Beyond Bond: inside Sean Connery's wild, wigged-out post-007 career
When Sean Connery starred in 1986’s Highlander – the sword-swinging, head-chopping fantasy in which he played an Egyptian-Spaniard (but sounding unmistakably Scottish) – the actor was paid $1 million for just seven days’ work. If production ran over, which was likely on such a slapdash low-budget film, Connery would receive another $1 million.
Thirty minutes before the end of his final day, Connery sensed things were not on schedule. “You’re not going to finish are you?” he said to director Russell Mulcahy. Mulcahy responded by sticking Connery in front of a leafy background and reeled off some instructions. “Now stand to the side. Now swing your sword. Now take your hat off. Look angry, scream.”
After 30 minutes Mulcahy shouted: “Right. Cut! That's a wrap.” Connery laughed. “You b–––––d!” That Sean Connery could command that kind of money – and double for going a minute over schedule – speaks to his immense stature. Whatever that indefinable quality is – pure screen presence – Connery permeated it. He was a slinking, nails-hard embodiment of hyper-masculinity.
The legacy of Sean Connery, who has died aged 90, will always be James Bond because Connery remains the standard to beat. But there was more to Sean Connery than 007. Famously, Connery did an odd selection of jobs before he started acting – not all befitting the luxury lifestyle of a future Bond. He worked as a milkman, coffin polisher, and model at an art college.
He also had numerous acting roles before being cast as 007, taking the lead as a fading boxer role in Blood Money – the BBC’s reworking of Requiem for a Heavyweight – and starring opposite Lana Turner in Another Time, Another Place. Connery even sang in the Disney film Darby O'Gill and the Little People. “I had so little experience about singing that it was a nightmare to learn it and go and make the record,” he later said.
He showed glimpses of his intensity with supporting roles in 1957’s Hell Drivers and 1961’s The Frightened City. Bond creator Ian Fleming didn’t want Connery for the role in Dr No, and branded him an “overgrown stuntman”. Connery would prove Fleming wrong, of course, and not just in the first Bond movies.
At the time of his original Bond run, he starred opposite Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, an uncomfortably dark psycho-sexual tale in which Connery is both a romantic lead and rapist. When Mark Cousins interviewed Connery in 1997, he noted it was a rare film about women for the star. “I’m not particularly skilled in understanding women,” replied Connery.
In 1965, the same year as Thunderball, Connery starred in The Hill, an intense war drama about a British military prison in Libyan desert. Connery is masterful as a squadron sergeant major imprisoned for assault – a performance that goes psychologically deeper than the surface-level pleasures of James Bond. His (official) Bond run ended with the painfully daft Diamonds are Forever in 1971. This was not the James Bond of his earlier films: now older, weightier, and clearly unenthused.
The next few years saw a him move away from 007 in interesting ways. Most notably The Man Who Would Be King – a superb adventure with real life pal Michael Caine (both Connery and Caine would cite it as a personal favourite) – and John Boorman’s nutty science fiction, Zardoz, immortalised by the image of pony-tailed Connery in a red nappy-bullet belt combo.
Intriguingly awful, Zardoz is perhaps the first entry into what might be considered an alternative CV of campy stinkers for Connery: Highlander II: The Quickening (a film so legendarily bad it was erased from the series’ own continuity); medieval love triangle First Knight; sexed up height flick Entrapment; and, of course, The Avengers in 1998. (Phoenix Nights’ Max and Paddy would draw a connection between the quality of Connery’s films and whether he was wearing a wig or not. “No wig, no hit, s––t.”)
Even his return to Bond in 1983’s Never Say Never Again feels like part of this strand, thanks to its “unofficial” status. In truth, it’s a solid film. A re-do of Thunderball that’s arguably more gripping than the original, and stands up to a reappraisal (Thunderball is one of the big-name Bonds, but the underwater fighting business is interminable). Also notable is Connery’s role in ensemble war epic A Bridge Too Far, about the Battle of Arnhem, and his cameo as King Agamemnon in Time Bandits. (Something about Connery lent well to mythical royalty: he played King Arthur in First Knight and Richard the Lionheart in the final seconds of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves).
As a murder-solving Franciscan monk in 1986’s The Name of the Rose, Connery re-cast himself as a strong character actor. The film has a curious Eighties-ness to it (Christian Slater is his apprentice) and Connery won a Bafta for the role.
By now he was more than just Bond. But he brought the gravitas and steely machismo that he’d inherited from 007. The same year, Connery appeared in Highlander. Director Russell Mulcahy wasn’t just knocked back by Connery’s status and price tag, but the star’s homemade scotch too. “I had a shot, and I don't know what proof it was but it blew my brains out!” Mulcahy later said.
Connery won an Oscar for best supporting actor for his part in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables. He plays streetwise, tough-as-old-boots cop Jim Malone, who joins Kevin Costner’s crusade to bring down Al Capone. Connery is truly magnificent in the role. Costner’s Elliot Ness has the integrity; but Connery’s Malone has the guts. Even with Robert De Niro as the baseball bat-swinging Al Capone, there’s a sense that given five minutes with Capone, Connery’s cop could sort him out with his bare fists.
He was perhaps at his most lovable as Henry Jones Sr in 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. His casting is deliberate and inspired: the actual James Bond as the father of Indiana Jones. Scholarly and square, he’s shocked by Indy’s adventuring. But there’s still a glint of the old Bond: in a great throwaway line ("She talks in her sleep"), he reveals he was sleeping with the sexy Nazi long before Henry Jr showed up. Thanks to the warmth and chemistry between Harrison Ford and his screen father, it’s the most emotionally satisfying of the Indiana Jones films.
He delivered a powerhouse performance in The Hunt for Red October – playing a Russian submarine captain (still with the trademark Connery accent, of course) – before a glut of forgettable films in the Nineties.
His last great role was in The Rock – Michael Bay’s Die Hard in Alcatraz-style action extravaganza. Connery plays a kind of alternative reality James Bond: a British spy caught and imprisoned by the Americans, now released to battle a hostage situation in the old prison. It’s glorious fun, and Connery remains as he always was: towering, macho, and wrought with sex appeal.
