Sean Connery Online | American Film May 1989

American Film May 1989

CONNERY.

Sean CONNERY.

Aged to perfection but no longer bottled in Bond, he’s the closest equivalent we now have to Clark Gable-an old-time movie star

BY BEN FONG-TORRES

WHEN SEAN CONNERY OPENED THE door of his New York hotel room and peered out, I didn't see James Bond. I saw Jimmy Malone, the wizened Irish cop in The Untouchables, opening the door, with just a trace of caution on his face, for Eliot Ness. I saw the man who's playing the father of an action hero of the '80s, Indiana Jones. I saw the actor who'll be onscreen this fall as a grandfather, for Chrissakes. Truth be told, I also saw 007. How could one not? A squint of the eye, a mental toupee and a quick 20 pounds off, and you'd have the man at the end of Never Say Never Again. That was the one Connery made in 1983, when he was 53. He'd clearly shown it wasn't 1962 anymore. But he also provided proof once more that he, and he alone, truly deserved to call himself "Bond. James Bond." Of the various men who would be Bond, only Connery had that magic presence that came from within, that derived from and gave off airs of absolute confidence, sophistication, grace, wit, cool, detachment and, finally, the icy meanness necessary to be an agent for the British Secret Service, and to carry a license to kill. On the screen, all of those qualities appeared innate. And yet, Connery was a laborer from a poor pocket of Edinburgh, Scotland, a dropout the moment he hit his teens and a theater-trained actor who was wallowing in B flicks when, what passed for destiny, called. In other words, he was some actor, and although he went through his years in Bondage thinking he wasn't appreciated, he was. Sidney Lumet, the director who hired Connery to star in his 1965 film, The Hill, saw a craftsman through all the slickness that was Bond and engaged him in five films through the years, the latest, Family Business, to be released this fall. "The thing that was apparent to me-and to most directors-was how much talent and ability it takes to play that kind of character, [who's] based on charm and magnetism," Lumet says. "It's the movie equivalent of high comedy, and he did it brilliantly." And now, here's Connery, settling into a Victorian chair in his sunny suite at the Wyndham Hotel, pouring a drink of Deer Park mineral water into a wineglass and explaining that it's "lubrication" for his throat. He's on the mend from an operation to remove a node on his vocal cords, and thus several weeks of enforced silence; the day before, he was looping dialogue for Family Business, in which he plays father to Dustin Hoffman and grandfather to Matthew Broderick. Tomorrow, he's off to his getaway home on Lyford Cay, a resort town in the Bahamas. Today, he's got two movies to promote, Family Business and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Connery portrays Indiana's father, Dr. Henry Jones, in an inspired bit of casting: James Bond meets Indiana Jones.1B' Don't get him started on that, though. I've been warned by his publicist that Connery may try to cut our interview short by blaming his throat; that he's not much for pushing movies; that he can either be "pissy"-especially if he's asked too many questions about Bond-or his usual self-a true gentleman, a stand-up guy who likes to tell a story or two. A man's man.

Dressed in a sky blue denim shirt and charcoal slacks, Connery looks rather like a suspect facing a talk with a district attorney. With his domineering eyebrows and wide, drooping Untouchables mustache, he looks formidable-even forbidding.

But yes. Through the serious demeanor, the occasional hacking cough, he displays undeniable charm and magnetism. He is uncomplaining and all business.

As is his nature, the actor seems willing to address just about any question-it's the interview equivalent of his remarkable ability to, as Pauline Kael put it, "let out the stops." Say you heard that Christopher Reeve called him on the eve of Superman, for advice on how to avoid getting trapped by a recurring role, and Connery will tell you, "I just told him to get a good lawyer {for} some measure of control, and not to be dictated to by idiots, as much as you can reasonably be protected against that."

And yet, like a certain recurring character he used to play, Connery can be hard to pin down.

Compliment Connery on the vividness of his death scene in The Untouchables- after being machine-gunned, he crawls down a hallway, bloodying it as he goes- and he'll deflect the credit to director Brian DePalma and tell how another long scene, which begins inside a police station and erupts into violence outside, was captured in one shot, the result of DePalma's desire for "fluid intensity."

Remind him of the wonderful bit in Robin and Marian (1976), with Audrey Hepburn, in which, portraying a middle-aged Robin who's been reunited with Maid Marian, he wakes up in Sherwood Forest, staggers toward a fire, reaches for his crotch, and gets set to relieve himself, when he suddenly remembers Marian's presence and pulls back. Connery arches an eyebrow-that action seems to pass for a smile-and shares the credit with writer Goldman: "That was an example of, 'I liked the script.' "Which, Connery says, is his uppermost concern in choosing work. "Here was a guy who was aging, and at the end of a myth. He's a not very intelligent guy, who's at heart a boy, and that's how I played it. Waking up with a bit of rheumatism, he goes to have a piss and realizes Marian is there, and he has to cover up and go somewhere else." It was all in the script.

Connery, says Harrison Ford, has a "delicious sense of humor." Unfortunately, Ford couldn't come up with any examples. Neither can Connery. Once again, he's willing to give the laughs to others. Talking about Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he worked on Marnie in 1964, he recalls the only two directions given him during production: "I had a tendency sometimes to speak too quickly, and he would say, 'Just sneak in some dog's feet,' which was his way of saying 'Pause.' The other was, I was opening my mouth, listening to somebody talking to me, and he said, 'I don't think people are interested in your dental work.' "

When Connery speaks, unencumbered by a script or character, he relaxes into his Scottish burr, so that it's "al-SO" and "bet-tah." On occasion, he fidgets with his nails or his gold wedding ring, but mostly he's in control. The man's bearing is regal, as befits a Scotsman who has slowly, yet suddenly, become one of the movies' true stars.

Vincent Patrick, who wrote Family Business and socialized with Connery off the set, is amazed by the way New Yorkers reacted to Connery. "You suddenly realize he's the closest we now have to Clark Gable, an old-time movie star. Everyone knows him and likes him. It's shocking- every age group, men and women. There's something very likable about him on a screen."

As Bond, Connery loved 'em and either left 'em, or left 'em dead. In real life, he's been married only twice in 58 years: first to actress Diane Cilento, best known as Molly, the lusty peasant woman in Tom Jones. Their marriage lasted from 1962 to 1973 and produced a son, Jason, now 25 and an actor.

In 1970, Connery was playing in the Moroccan International Amateur Golf Tournament when he met Micheline Roquebrune, a French painter who was also competing. They each won their tourneys and, after waiting out their respective divorces, married in 1974.

When they met, says Micheline, she didn't know from James Bond-no doubt a plus in Connery's book-but "I knew he was a superstar. Everywhere, women went, 'Ah-ah-ah!' "And what does her husband make of it all? "He finds it very boring. He says they are looking at his image and not him."

He is a private man, but he's neither Garboesque nor grotesque, as he perceives some of today's superstars.

"I think it's a great, great load of bullshit made about the public place; this coming in with four bodyguards and the dark glasses and the jacket over the shoulder, making an entrance into a restaurant." Connery momentarily addresses the Eddie Murphys of this world: "What're you trying to do?

"I have a simple code of conduct," he continues. "If I go to a public place, that's exactly what it is. I have to deal with the public. So I go to football and boxing matches; I go on the streets everywhere. If I go to a private place, then I expect my privacy to be respected, and it's as simple as that."

Over the years, Connery has done few interviews, and he's aware that his low profile may have cost him some award nominations. But his credits over nearly 30 years, and his work in The Untouchables, When Connery speaks, unencumbered by a script or character, he relaxes into his Scottish burr, so that it's "al-SO" and "bet-tah." On occasion, he fidgets with his nails or his gold wedding ring, but mostly he's in control. The man's bearing is regal, as befits a Scotsman who has slowly, yet suddenly, become one of the movies' true stars.

He is a private man, but he's neither Garboesque nor grotesque, as he perceives some of today's superstars.

Over the years, Connery has done few interviews, and he's aware that his low profile may have cost him some award nominations. But his credits over nearly 30 years, and his work in The Untouchables, made him unstoppable last year.

Even though Connery was the odds-on favorite for an Oscar, and got a hint of what was to come when he ignited a long, standing ovation early in the evening when he presented an award, Connery says he was prepared not to win. (He has never joined the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.) "I didn't experience any great elation," he says, flatly, and thinks he got the Oscar more for his body of work than for The Untouchables.

In that film, Connery turns the supporting role of Jimmy Malone, a veteran Irish cop who teaches Eliot Ness the ropes of the Chicago gangland game, into a showcase for his well-honed acting skills. He is both gruff and sentimental, cruel and kind, burned-out wary and boyishly enthused about going after Al Capone.

But Connery has been an exemplary actor whenever his roles and directors have permitted. In The Hill, the film he made with Lumet in 1965, he plays a convict in a brutal British military prison in North Africa. He could not have been farther from the image of the debonair, carefree, globe-trotting, womanizing spy. For two stark black-and-white hours, he is every inch Joe Roberts, the sergeant major struggling up numerous man-made hills.

Two movies into the Bond series, Connery had shown additional dimensions. But for years, his quest for respect could be compared with Joe Roberts' futile climbs.

That, says film producer Larry Gordon, has changed. "Sean is now being taken seriously as an actor. He's not James Bond. He's Sean Connery, and he's a terrific actor."

Gordon singles out movies like The Man Who Would Be King, the 1975 John

Huston film from a Rudyard Kipling story about two British soldiers (Connery and Michael Caine) conquering a barbarous land; and The Name of the Rose, the 1986 film in which Connery plays a medieval monk solving a murder mystery. "That was not typecasting," says Gordon. "He stretched, and he was great. I haven't seen a bad film that he's done."

But yes, Gordon agrees, there was a time when, among the hard-eyed people who watch films primarily for potential profits, Connery hadn't shaken Agent 007. Between 1984 and 1986, Gordon was president of 20th Century Fox. "You'd say, 'Well, is he too identified with James Bond?' But since The Untouchables and other things he's done, I think that's long gone."

His first film after getting the gold was a forgettable collection of cliches called The Presidio. But now, Connery is back with two meaty roles.

First, there's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the third Indy adventure from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and the first since 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Shortly after Temple of Doom, they developed three story ideas and had several screenplays written. One of them included a notion of Spielberg's: "I wanted to do Indy in pursuit of his father (a medieval scholar), sharing his father's dream, and also, in the course of searching for their dreams, they rediscover each other."

Spielberg says Connery was his first choice to play Dr. Jones. "I couldn't imagine anyone with less screen power than Sean Connery to be the famous Indiana Jones' father." As Spielberg sees it, Ford “takes up a lot of screen, and I didn't want Harrison diminishing any father in screen presence."

Spielberg counts himself among Connery's greatest admirers, dating back to The Hill in 1965, when Spielberg was 17 and already making movies. "And one of my favorite Sean Connery movies of all time is The Man Who Would Be King. He's done so many incredible parts that you can pretty much cast him in any nationality, from the Raisuli {the desert sheik in The Wind and the Lion} to the Irish cop in The Untouchables, and people accept Sean Connery.”

It was when DePalma showed him a rough cut of The Untouchables that Spiel- berg thought he'd found a match for Ford. "I figured Sean would give Harrison a run for his money."

Spielberg wasn't sure he could get Connery. "I didn't think Sean would want to play Indiana Jones' father. Obviously, Sean had his trademark on the James Bond movies, and we are a kind of James Bond movie ourselves." If he were in Connery's shoes, says Spielberg, "I'm not quite sure I'd be interested in being in James Bond's rival motion picture."

Connery was, but he didn't like the initial script. In that version, says Ford, Dr. Jones was "a more elderly, gnomish, Yoda-like father."

"It didn't add up in my book," Connery says. "I was after something a bit more Victorian and flamboyant, like one of the old expeditioners, Sir Richard Burton and Mungo Park, who went off into the hinterlands and were missing for months...and that's what we got."

Connery also had a strong hand in shaping his character in Family Business. He plays the part of Jessie McMullen, an unrepentent thief who winds up leading both his son and grandson in a million- dollar heist. Connery wanted to make McMullen "harder and less sentimental."

Hearing this, Patrick, who wrote the script based on his own novel, breaks out in laughter. "{Connery's} the only person in the Western Hemisphere who would ever say that," he says. "This guy {the grandfather} was about as hard as they come-until I met Sean."

But once Connery, who thinks through every script and prepares meticulously for every role, explained how a tougher McMullen would affect the grandson and the movie's message, Patrick and producer Gordon were in accord. "Jessie had more of a leprechaun kind of a personality in the script we sent to Sean," says Gordon. "He did want to play it harder, which really helped us a great deal."

Patrick couldn't resist the chance to observe Connery, Hoffman and Broderick in action.

Asked to describe Connery, Patrick uses two terms: "consummate professional" and "generous." In a shot of Hoffman, where only Connery's back can be seen, Connery "never backs up for an instant," Patrick notes. "He gives just as good a performance while feeding the other actor. He does whatever he can to make the film better." Connery is a generous actor, says Ford, "which is to say that he just goes to work with no bullshit."

It'd be understandable that Connery, propelled to stardom as a stud, might have to be dragged into, and past, middle age, growing bald and paunchy before the moviegoing audience and, now, portraying a grandfather.

Lumet, who worked with Connery in The Hill ( 1965), when he was in the midst of Bondage, The Anderson Tapes (1971), The Offense (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and, now, in Family Business, says that Connery is unconcerned with his image. "It’s all a question of good parts. There's no vanity about him. He has no worry about playing a hero or a villain, a good guy or bad, looking ugly or pretty. He's so sure of himself as a man, he goes for the best parts."

"It’s amazing," he continues. "He's close to being a legend. Bur there's been no change in him. He's the most level-headed person I know. He knows it's all crap. He enjoys life."

"Yes," says Connery, "that's pretty accurate. What matters to me is just to be a serious actor."

As for aging, he shrugs, "It's city hall, isn't it? You can't fight it, so accept it and go with it and hopefully enjoy it."

Thomas Sean Connery was born in a poor and rugged part of Edinburgh, near a rubber mill and a brewery. "The place smelled of rubber and hops," Connery recalls. His father worked at the mill 12 hours a day, and his work ethic rubbed off on his son. "It's blind allegiance, in a way. Therefore, I couldn't wait to go to work."

Shortly after his brother Neil was born, nine-year-old Sean began rising at six in the morning to deliver milk before going to school. It was wartime, and, while his father worked in a munitions factory in Glasgow, Sean was doing his part to keep the family afloat.

Connery remembers life being "disruptive." Still, he managed to see a few movies on Saturdays, trading jam jars and beer bottles for tokens to the local cinema. He'd watch Flash Gordon, the Three Stooges and myriad American cowboys. "I always used to think about being an Indian," says Connery, straight-faced.

He dropped out of school at 13 and joined the navy at 16; stomach ulcers- which he blames on his inability to deal with discipline-got him out at 19. After attending a British Legion training school, he became a furniture polisher, and that led to a job polishing coffins.

In London, in 1950, while working in a newspaper printing plant, he was a member of a bodybuilding club. His 6-feet-2-inch stature and rugged physique got him jobs as a swim-trunks model. When he entered the Mr. Universe competition the same year, he was invited to audition for the touring company of South Pacific.

Connery wound up in the male chorus, going from town to town singing "There Is Nothing Like a Dame." He graduated to a small speaking part and, on the road, made up for lost school time. Robert Henderson, an actor and director in the company, told Connery that if he wanted to be an actor he should catch up on literature, and he gave Connery a list of 10 books. Every day for one year, in every town, Connery hit the local library and read into a tape recorder. Back in London, he studied theater by attending the Old Vic.

"Every actor sounded the same on stage," Connery notes. Determined to be more "organic," he applied himself to repertory theater and television work, making a mark in a BBC presentation of Requiem for a Heavyweight. Then came a role opposite Clare Bloom in Anna Karenina. Signed to 20th Century Fox, Connery appeared with Lana Turner and Barry Sullivan in Another Time, Another Place, and had just played a vicious killer in Tarzan's Greatest Adventure when he got a call from two American producers, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. They'd acquired the rights to a number of Ian Fleming's popular series of James Bond novels.

For the Bond role, the producers either considered or auditioned Cary Grant, David Niven, Richard Burton, Trevor Howard, Peter Finch, James Mason, Roger Moore and even Jimmy Stewart. But these big names were too big for the $l million budget allotted to the first Bond film, and the producers settled for Connery, who commanded all of $16,500.

He ran with the part, injecting an ingredient largely alien to Fleming's Bond: humor, in the form of teases (Miss Moneypenny, the secretary of Bond's boss, M, being the most frequent target) and double entendres. In bed with yet another knockout dame in Goldfinger, Bond answers the phone and declines a dinner invitation: "Something big's come up."

"I look for humor in whatever I'm doing," Connery says-as long as the humor fits the character and story. Listing role models of on-screen wit, he names Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant ("probably the most underrated actor to appear on screen "), Marlon Brando ("the most watchable of American actors") and, among the British, Ralph Richardson. "I adored his acting," he says. "He always found something quite humorous in his way of doing things."

Some social scientists ascribe the 007 phenomenon to America's need for a suave hero after the assassination of JFK-himself an Ian Fleming fan. The Beatles took care of the girls; Bond handled the guys, who suddenly knew all about vodka martinis, Aston Martins, chemin de fer and dames.

Yet, as soon as Bond took off, Connery got nervous about the character jettisoning his acting career. No matter how good he was at playing Bond, Connery was afraid he'd be stamped 007 forever.

"He has enormous range," says Lumet, "and he wanted to be recognized for other kinds of acting."

By the mid '60s, when the nation was steeped in Bondmania (a 007 after-shave was in the air, and Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man" was on the air), Connery had a dossier of complaints.

The producers were "greedy," he said, in 1966. "They'd play Bond themselves if they could-to save the money." After the blockbuster Goldfinger, Bond films began exploiting high technology and stunts at the expense of stories and characters. Also, they took too long to make, intruding on his other work. And, perhaps most painful of all, the films Connery made outside his 007 persona were bigger bombs than any detonated by a Bond villain.

Connery kept vowing that he was quitting and kept coming back, in 1971 for Diamonds Are Forever (he donated his $1.25 million salary to a favorite cause, the Scottish International Education Trust Fund) and in 1983.

By then, Broccoli and Saltzman were out of the picture, and Connery took $3 million for Never Say Never Again. The title was a brainchild of Micheline Connery, and it perfectly summed up his turbulent affair with James Bond.

Although Connery has said "never again" for the last time, the elements he introduced-humor, irony, detachment, self-deprecation, an on-screen signal of just playacting-live on in today's movie heroes. It's in the way Reeve played Superman, Michael Douglas' Jack Colton in Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, in any number of would-be Bonds and- yes-Ford's portrayal of Indiana Jones.

Here, for a change, Connery is not bashful about taking credit. "I think it's an element that I introduced. There was no question that Spielberg's idea to have myself as the father of Indiana Jones was because of the mixture of these elements."

Spielberg agrees, to an extent. "Sean made a contribution to all movie heroes everywhere with James Bond," the director says. But he adds, "James Bond was probably inspired by the serials of the '30s, '40s and '50s, as the Indiana Jones series has been inspired by those old Republic serials."

Sean Connery has made a lifetime of films. From more than 45 features, could he compile a Connery film festival? He has been honored with two such tributes, in London and Paris, but he's never picked the films. Connery doesn't sneak in many dog's feet (Hi there, Hitchcock) while coming up with some choices for our hypothetical gala: The Hill, The Man Who Would Be King, Robin and Marian, The Name of the Rose and The Untouchables.

What-no Bond? Yes, one. Not Goldfinger, the box-office champ, but From Russia With Love. Connery likes its story line-heavy on intrigue, light on technotoys-the best.

It is possible, too, that the best Connery film fest would be his six-pack and a compilation of clips. He's often been picked out as the only redeeming actor in a dud movie, and he's been in a lot of plain bombs, with or without him. Anybody remember Shalako? Cuba? Ransom?

Connery owns up to having made some poor choices. "Sometimes," he says with a shrug, "you read something and it captures you." That happened in 1979, when he read a treatment for a film called Meteor. "I was very impressed, but it was dependent on special effects. Well, it turned out that the guys who raised the money didn't have the money, and it was late. The special effects were diabolical, shit flying on the screen instead of meteors."

Connery doesn't discuss his current fees but says that money has never been a factor in choosing scripts. "My first choice is always that I want to do it...it just gets down to the writing."

Sometimes he forgoes salary for a piece of the profits, if it helps get a project off the ground. In 1981, when he learned that Terry Gilliam was having trouble raising $5 million to make Time Bandits, Connery, a fan of The Monty Python Show, stepped in and accepted the key role of King Agamemnon. “When I {thought} of some of the assholes who get the money to make movies," he says, “it seemed ridiculous. I took a nominal fee and a piece of the picture, and it went ahead." It went ahead, in fact, to gross $42 million in America alone.

Connery is generous and charitable, without fanfare, but he won't be cheated. After signing on to appear in A Bridge Too Far, for $450,000, he learned that other stars, many of them lured to the film after Connery, were getting $750,000. Connery confronted producer Joseph Levine: "He said, 'It's not my fault you got a fucking lousy agent.' I said, you're absolutely right, so we'll change that.' He thought about it a few days and came back and said, 'I'm going to give you the same as the rest.' He didn't have to, but needless to say, of the other $350,000, I didn't pay my agent commission, and I sacked him." Connery's thoughts drift almost visibly to other fights.

"I think the only company I haven't sued is Paramount," he says. Connery joined Michael Caine in a 1978 lawsuit against Allied Artists, claiming they'd been cheated out of their share of profits from The Man Who Would Be King. When Connery talked a little too freely to the press about being "robbed," he was slapped with a multimillion-dollar countersuit, but he kept punching, and he's still punching.

Stealing and "Mickey Mouse book-keeping" are more prevalent than ever, he says, as movies are increasingly financed by corporate conglomerates headed by people far removed from the art, dirt and grit of making movies. Megamergers, he says, are squeezing out the smaller companies. "Somehow, like the theater, which they're always saying is dying, people find ways to get together, but it's invariably the creative people who have to take the greater risk."

Another thorn in his side is The Name of the Rose (1986), which earned $60 million in Europe (and several awards for Connery) but went almost unseen in the United States. Connery says Barry Diller, then CEO of Fox, "fucked it up" by rushing its release and marketing it with cartoon drawings. Did the film's failure here cost him an Oscar? Connery just sits and seethes.

The talk-and his weakening throat- are collecting their toll on Connery, and he stops. He looks over his right shoulder to a corner desk, where a short stack of scripts and books wait to be taken along to the Bahamas.

But before he takes off, Connery has one more chore: a cover photo. In the bedroom of another suite, he dutifully tries on a variety of jackets and blazers that have been laid out for him. The tailor asks if Connery has a favorite designer.

"No," he says indifferently, then appears to change his mind. "Woolworth's," he says. The tailor smiles politely, then gets busy taking measurements. As the tape goes around his waist, Connery proffers his size: "38."

The tailor comes up with some bad news: “39.”

"Well, 38 1/2," says Connery.

As the tailor makes a note of it, Connery nods emphatically, offering just a hint of satisfaction.

Everything in life, it seems, is a compromise.

Ben Fong-Torres says he was shaken, not stirred, by Connery.