. (Image: IMDb)

True success matched with recognition belatedly came his way with Brian de Palma’s 1988 mafia hit The Untouchables, in which he played with relish the role of lone incorruptible cop Mallory alongside Kevin Costner’s crusading crime fighter Eliot Ness. There’s a memorable scene in a church where Kevin Costner’s unbendable operator finds his morals outflanked by the mob tactics in corrupt 1930s Chicago. Fingering his Irish lucky charm, Connery’s Mallory turns to him and says:

“You wanna know how to get to Capone? He pulls 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; and that’s how you get Capone.”

It’s said that when members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (the organisation which awards the Oscars) first watched that scene at a private screening of the film, they erupted in wild hoots and cheers as Connery delivered the lines. He was finally awarded an Oscar for his work, 31 years after making his first film.

The adulation that greeted his performance ushered in a third act where, in strong supporting roles, his legend was burnished even further. He all but stole the show as Harrison Ford’s cantankerous father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). He urged his budding writing protégé Jamal to “pound the keys!” in his portrayal of a reclusive writer in Finding Forrester (2000); and improbably had us believe he was capable of seducing Catherine Zeta-Jones, half his age, in Entrapment (1999). In between, the golden sunlight beamed dazzlingly, if unconvincingly, in First Knight (1995) where he assumed the role of King Arthur.

In private life, of course, he did not behave as heroically as his characters – an affliction that has blighted so many of our screen heroes. Money seems to have been at the heart of most of his faults. Quitting Bond, for example, was not only about furthering his skills elsewhere – his relationship broke down with producer Cubby Brocolli because he felt he was being chiselled out of his proper dues.

The two never reconciled and this is why, in all the myriad Bond retrospectives, celebrations, gala dinners, opening nights and documentary content produced by Brocolli’s EON Productions, Connery is neither present nor interviewed, while nearly every single other major actor and actress is. The pettiness bordered on vindictiveness towards Brocolli, who nurtured the Bond series like a loving father, and meant that Connery ended up essentially disavowing his most famous creation.

He could also be mean-spirited with several of the film studios he worked with, suing them for some perceived grievance or other and making enemies along the way.

Money also meant that he became a tax exile from Britain, living for five decades with his second wife Micheline in tax havens like Spain, Monaco and finally the Bahamas. In 2015 there was an unsavoury incident where Spanish magistrates began investigating allegations levelled at him and Micheline of tax evasion and money laundering involving the sale of a Costa del Sol property, something still not settled by the time of his death.

He’d lived faithfully with Micheline for decades without a hint of extramarital scandal – an unusual feat in the industry. Yet, at the same time, he was also dogged by accusations of sexism. In a Playboy interview in 1964, he argued that there could be grounds for hitting a woman with an open-handed slap “provided all other alternatives have failed and there’s been plenty of warning.”

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When I first heard of Connery’s death, I was reminded of the story told about Dame Edith Evans by the British film director Bryan Forbes. When he told his daughter about the death of Dame Edith, she said, “That’s not possible. She’s not the type.” So it seemed with Connery. How could James Bond, or King Arthur, ever die?

Connery was – is – eternally young in our collective minds, flicking the lighter in Dr No and uttering the immortal words which introduce James Bond to the world. Or, strapped to the laboratory table while the gold laser slowly inches towards him, defiantly snapping at Goldfinger, “You expect me to talk?”

As most schoolboys know, on this occasion it is actually Goldfinger who has the final retort. “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!”

Ultimately, much as he wanted to turn his back on Bond and his world, it turns out even Sean Connery couldn’t escape the clutches of the evil Goldfinger. DM

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