Reader's Digest August 1989

SEAN CONNERY: Against the Odds

The story of his life is as extraordinary as any film fantasy

BY JOHN CULHANE

“MY NAME IS BOND-James Bond,” Sean Connery informed the world's moviegoers in 1962. In seven Bond films over a span of 21 years, the tall, dark Scot came to embody the suave secret agent whose code name was known around the globe: 007.

            In the most exotic locations on Earth, enemies of the free world tried to eliminate 007, employing everything from hungry sharks to an industrial laser. But he always survived, practically unscathed, still self-assured, usually with a beautiful woman on his arm. As writer and fan Bob Greene asked, "Was there an American boy who did not secretly want to grow up to be James Bond?"

            Yet better than any spy thriller is the real-life story of Tommy Connery, a poor, uneducated laborer's son who grew up to be Sean Connery, well-read, well-traveled and world-famous.

            He was born August 25, 1930, in a grimy section of Edinburgh called Fountainbridge, where the Connerys lived in two rooms in a cold-water, outside-toilet tenement. His hard-working father, Joe, managed to keep his job at a rubber factory during the dark days of the Depression and still find time for his son. He gave Tommy swimming lessons after hours and helped his wife teach the boy to read even before he started school. But as times got tougher, Euphamia "Effie" Connery had to take jobs as a cleaning woman.

            When World War II began, Tommy, a go-getter even then, found work delivering milk door-to-door in the early morning hours before school. He was nine years old.

            Connery quit school at 13 and became a full-time deliveryman. He'd start at 5 a.m. and finish his milk route quickly so he could pick up extra jobs delivering coal or potatoes. But by 16, he determined to escape his world of poverty.

            The British Royal Navy seemed to offer a way, and he signed on. Once in, however, he realized that for a young man without an education, the navy would be another dead end. Assigned as a boy seaman to the H.M.S. Formidable on England's south coast, Connery was to see little but British coastal waters. His muscular build-he was already six-foot-two-got him a spot on the boxing team, but he failed to distinguish himself. Within a year, the homesick teenager, worried about his bleak prospects, developed chronic stomach problems. Finally, the navy hospitalized Connery for ulcers, and at 19 he was given a medical discharge.

"Want to Be an Actor?"

            Tommy found work as a helper in the printing-press room of the Edinburgh Evening News. Having developed into a strong swimmer, he also became a lifeguard at the local pool, and his muscular body got him jobs modeling at the Edinburgh College of Art. A friend encouraged him to compete in the Mr. Universe contest in London. Tommy Connery won third place, but more important, he heard that the British production of South Pacific needed cast replacements. He tried out, sang a bit of "There Is Nothin' Like a Dame" in his naturally pleasant voice and did a few dance steps. He got the job, but his Scottish burr was so impenetrable that few cast members spoke to him. "They thought I was polish," Connery recalls.

            The exception was Robert Henderson, a 47-Year-old Yank who was directing South Pacific. One day, Henderson had a long talk with the muscle man whose determination seemed irrepressible. Connery told Henderson he hoped to become a professional soccer player.

            "Well, look," said Henderson. "With soccer, at 28 or 30, it's all over. Then what do you do? Wouldn't you rather be an actor?"

            "How?" asked Connery. "I left school at 13."

            Henderson nodded. "You've practically no education. But you have an imagination and a mind. I will give you a list of ten books that you should read."

            The "ten" books that Henderson had promised were more like 200, including the complete works of Shakespeare, Thomas Wolfe and Oscar Wilde. But Connery tackled them-every day, applying all the energy and tenacity he got from his parents. He would go to the library in the morning and stay till curtain time.

            Late at night, he would sit up with his tape recorder, hearing a voice that certainly wasn't Polish and was sounding a little less Scottish. Acting, he decided after a year of this, was going to be his career. And for his new life, Connery had chosen a new first name.

            In 1957, the BBC produced Rod Serling's play Requiem for a Heavyweight. The down-and-out prize-fighter, Mountain McClintock, was played by a young actor who had boxed in the Royal Navy. His performance-smashing. His name-Sean Connery.

            That same year, Connery was cast in a production of Anna Christie. The title role was played by ash-blond Diane Cilento. She was to become Connery's wife a few years later.

            By then Connery had appeared in five forgettable films-but in one of them, he caught the eye of Walt Disney, who brought him to the United States in 1958. Disney cast him as Michael McBride, the love interest in a story about leprechauns called Darby O'Gill and the Little People. In the film's climax, McBride has a rousing fistfight with the village bully.

            Among those who took note of Connery's screen presence in Darby was producer Harry Saltzman who, with co-producer Albert R. "Cubby" Broccoli, was casting a film of their own based on Dr. No, the 1958 novel by Ian Fleming.

            Connery was called to the producers' London office for an interview. "We watched him bound across the street like Superman," said Saltzman later. "We knew we had our Bond."

            But Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, had casting approval and was harder to persuade. "He'd have loved to have had Cary Grant in the role, but there wasn't enough money for that," says Connery. "So he was obliged to agree that I would do it."

            Play it Connery did, and splendidly-five times in all in the '60s, from Dr. No through From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and Thunderball to You Only Live Twice. His debonair charm and magnetic good looks on screen captivated audiences around the globe. Small boys from Chicago to Rome could tell you exactly what 007 said when Goldfinger threatened him with a laser:

            "Do you expect me to talk?"

            "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.”

            But 007 did not die. The Bond pictures' success permitted Connery to move his wife, their son, Jason, and his stepdaughter into a town house overlooking London's Acton Park. He was also able to buy his parents a more comfortable home and persuade his father to retire.

            Connery came to feel, however, that the role of Bond limited him as an actor, and he asked to be released from his contract. In 1971 it was announced that he would do one more Bond film for $1 million. Every cent would go to his newly formed Scottish International Educational Trust, to help underprivileged Scots go to college.

A Father's Last Gift.

            Shortly after he finished that sixth Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, Connery went to visit his parents in their new home in Edinburgh. His father had been battling cancer, but no one in the family believed he was in any immediate danger. Sean spent the night, and in the morning the family took Joe to the hospital.

            "When we were leaving, I looked back and saw him standing in the doorway of his room. He made a great big gesture..."

            Telling me the story, Connery suddenly stood and acted out his father's gesture, lifting his chin up and raising both his arms, fists clenched, above his head. "I thought he was saying, 'Don't worry about me. Everything is terrific.' So I went back to London. The next morning at one o'clock, I got the call that he was dead.

            "It had an absolutely devastating effect on me," Connery said. "What took me by surprise was the sense of loss I felt. I was very much more influenced by my mother than by my father-I thought."

            But it is no small gift to a son, the look of a father unafraid in the face of death.

            Not long after, the great director John Huston offered Connery a role in The Man Who Would Be King, based on Kipling's tale of two British soldiers in India who bluff their way to the throne of mountainous Kafiristan. Huston found the perfect pair to play Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan: Sean Connery and Michael Caine, Connery's cockney pal since his early days in London.

            Danny Dravot's death scene had greater depth than anything Connery had previously put on film. Surrounded by hostile tribesmen, he settles his crown upon his balding head and strides out on the suspension bridge across a yawning chasm. As the tribesmen begin to chop the ropes, Connery, in a clear tribute to his father, lifts his chin and begins to sing: "A glorious band, the chosen few, on whom the spirit came...." When he falls, Peachy finishes the song for him.

Face of Heroism.

            Millions went to see Connery as Danny, and in such other change-of-pace roles as the chivalrous Arab chieftain, Raisuli, in The Wind and the Lion (1975) and as Robin Hood in Robin and Marian (1976).

            Connery did play James Bond once more, in the appropriately titled Never Say Never Again in 1983, but he was no longer just James Bond; he had become, in the words of British film lecturer Neil Sinyard, "the acceptable face of heroism in an anti-heroic age."

            The roles he took on in the '80s reflected his changed stature. Connery described his character in both Time Bandits and The Name of the Rose as "being a kind of father-teacher, a role model." Best of all was his Oscar-winning performance in The Untouchables as Jimmy Malone, the veteran Chicago cop, mentor to rookies.

            Connery based his characterization of the Irish-born Malone on a few tough old beat cops he remembered from Edinburgh. His character's memorable advice to Eliot Ness had a convincing ring: "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get him. 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.” When the film clip of this speech-delivered in Connery’s inimitable, riveting style-was shown at the Academy Awards presentation, the audience erupted with cheers.

“The Hard Way.”

             As Connery was making the transition to these fatherly roles, life imitated art.  His son, Jason, now 27, announced he wanted to be an actor and sought his father’s advice.

            “You come with me,” Connery said, and drew up a list of recommended plays and other works for his son to read-much as Robert Henderson had done for him.  Together, they prepared two audition pieces and a song for Jason, who was accepted at a repertory company in Scotland.

            After his apprenticeship there, Jason bought a secondhand car to make the rounds of auditions in London.  I asked Connery, “You mean you wouldn’t buy your son a new car?” Connery stared at me with the stern rectitude of his Scottish forebears: “I wouldn’t buy him a car, no.  Doing it the hard way-call it craft, discipline, whatever-is a very important part of being an actor.”

            At 59, Sean Connery and his second wife of 14 years, Micheline Roquebrune, have homes on two continents. He reads widely, paints enthusiastically, continues to support the Scottish International Educational Trust-and is as much in demand as he ever was as Bond.

            Right now on movie screens around the world in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Sean Connery plays the father of Indiana Jones.  Wearing a country walking hat, spectacles, salt-and-pepper beard, he looks just the sort whose son would grow up to be an adventurer-archeologist.

            And what adventures! In one scene, Dr. Henry Jones and his son take over the enemy’s German fighter biplane-the son at the controls, the father behind him, blasting away at their pursuers with machine guns.  It is a favorite image of Connery’s: father and son fighting and winning together, against the odds.