The name stays ‘Bond, James Bond’
Sean Connery immortalised James Bond character in seven films of the same name
Best known for the inaugural and one of the best portrayal of British Secret Service agent, Connery was born Thomas Sean Connery on August 25, 1930. His mother, Effie, he later revealed, occasionally worked as a cleaning woman.
After doing a bunch of odd jobs and facing a handful of rejections, his first big breakthrough came in 1962 when the young actor embarked on a career playing the debonair spy that went on to become the most famous character franchise in movie history. The first Bond film, Dr. No, set the stage for Connery to play the role for over two decades with his last reprisal in 1983 with Never Say Never Again.
Connery won a best-actor award from the British Academy of Film & Television Arts for The Name of the Rose (1986)
Connery won a best-actor award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for The Name of the Rose (1986), based on the Umberto Eco novel, in which he played a crime-solving medieval monk, and the Academy Award as best supporting actor for his performance as an honest cop on the corrupt Chicago police force in The Untouchables (1987), playing a cop who assists Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) take down Al Capone (Robert De Niro).
In the 1970s and ’80s, Connery gracefully transformed himself into one of the grand old man of the movies. If his trained killer in the futuristic fantasy Zardoz (1974), his Barbary pirate in The Wind and the Lion (1975) or his middle-aged Robin Hood in Robin and Marian (1976) did not erase the memory of his James Bond, they certainly blurred the image.
Connery’s magnetism did not fade as he grew older. In 1989, when he was 59 years old and had long since discarded his James Bond toupee, People magazine anointed him the Sexiest Man Alive.
In The Man Who Would Be King (1975), directed by John Huston, Connery played a British soldier who sets out to loot a country and is mistaken for a god. When Huston had first tried to finance a movie based on Rudyard Kipling’s short story of the same name 20 years earlier, he intended to take Clark Gable for the role of Danny Dravot. “Mr. Connery was a far better Danny than Gable would ever have been,” Huston told The New Yorker.
“To quote his character in The Man Who Would Be King, “You call it luck. I call it destiny,” one can say that perhaps
In 1989, People magazine anointed him the Sexiest Man Alive
it is a little of both that allows Connery to leave an indelible mark in every film he has chosen,” Huston further said.
On July 5, 2000, wearing the dark green MacLeod tartan of the Highlands, Connery was knighted at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh by Queen Elizabeth II. His knighthood had been vetoed for two years by officials angry at his outspoken support for the Scottish National Party and his active role in the passage of a referendum that created the first Scottish Parliament in 300 years.
Sean Connery passed away in his sleep at the age of 90 in The Bahamas on October 31. He made his last appearance on the big screen in 2003 as Allan Quartermain in the lesser known film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And while the iconic actor hadn’t appeared on the big screen in nearly two decades before his demise, he has surely changed the way people order a martini “that’s shaken, not stirred,” as he taught us.
