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Oleta Blaylock
Connery received numerous accolades including a BAFTA Award, three Golden Globe Awards and an Academy Award, the first Scottish actor to win the lattermost achievement.[4] He also received honorary awards such as the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1987, the BAFTA Fellowship in 1998 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1999. He was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France and a knight by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to drama in 2000.[5]
Thomas Sean Connery was born at the Royal Maternity Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 25 August 1930; he was named after his paternal grandfather.[6][7] He was brought up at No. 176 Fountainbridge, a block which has since been demolished.[8] His mother, Euphemia McBain "Effie" McLean, was a cleaning woman. The daughter of Neil McLean and Helen Forbes Ross, she was named after her father's mother, Euphemia McBain, wife of John McLean and daughter of William McBain from Ceres in Fife.[9][10][11] Connery's father, Joseph Connery, was a factory worker and lorry driver.[12]
Two of his paternal great-grandparents emigrated to Scotland from Wexford, Ireland, in the mid-19th century,[13] with his great-grandfather James Connery being an Irish Traveller.[14] The remainder of his family was of Scottish descent, and his maternal great-grandparents were native Scottish Gaelic speakers from Fife and Uig on Skye.[15][16] His father was a Roman Catholic, and his mother was a Protestant. Connery had a younger brother Neil and was generally referred to in his youth as "Tommy".[17] Although he was small in primary school, he grew rapidly around the age of 12, reaching his full adult height of 6 ft 2 in (188 cm) at 18.[18] Connery was known during his teen years as "Big Tam", and he said that he lost his virginity to an adult woman in an ATS uniform at the age of 14.[19][20] He had an Irish childhood friend named Samus;[14] when the two were together, those who knew them both called Connery by his middle name Sean, emphasising the alliteration of the two names.[14] Since then Connery preferred to use his middle name.[14]
When I took a taxi during a recent Edinburgh Film Festival, the driver was amazed that I could put a name to every street we passed. "How come?" he asked. "As a boy I used to deliver milk round here", I said. "So what do you do now?" That was rather harder to answer.[15]
Afterwards, he returned to the co-op and worked as a lorry driver, a lifeguard at Portobello swimming baths, a labourer, an artist's model for the Edinburgh College of Art, and after a suggestion by former Mr. Scotland Archie Brennan,[25][26] as a coffin polisher, among other jobs. The modelling earned him 15 shillings an hour.[26] Artist Richard Demarco, at the time a student who painted several early pictures of Connery, described him as "very straight, slightly shy, too, too beautiful for words, a virtual Adonis".[27]
Connery began bodybuilding at the age of 18, and from 1951 trained heavily with Ellington, a former gym instructor in the British Army.[28] While his official website states he was third in the 1950 Mr. Universe contest, most sources place him in the 1953 competition, either third in the Junior class[29] or failing to place in the Tall Man classification.[30] Connery said he was soon deterred from bodybuilding when he found that Americans frequently beat him in competitions because of sheer muscle size and, unlike Connery, refused to participate in athletic activity which could make them lose muscle mass.[31]
Connery was a keen footballer, having played for Bonnyrigg Rose in his younger days.[32] He was offered a trial with East Fife. While on tour with South Pacific, Connery played in a football match against a local team that Matt Busby, manager of Manchester United, happened to be scouting.[33] According to reports, Busby was impressed with his physical prowess and offered Connery a contract worth 25 a week (equivalent to 882 in 2023) immediately after the game. Connery said he was tempted to accept, but he recalls, "I realised that a top-class footballer could be over the hill by the age of 30, and I was already 23. I decided to become an actor and it turned out to be one of my more intelligent moves".[34]
While in Edinburgh, Connery was targeted by the Valdor gang, one of the most violent in the city. He was first approached by them in a billiard hall where he prevented them from stealing his jacket and was later followed by six gang members to a 15-foot-high (4.6 m) balcony at the Palais de Danse.[36] There, Connery singlehandedly launched an attack against the gang members, grabbing one by the throat and another by the biceps and cracking their heads together. From then on, he was treated with great respect by the gang and gained a reputation as a "hard man".[37]
Connery first met Michael Caine at a party during the production of South Pacific in 1954, and the two later became close friends.[35] During this production at the Opera House, Manchester, over the Christmas period of 1954, Connery developed a serious interest in the theatre through American actor Robert Henderson, who lent him copies of the Ibsen works Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, and When We Dead Awaken, and later listed works by the likes of Proust, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bernard Shaw, Joyce, and Shakespeare for him to digest.[38] Henderson urged him to take elocution lessons and got him parts at the Maida Vale Theatre in London. He had already begun a film career, having been an extra in Herbert Wilcox's 1954 musical Lilacs in the Spring alongside Errol Flynn and Anna Neagle.[39]
Although Connery had secured several roles as an extra, he was struggling to make ends meet and was forced to accept a part-time job as a babysitter for journalist Peter Noble and his actress wife Marianne, which earned him 10 shillings a night.[39] He met Hollywood actress Shelley Winters one night at Noble's house, who described Connery as "one of the tallest and most charming and masculine Scotsmen" she had ever seen, and later spent many evenings with the Connery brothers drinking beer.[39] Around this time, Connery was residing at TV presenter Llew Gardner's house. Henderson landed Connery a role in a 6 a week Q Theatre production of Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution, during which he met and became friends with fellow Scot Ian Bannen.[40] This role was followed by Point of Departure and A Witch in Time at Kew, a role as Pentheus opposite Yvonne Mitchell in The Bacchae at the Oxford Playhouse, and a role opposite Jill Bennett in Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie.[40]
During his time at the Oxford Theatre, Connery won a brief part as a boxer in the TV series The Square Ring, before being spotted by Canadian director Alvin Rakoff, who gave him multiple roles in The Condemned, shot on location in Dover in Kent. In 1956, Connery appeared in the theatrical production of Epitaph, and played a minor role as a hoodlum in the "Ladies of the Manor" episode of the BBC Television police series Dixon of Dock Green.[40] This was followed by small television parts in Sailor of Fortune and The Jack Benny Program (in a special episode filmed in Europe).[40]
Connery had a major role in the melodrama Another Time, Another Place (1958) as a British reporter named Mark Trevor, caught in a love affair opposite Lana Turner and Barry Sullivan. During filming, Turner's possessive gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, who was visiting from Los Angeles, believed she was having an affair with Connery.[46] Connery and Turner had attended West End shows and London restaurants together.[47] Stompanato stormed onto the film set and pointed a gun at Connery, only to have Connery disarm him and knock him flat on his back. Stompanato was banned from the set.[48] Two Scotland Yard detectives advised Stompanato to leave and escorted him to the airport, where he boarded a plane back to the United States.[49] Connery later recounted that he had to lie low for a while after receiving threats from men linked to Stompanato's boss, Mickey Cohen.[47]
In 1959, Connery landed a leading role in director Robert Stevenson's Walt Disney Productions film Darby O'Gill and the Little People (1959), alongside Albert Sharpe, Janet Munro, and Jimmy O'Dea. The film is a tale about a wily Irishman and his battle of wits with leprechauns. Upon the film's initial release, A. H. Weiler of The New York Times praised the cast (save Connery whom he described as "merely tall, dark, and handsome") and thought the film an "overpoweringly charming concoction of standard Gaelic tall stories, fantasy and romance".[50] He also had prominent television roles in Rudolph Cartier's 1961 productions of Adventure Story and Anna Karenina for BBC Television, co-starring with Claire Bloom in the latter.[51] Also in 1961 he portrayed the title role in a CBC television film adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth with Australian actress Zoe Caldwell cast as Lady Macbeth.[52]
Connery's breakthrough came in the role of British secret agent James Bond. He was reluctant to commit to a film series, but understood that if the films succeeded, his career would greatly benefit.[citation needed] Between 1962 and 1967, Connery played 007 in Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice, the first five Bond films produced by Eon Productions. After departing from the role, Connery returned for the seventh film, Diamonds Are Forever, in 1971. Connery made his final appearance as Bond in Never Say Never Again, a 1983 remake of Thunderball produced by Jack Schwartzman's Taliafilm. All seven films were commercially successful. James Bond, as portrayed by Connery, was selected as the third-greatest hero in cinema history by the American Film Institute.[53]
The choice of Connery for the role of James Bond owed a lot to Dana Broccoli, wife of producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, who is reputed to have been instrumental in persuading her husband that Connery was the right man.[54] James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, originally doubted Connery's casting, saying, "He's not what I envisioned of James Bond looks", and "I'm looking for Commander Bond and not an overgrown stunt-man", adding that Connery (muscular, 6' 2", and a Scot) was unrefined.[55] Fleming's girlfriend Blanche Blackwell told him Connery had the requisite sexual charisma, and Fleming changed his mind after the successful Dr. No premire. He was so impressed, he wrote Connery's heritage into the character. In his 1964 novel You Only Live Twice, Fleming wrote that Bond's father was Scottish and from Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands.[55]
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