Summary

Sir Thomas Sean Connery († October 31, 2020 in Nassau, Bahamas) was a Scottish actor, film producer and Academy Award winner.

After initially achieving great popularity in the 1960s in the role of secret agent James Bond, Connery established himself as a character actor from the 1970s onward. In 1989, People Magazine named him "Sexiest Man Alive" and in 1999, when he was 69, he was voted "Sexiest Man of the Century." Director Steven Spielberg named him one of the five best actors in the world in 1992. Connery ended his film career in 2004.

From the 1960s onward, Connery increasingly showed solidarity with the Scottish cause and became a founder and supporter of various Scottish institutions. He was also a supporter of Scottish independence.

Childhood and youth

Sean Connery's father Joseph Connery was a truck driver and came from County Wexford, Ireland. His mother Euphemia "Effie" Maclean was a cleaner. His father was Catholic, his mother Protestant. Connery grew up in poor circumstances. To support his family financially, he left school at an early age and worked as a milkman at the Saint Cuthbert's Co-Operative Society and as a lifeguard. Connery enlisted in the Royal Navy for seven years at the age of 16, but was discharged after just over two years due to a duodenal ulcer. His younger brother Neil Connery also later became an actor.

Successes as a bodybuilder

After his time in the Navy, Connery earned his money with odd jobs, including as a milkman, digger driver, horse driver, printer and furniture polisher. Along the way, he learned the French method of furniture polishing at a vocational school in Glasgow. After working for a funeral parlor, among other things, he later recounted, he specialized in the polishing of coffins.

During this time he also decided to pursue bodybuilding, focusing on weightlifting. At the same time he became a sought-after (nude) model at the Edinburgh College of Art, mostly as a Greek athlete or Roman warrior. He also did some commercial shoots. These side jobs prompted him to pursue bodybuilding even more professionally. In 1950 he became the Scottish bodybuilding champion. Furthermore, he participated in the prestigious Mister Universe contest, but there - contrary to what is often written - he did not win any prize.

Marriage and family

From 1962 to 1973 Sean Connery was married to the Australian actress Diane Cilento. The common child from this marriage is Jason Connery. In 1975 Connery married in second marriage the painter Micheline Roquebrune, with whom he lived in Spain. The relationship remained childless, but Roquebrune brought three children into the marriage. Connery owned houses in Andalusia and the Bahamas.

His foundation

Connery was a Scottish patriot and campaigned for decades for the interests of his homeland and its inhabitants. Together with the racing driver Sir Jackie Stewart and the shipbuilder Sir Iain Stewart, he founded the Scottish International Educational Trust with his own funds, which both awards educational scholarships to talented Scots and finances projects that, in their opinion, help Scotland's culture, economy, environment or society. Connery's million-dollar fee for the 1971 film James Bond 007 - Diamond Fever went entirely to the trust. He had taken on the unloved role of the secret agent for a sixth time in order to provide financial security for the foundation. Connery campaigned for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom until his death and was a member and supporter of the Scottish National Party, the current governing party, which politically belongs to left-wing liberalism.

Commitment to the environment

From 2011, the vegan Sean Connery was part of the advisory board of the marine conservation organization Sea Shepherd. In 2014, together with "Save the Bays," he campaigned against the construction of a coastline in the Bahamas. Sean Connery also provided financial support for Al Gore's climate protection project.

Honorary awards

On July 5, 2000, Connery was made a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to Scotland and from then on carried the title of "Sir. The ceremony took place in Edinburgh. Connery wore a kilt for the occasion. He received what he considered to be the highest honor in 1991, when he was awarded the Freedom of the City by the city of Edinburgh.

Death

Sean Connery died in Nassau, Bahamas, on October 31, 2020, at the age of 90. The cause of death was respiratory arrest caused by pneumonia combined with age-related heart failure. He was already suffering from dementia. Connery's ashes were scattered on an unknown Scottish golf course.

First engagements

Connery's bodybuilding successes led to his first acting engagement in the chorus of a production of the musical South Pacific. From 1954, he landed minor roles in film, theater and television productions, appearing in films including The Blind Spider and Duel at the Wheel (both 1957). Connery's colleague Michael Caine, with whom he had been friends since the late 1950s, described these years as a time of privation, during which the two then unknown actors had also been dependent on state support.

The melodrama Another Time, Another Place (1958) gave Sean Connery his first high-profile role as Lana Turner's lover, but he was initially unable to establish himself as a star. Until the early 1960s, he appeared in numerous television and cinema productions, for example as a soldier in the lavishly produced war film The Longest Day (1962) in some short scenes of the Allied landings in Normandy.

Successes as James Bond

In the early 1960s, producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were preparing a film series featuring secret agent James Bond, based on the popular series of novels by author Ian Fleming. The former secret agent Fleming published a new Bond novel once a year since 1953.

After candidates such as David Niven, Roger Moore, Cary Grant and Patrick McGoohan had initially been considered for the Bond role - but for various reasons they were not considered - the producers became aware of the relatively unknown Sean Connery through a recommendation from director Terence Young. Connery convinced Saltzman and Broccoli with his athletic appearance and confident demeanor and was given the role. The readers of a London daily newspaper also voted for him. Director Terence Young prepared Connery, who came from a poor background, to play the role of a stylish agent who values an upscale lifestyle. Writer Ian Fleming initially thought the actor was the wrong choice for the sophisticated Bond.

In 1962, James Bond Chases Dr. No was produced on a relatively low budget of $1.1 million. This first film in the Bond film series featured the British secret agent battling the megalomaniac criminal Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman), who sabotages American rocket launches from Jamaica. Dr. No laid the groundwork for the immensely successful Bond film series and assembled key figures in the creative team behind the camera, such as composer John Barry, who created the signature Bond sound, and set designer Ken Adam, who created the extravagant backdrops. The film was an immediate success, grossing nearly $60 million worldwide and establishing 32-year-old Sean Connery as a new star.

In 1963, with a doubled budget of two million US dollars, James Bond 007 - Love Greetings from Moscow went into production, a tough agent thriller that was well received by critics and audiences and was especially praised for the successful casting of the supporting roles with Lotte Lenya, Robert Shaw and Pedro Armendáriz. James Bond, tasked with taking a Soviet decryption machine to Istanbul, is attacked by numerous agents, but - with the machine and a beautiful Russian woman - is able to reach the saving Venice.

The commercial success of this film, with worldwide box office takings of around $79 million, was far surpassed by the third film in the Bond series. James Bond 007 - Goldfinger, made in 1964 on a three-million-dollar budget, showed the British agent fighting the megalomaniac super-villain Goldfinger, who wants to detonate an atomic bomb at Fort Knox. Goldfinger grossed $125 million and definitively triggered the so-called "Bondmania" of the 1960s. The film served as a kind of blueprint for the later Bond films and, with Gert Fröbe as Goldfinger, presented the role model for numerous other Bond villains. Sean Connery defined Bond's image as a fierce action hero and irresistible heartthrob and finally established himself as a new world star. From then on, the Bond films were accompanied by intensive merchandising campaigns.

Beginning with Goldfinger, the Bond films became increasingly elaborate, fantastic and unrealistic (and also moved further and further away from the literary models of Ian Fleming, who died in 1964). Expensive set constructions, extravagant gadgets and long fight scenes with several dozen stuntmen were obligatory for a Bond adventure from the mid-1960s on. For Fireball (1965), the production budget was therefore tripled to nine million US dollars. In the fight against a secret organization that blackmails Western governments with two stolen atomic bombs, Bond proves himself in elaborate underwater battles, among other things. With a worldwide box office of $141 million, Fireball became one of the biggest film successes of the 1960s and remained the most commercially successful Bond film until 1977. With inflation-adjusted box-office takings of over one billion U.S. dollars, Fireball is the most successful film in the series as well as Connery's biggest box-office hit.

In the mid-1960s, Sean Connery became increasingly dissatisfied with the role of James Bond, which no longer challenged him as an actor and confined him to a certain image. In addition, Connery was bothered by the extremely long shooting of the films, which lasted up to six months. Therefore, during the production of Man Lives Only Twice, the actor announced his exit from the Bond film series in 1967. The producers tried in vain to dissuade Connery, who was apparently also dissatisfied with his salary, from his decision. You Only Live Twice became the last Bond film for Connery for the time being and featured him fighting the villainous Blofeld (Donald Pleasence), who hijacks Russian and American space missiles. The film's most spectacular set was a huge volcanic crater built by production designer Ken Adam on the grounds of Pinewood Studios. You Only Live Twice grossed more than $111 million on a $9.5 million budget.

After George Lazenby took over the Bond role in James Bond 007 - On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), the producers made a deal with American actor John Gavin. However, United Artists wanted Sean Connery back as Bond and tried to get him to return. Connery accepted for the record fee of 1.25 million U.S. dollars, which he donated to the Scottish International Educational Trust, a foundation he founded, plus United Artists financed two film projects of his own choice. In James Bond 007 - Diamond Fever (1971) he played the secret agent for the sixth and for the time being last time. In this film, Bond fights diamond smugglers and his old mortal enemy Blofeld, who blackmails the nuclear powers with a dangerous laser satellite. This Bond film was also a great success, with a worldwide box office of $116 million. The budget was $7.2 million. In 1973, Roger Moore took over the role of James Bond.

In 1972, Connery was awarded the Golden Globe Award as the world's most popular actor, alongside Charles Bronson.

Other films in the 1960s

As early as the beginning of the 1960s, parallel to the first James Bond films, Connery appeared as an actor in the monumental war film The Longest Day, which featured a star-studded ensemble. After establishing himself as a box-office star as James Bond, he was hired as a leading man for other productions beginning in 1964. Alfred Hitchcock hired the actor for the thriller melodrama Marnie, in which Connery falls in love with the titular kleptomaniac Marnie (Tippi Hedren). Unlike with his earlier films, star director Hitchcock did not meet with a positive response from audiences or critics with Marnie. The thriller The Straw Doll (1964) starred Connery as a bon vivant who wants to get his hands on his rich uncle's (Ralph Richardson) money with the help of his mistress (Gina Lollobrigida).

In 1965, Connery appeared in A Bunch of Great Dogs as a prisoner of a British military penal camp during World War II. The black-and-white film depicts in harsh realism the brutal humiliations to which the prisoners are subjected and is considered a classic. Connery and director Sidney Lumet worked together several more times later. The comedy Simson Can't Be Beat, in which Connery appeared as a poet and womanizer, was not a box office success in 1966. His first and only appearance as a Western hero in Shalako (1968) and his portrayal of Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen in the Soviet production The Red Tent (1969) also met with little interest. Despite his enormous popularity as a Bond actor, Sean Connery failed to score a real box-office hit with any of his other films in the 1960s.

Since Connery's head hair thinned considerably at a young age, he wore a toupee (which he apparently did not appreciate) in most of the films of this decade. In all Bond films that Connery shot, he was seen with an artificial hairstyle.

The 1970s

From the 1970s, Sean Connery sharpened his profile as a character actor and repeatedly played roles in artistically and substantively sophisticated films that differed greatly from the James Bond films. The actor had also changed significantly in appearance and, aged, usually without a toupee and with more weight, was hardly reminiscent of the dashing agent actor of the 1960s.

In Cursed to the Last Day (1970), Sean Connery starred alongside Richard Harris - the film depicted the extremely harsh living conditions of Irish-born miners in Pennsylvania in 1876. In 1971, again directed by Sidney Lumet, Connery appeared in The Anderson Clan as an ex-con plotting a new coup in New York. In the reality-based drama His Life in My Hands (1972), the actor played a police inspector who so severely abuses a man suspected of sexual abuse against children that he dies. Sidney Lumet again directed the film. John Boorman directed Sean Connery in 1974 in the unusual science fiction film Zardoz, which features the actor as an "exterminator" in a post-apocalyptic world. Connery completed almost the entire film wearing tight boxer shorts. These films often received good reviews, but failed to benefit commercially from Connery's notoriety.

Also in 1974, Connery was part of a top-class cast in the Agatha Christie adaptation Murder on the Orient Express. The film was again directed by Sidney Lumet, who scored a solid success with the film. In the terrorist thriller The Clock Is Running Out (1974), Connery acted as a Swedish colonel.

In the mid-1970s, Sean Connery made several adventure films that received critical acclaim and are now considered classics, but had little resonance with audiences at the time: The Wind and the Lion (1975, directed by John Milius), The Man Who Wanted to Be King (1975, directed by John Huston) and Robin and Marian (1976, directed by Richard Lester). In these films, the actor presented himself as a mature character actor in a wide variety of roles - as a Barbary prince, a British adventurer and an aged Robin Hood - and played alongside distinguished colleagues such as Christopher Plummer, Robert Shaw, Richard Harris, Audrey Hepburn or his old friend Michael Caine. Connery's portrayals here were also characterized by humorous, self-deprecating undertones, alluding, for example, to the advancing age of the characters he played.

The thriller Oil (1976), in which Connery appeared as an Arab politician, proved a flop with critics and audiences. In Richard Attenborough's lavish war film The Bridge of Arnhem (1977), which depicted the historic Operation Market Garden of 1944, the actor appeared alongside a good dozen other stars as a paratrooper general. The film was a box office success.

The last three films Sean Connery made in the 1970s proved less successful. In the historical adventure film The Great Railway Robbery, Connery played a train robber in Victorian England alongside Donald Sutherland, performing dangerous stunts on moving trains. Directed by Richard Lester, Connery made the film Explosion in Cuba (1979), in which the actor is seen as a former officer training Cuban military officers in 1959. The disaster film Meteor (1979), typical of the time, with Connery as a scientist, was slammed by critics and failed with audiences.

Of the films Connery made in the 1970s besides Diamond Fever, only a few managed to hold their own at the box office, none of them even coming close to the box office takings of the popular Bond films. Although the actor was able to build on his reputation as a character actor, he was ultimately no longer a commercially appealing star during this decade and recorded his greatest successes with the ensemble films Murder on the Orient Express and Arnhem Bridge.

Starting in the late 1970s, Connery filed lawsuits against various film producers because he felt he had been cheated out of fees or profit shares. Among others, he sued James Bond producer Broccoli. He also sued his former financial advisor for embezzlement and fraud. These lawsuits often dragged on for years. In order to enforce his financial claims against producers or film studios, Connery was also later involved in lawsuits.

The 1980s

Even in the early 1980s, Sean Connery initially had little success. He starred as the marshal of a space station in the science fiction thriller Outland - Planet of the Damned (1981), a kind of Twelve Noon in Space. The parodic time-travel film Time Bandits became a big box-office hit in 1981 with a box-office take of $42 million, but featured Connery only in a minor supporting role as King Agamemnon. In Am Rande des Abgrunds (1982), star director Fred Zinnemann's last film, he acted as the lover of a younger woman who faces unwelcome competition in a young man. Richard Brooks directed the 1982 political thriller Flames on the Horizon, in which Connery appeared as a journalist.

After Sean Connery had not made any major box-office hits in recent years, the 53-year-old actor made a comeback at the box office in 1983 - in by far his most famous role as James Bond. Since the early 1960s, film producer Kevin McClory had owned partial rights to the James Bond story Fireball, which he had once helped to develop. McClory had been trying to produce a modernized Fireball remake since the 1970s, but had been embroiled in a years-long legal battle by the producers of the Bond films. When he was finally allowed by the court to shoot the remake, McClory succeeded in getting Sean Connery to collaborate on another Bond film. On the one hand, the actor allowed himself to be convinced by a fee of five million US dollars, but on the other hand he also saw the chance to finally take revenge on the long-time Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli, as he had always felt unfairly treated by him in financial terms.

Never Say Never was directed by Irvin Kershner in 1983 and featured Connery as an aged and graying Bond alongside Kim Basinger and battling Klaus Maria Brandauer, who played the villainous Maximilian Largo. With Never Say Never, Connery entered into direct competition with his Bond successor Roger Moore, with whom he was good friends, and who was seen in Octopussy the same year. With box office receipts of $160 million, Never Say Never became a huge box office hit, almost as successful as Octopussy, which grossed $187 million. This was Sean Connery's seventh and final appearance as James Bond. For very many viewers, his interpretation of the role is still the best portrayal of the legendary secret agent.

After Never Say Never, Connery managed to build a second career as a mature character actor and also win over a new generation of viewers. The Bond film was the first in a series of spectacular box-office hits that stabilized the actor's career in the 1980s and 1990s. Although Connery was a generation older than the major stars of the era, he established himself as a reliable box office draw for years to come. After the fantasy film Camelot - The Curse of the Golden Sword (1984), in which Connery starred as a knight, turned out to be a flop, Connery starred in another fantasy film in 1986: In Highlander, he played an incisive supporting role as an immortal alongside leading man Christopher Lambert, and found a suitable new role subject as the young hero's wise teacher, in which he was subsequently successful for some 15 years. Highlander, meanwhile, became a cult film.

In the best-selling film adaptation The Name of the Rose (1986), directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, Connery enjoyed great success in the role of the detective-talented monk William of Baskerville (box-office takings: $77 million). Here, too, the actor was seen in the role of an experienced mentor. The Name of the Rose was very successful, especially in Europe, and became Connery's biggest box-office hit to date outside of the Bond films.

The next year, the gangster thriller The Incorruptibles proved to be just as successful, with Connery once again starring as a younger man's wise teacher under the direction of Brian de Palma. Together with young FBI agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), he takes down the notorious Al Capone (Robert De Niro) as an Irish cop. With box-office takings of $76 million, the film was a worldwide box-office success and immediately earned Sean Connery the coveted film award for Best Supporting Actor in his first and only Oscar nomination. Connery had almost never been considered for film awards until the 1980s.

After the thriller Presidio (1988), which found only a small audience, Sean Connery followed with one of the biggest box office successes of his career. Director Steven Spielberg was so enthusiastic about the charisma of the character actor that he tailored the role of Professor Jones' father to him for the third Indiana Jones film. Thus, in 1989, Connery appeared in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade alongside Harrison Ford as the unworldly father of the famous adventurer (in fact, he is only twelve years older than Ford). His portrayal met with an almost unanimously positive response from critics and audiences alike. With box-office takings of almost $200 million, the film became one of the big box-office hits of 1989.

Connery was less successful with the comedic crime film Family Business (1989), which flopped with critics and audiences and starred him as the father of Dustin Hoffman, who was only seven years younger. Family Business also marked the end of Connery's decade-long collaboration with star director Sidney Lumet.

Connery's newfound popularity was also evident at the time when the 59-year-old was voted "Sexiest Man Alive" by People Magazine in 1989.

1990s and 2000s, retirement

In 1990, Connery scored another major film success with the action thriller Hunt for Red October. The actor appeared in the role of a Soviet submarine commander who hijacks a Soviet Navy submarine to the West, opening a dramatic underwater chase. This film also grossed nearly $200 million. Also in 1990, Connery starred in The Russia House as a publisher who is recruited by British intelligence and becomes involved in an espionage affair in Russia. Connery's film partners were Michelle Pfeiffer and Klaus Maria Brandauer. Connery made a decidedly unkempt appearance in this film ("I look like an unmade bed with a plastic bag hanging from it.") and received mostly good reviews for his portrayal of the hard-drinking publisher.

The films Highlander II (1991), Medicine Man - The Last Days of Eden (1992), in which he played an old biologist trying to save the rainforests, The Last Hero of Africa (1994) and In the Swamp of Crime (1995), in which as a lawyer he tries to prevent a death sentence, proved less successful. In 1991, Connery made a spectacular cameo appearance in the international box-office success Robin Hood - King of Thieves - at the end of the film he meets the title character played by Kevin Costner in the role of Richard the Lionheart. He donated his entire salary of 250,000 US dollars for just two days of filming to charity. In 1992, Steven Spielberg named Connery one of the five best actors in the world. In 1993 he starred alongside Wesley Snipes in the successful thriller The Cradle of the Sun, set in the milieu of Japanese businessmen.

In 1992, Connery founded the production company Fountainbridge Films, with which he produced several films, such as Tempting Trap (1999) and Forrester - Found! (2000). The company was dissolved in 2002.

The historical adventure film The 1st Knight (1995), featuring Connery alongside Richard Gere as Lancelot in the role of King Arthur, received mixed reviews and failed to meet commercial expectations. For the fantasy film Dragonheart, the actor dubbed the character of the fire-breathing dragon Draco. The dragon was a completely computer-generated character whose facial expressions had been adapted to Connery's. In 1996, he starred alongside Nicolas Cage in the lavishly produced action film The Rock, set on the former prison island of Alcatraz. The 66-year-old Connery completed several action scenes and enjoyed one of his greatest successes with this international blockbuster, which grossed $325 million. Connery's fee for this film had risen to twelve million U.S. dollars.

In 1998, Sean Connery played the super-villain Sir August de Wynter in With Umbrella, Charm and Bowler Hat. However, the lavishly produced film adaptation of the popular TV series failed with critics and audiences. For his role, Connery was also nominated for the negative award Golden Raspberry as Worst Supporting Actor. That same year, Connery also appeared in the ensemble film Life and Love in L.A. for the low fee of $60,000. In 1999, he starred alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones in the romantic thriller Tempting Trap, playing an aging master thief who falls in love with a young female colleague. The film was successful at the box office, but critics complained that the 69-year-old Connery was no longer entirely believable in the role of action hero and lover. For this film, Sean Connery received the highest fee of his career, $20 million.

Critics and audiences reacted overwhelmingly positively to Connery's next film, Forrester - Found! (2000), in which he stars as an eremitic writer who befriends a young man. Originally, Connery was also up for the role of the wise wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings film series, but he turned it down due to problems understanding the extensive Tolkien world. A few years earlier, he had already turned down the character of Morpheus in the no less successful Matrix films for similar reasons.

Connery's last film was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), an action adventure with fantasy elements in which he starred as the adventurer Allan Quatermain alongside other literary characters such as Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray and Tom Sawyer. With box-office takings of 175 million U.S. dollars, the film was a success at the box office, despite a tendency toward poor reviews.

In 2005, Sean Connery voiced the part of James Bond for the video game Love Greetings from Moscow, based on the Bond film of the same name. However, he no longer wanted to work as a film actor and retired in 2006. In 2007 - despite talks with George Lucas, Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg - he turned down a role in the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones series. Connery did not appear in any more films after that. On August 25, 2008, Connery's 78th birthday, his autobiography Being a Scot was published.

In September 2010, Harrison Ford announced that he was eager to see Sean Connery return in Indiana Jones 5. However, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth film in the series, Jones informed viewers that his father had since passed away. Connery, however, can be seen for seconds in a portrait photo standing on his son's desk - this was the actor's last "appearance" in a feature film.

Accent and voice actor

Connery always spoke his roles with a Scottish accent, which critics occasionally found inappropriate - for example, when Connery portrayed a Berber prince in The Wind and the Lion or later a Spanish nobleman in Highlander. This problem does not occur in the German dubbed versions of his films. From the early 1960s, Connery was dubbed almost exclusively by Gert Günther Hoffmann. Other voice actors were Heinz Drache, Klaus Kindler, Benno Gellenbeck or Michael Chevalier. From the mid-1990s, when Hoffmann fell ill (he died in 1997), Connery no longer had a regular voice actor. Since then, he has been voiced by Klaus Kindler, Manfred Wagner, Gerhard Paul or Klaus Sonnenschein, among others. The role of the computer-created dragon Draco in the fantasy film Dragonheart (1996), to which Connery lent his voice in English, was spoken in German by Mario Adorf.

Connery caused a stir when, in 1965, in an interview for Playboy magazine about the Bond character, he expressed the view that a man had the right to hit a woman under certain circumstances (if nothing else proved fruitful and the woman had been warned clearly and repeatedly beforehand), and later reiterated this view, e.g. in a TV interview with Barbara Walters in 1987. In 2006, however, he distanced himself from these statements.

In Asterix volume 26 The Odyssey, one of the main characters, the druid and spy Nullnullsix, is both modeled on actor Sean Connery and an allusion to his portrayal of secret agent James Bond (Nullnullsix).

Sources

1. Sean Connery
2. Sean Connery