Sean Connery hated James Bond and spent four decades trying to outrun the spy

Sean Connery

Photo: Rob Bogaerts for Anefo / CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 25, 1930 Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Died	October 31, 2020 (90)
Occupation	Actor and film producer
Known for	Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Untouchables, Goldfinger
Awards	Academy Award · Golden Globe · 2 BAFTA · Tony Award · Cecil B. DeMille Award · Kennedy Center Honors · AFI Life Achievement (lifetime achievement)

“I have always hated that damned James Bond. I’d like to kill him.” Sean Connery said it while he was still the most bankable spy on any screen, and he spent the rest of his working life trying. He walked away from the part twice and kept choosing directors who could show audiences the actor underneath the dinner jacket. He never quite won. Amazon MGM Studios and Denis Villeneuve are now looking for the next Bond, and every name floated for the job is still measured against the template the Scot set and then tried to bury.

His own explanation for the contradiction was simple: he had been somebody else first. Before the tuxedo there was an Edinburgh boy delivering milk for the St Cuthbert’s Co-operative, a navy recruit sent home with an ulcer, a lifeguard at the Portobello baths, a coffin polisher and a life model for students at the Edinburgh College of Art. The hero Ian Fleming at first thought miscast had read Ibsen between chorus numbers on a touring musical.

The Fountainbridge tenement where Thomas Sean Connery grew up, after his birth in Edinburgh on 25 August 1930, has since been demolished. His mother, Effie McLean, was a cleaner; his father, Joseph, worked in a factory and drove lorries. He joined the Royal Navy at 16 and left at 19 with a duodenal ulcer and a tattoo that read “Scotland Forever”.

Bodybuilding took him to London for the Mr. Universe contest in 1953, where another competitor mentioned auditions for South Pacific. He got into the chorus and worked his way up to a featured role. On tour, Matt Busby of Manchester United reportedly offered him £25 a week after watching him play football; Connery declined, reasoning that “a top-class footballer could be over the hill by the age of 30, and I was already 23.” The BBC gave him his first lead in Requiem for a Heavyweight in 1957, and Disney cast him in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, where The New York Times found him “merely tall, dark, and handsome.”

Dr. No changed the scale of everything in 1962. Dana Broccoli is credited with persuading her husband, the producer Albert R. Broccoli, that the rough-edged Scot was right, and the director Terence Young taught him, in Lois Maxwell’s words, “how to walk, how to talk, even how to eat.” Fleming came round far enough to give Bond a Scottish father in the novel You Only Live Twice. Connery played the agent in From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball and the film of You Only Live Twice, quit, returned for Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 and came back a final time, outside the official series, in Never Say Never Again in 1983. His wife supplied that title, a joke at the expense of his own vow.

The more revealing career happened in the gaps. Hired by Alfred Hitchcock for Marnie, he asked to read the script first; told that Cary Grant never did, he answered: “I’m not Cary Grant.” With Sidney Lumet he made The Hill, set in a military prison, and later The Offence, as a detective who beats a suspect in an interrogation room. John Huston paired him with his friend Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King, the film both men called their favourite, and Richard Lester made him an ageing Robin Hood opposite Audrey Hepburn in Robin and Marian. He also directed and presented The Bowler and the Bunnet, a documentary about a labour experiment at a Glasgow shipyard, which he later called the start of his long association with the Scottish National Party.

The second career arrived in his fifties. The Name of the Rose earned him the BAFTA for best actor, and Highlander made him the older mentor of younger leads. In Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables he played Jim Malone, the Irish beat cop who shows Kevin Costner‘s Eliot Ness how Chicago works, and won the Academy Award for best supporting actor, the first Scottish actor to take a major Oscar. Steven Spielberg cast him as Indiana Jones’s father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Harrison Ford said Connery’s ideas at the writing stage made the character richer than the screenplay had been. The Hunt for Red October, The Rock and Finding Forrester followed. After The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, whose director he said “would have been arrested for insanity”, he stopped, confirming his retirement at the American Film Institute’s lifetime achievement tribute in 2006.

The statue has cracks that many tributes stepped around. In a 1965 Playboy interview he said: “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong in hitting a woman, though I don’t recommend you do it in the same way you hit a man.” Vanity Fair reported similar views from him in 1993, and his first wife, the Australian actress Diane Cilento, alleged in her 2006 autobiography that he had abused her mentally and physically. Connery said he had been quoted out of context and that year declared that no level of abuse of women “is ever justified under any circumstances. Full stop.” His politics held their own contradiction: the man who embodied a certain British cool backed Scottish independence from homes in Marbella and the Bahamas, and his tax status limited the days he could spend in the country he championed.

His marriage to Cilento, from 1962 to 1973, produced a son, the actor Jason Connery. In 1975 he married the French-Moroccan painter Micheline Roquebrune, and they stayed together until his death. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh in 2000.

Connery died in his sleep at his home in Nassau on 31 October 2020, aged 90; Roquebrune said dementia had marked his final years. His ashes were scattered in Scotland in 2022. Since 2024 the Edinburgh International Film Festival has offered a £50,000 Sean Connery Prize to a world-premiere feature chosen by audience vote, and the National Film and Television School runs the Sean Connery Talent Lab in Edinburgh for emerging filmmakers; applications close on 10 November 2026. In Paris, the production company CAPA is developing Sean Connery: The Untold Story, a documentary directed by the couple’s granddaughter, the French journalist Stéphanie Renouvin, with Canal+ and Sky on board.

Amazon has still not named its Bond, and whoever gets the part will be compared for years with a man who wanted it dead. The answer to the question Connery kept asking, whether there was an actor under the spy, sits in the films he made between missions. The Edinburgh lab carrying his name is now paying unknown Scots to find out the same thing about themselves.

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Tags: actors, james bond, Sean Connery, The Untouchables, Dr. No, Michael Caine

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