Sir Sean Connery (August 25, 1930 – October 31, 2020) was a Scottish actor. He was the first actor to portray fictional British secret agent James Bond on film, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983.
In the early 1950s, arriving like many other penniless or fortune-seeking Scots in London, Connery won a bronze medal at a Mr Universe contest in the Scala Theatre. He was subsequently cast in a touring production of South Pacific, and was taken under the wing of a venerable old Thespian, Robert Henderson, who prescribed him a stiff diet of highbrow literature – Stanislavsky, the whole of Proust, Thomas Wolfe. Just as he had catered for his muscles with the dumb bells, now he assiduously cultivated his mind: this was self-improvement taken to extremes.
Although he didn’t receive much formal training, Connery studied for three years with Yat Malmgren, a Swedish dancer. Despite his difficulties in finding work – his pronounced Edinburgh accent grated on the nerves of numerous casting directors – he was more interested in movement and gesture than in elocution. He had the conviction that information on screen could be conveyed visually: it did not need to be spelled out.
This, perhaps, goes some way to explaining why American audiences, notoriously suspicious of the British accent in all its manifestations, were prepared to accept him. He knew how to move gracefully. Moreover, he didn’t share the contempt for cinema evinced by so many of his contemporaries, who seemed to regard the medium as a useful money-spinner but a very second-rate thing by comparison with the stage.
Connery made his film debut in 1956 in No Road Back. The following year, he had a bit part in Cy Endfield’s Hell Drivers. Opposite Patrick McGoohan and Stanley Baker, actors in a similar mould, he played one of a gang of reckless lorry drivers who haul ballast at breakneck speed down England’s leafy byways. This was predictable casting: Connery as a working-class villain. Lead roles tended to be kept for better mannered chaps.
Although his was a relatively minor part, he was given the opportunity to strut around in his leather jacket to good effect, and to get involved in a bit of brawling and drinking. In hindsight, Hell Drivers, which was a clunking failure at the box office, seems a brave attempt to break British cinema out of its quaint, gentrified manacles, to try to tap some of the energy of Hollywood films like The Wild Ones, or The Wages of Fear from the continent.
Connery’s first breakthrough, with Requiem for a Heavyweight, didn’t give his career the boost that might have been expected. Fox had little idea how to use him and left him languishing under contract, occasionally hiring him out to other studios. Thus he appeared opposite Lana Turner in Another Time, Another Place (1958) and was the romantic interest in the whimsical Disney fable of 1959, Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Playing opposite children is one thing, playing opposite garden gnomes quite another.
Anyway, he seemed too dark and brooding a presence for a Disney family film. Along with Anthony Quayle, he was a baddy gunning for Bond’s iconic predecessor Tarzan (Gordon Scott) in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959), but his Hollywood career seemed to stutter from false start to false start. Below are some vintage photos of a handsome Sean Connery when he was young in the 1950s:
In the early 1950s, arriving like many other penniless or fortune-seeking Scots in London, Connery won a bronze medal at a Mr Universe contest in the Scala Theatre. He was subsequently cast in a touring production of South Pacific, and was taken under the wing of a venerable old Thespian, Robert Henderson, who prescribed him a stiff diet of highbrow literature – Stanislavsky, the whole of Proust, Thomas Wolfe. Just as he had catered for his muscles with the dumb bells, now he assiduously cultivated his mind: this was self-improvement taken to extremes.
Although he didn’t receive much formal training, Connery studied for three years with Yat Malmgren, a Swedish dancer. Despite his difficulties in finding work – his pronounced Edinburgh accent grated on the nerves of numerous casting directors – he was more interested in movement and gesture than in elocution. He had the conviction that information on screen could be conveyed visually: it did not need to be spelled out.
This, perhaps, goes some way to explaining why American audiences, notoriously suspicious of the British accent in all its manifestations, were prepared to accept him. He knew how to move gracefully. Moreover, he didn’t share the contempt for cinema evinced by so many of his contemporaries, who seemed to regard the medium as a useful money-spinner but a very second-rate thing by comparison with the stage.
Connery made his film debut in 1956 in No Road Back. The following year, he had a bit part in Cy Endfield’s Hell Drivers. Opposite Patrick McGoohan and Stanley Baker, actors in a similar mould, he played one of a gang of reckless lorry drivers who haul ballast at breakneck speed down England’s leafy byways. This was predictable casting: Connery as a working-class villain. Lead roles tended to be kept for better mannered chaps.
Although his was a relatively minor part, he was given the opportunity to strut around in his leather jacket to good effect, and to get involved in a bit of brawling and drinking. In hindsight, Hell Drivers, which was a clunking failure at the box office, seems a brave attempt to break British cinema out of its quaint, gentrified manacles, to try to tap some of the energy of Hollywood films like The Wild Ones, or The Wages of Fear from the continent.
Connery’s first breakthrough, with Requiem for a Heavyweight, didn’t give his career the boost that might have been expected. Fox had little idea how to use him and left him languishing under contract, occasionally hiring him out to other studios. Thus he appeared opposite Lana Turner in Another Time, Another Place (1958) and was the romantic interest in the whimsical Disney fable of 1959, Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Playing opposite children is one thing, playing opposite garden gnomes quite another.
Anyway, he seemed too dark and brooding a presence for a Disney family film. (Apparently, this was where he was first spotted by Mrs Broccoli, who noted with alarm the violent way he kissed the heroine.) Along with Anthony Quayle, he was a baddy gunning for Bond’s iconic predecessor Tarzan (Gordon Scott) in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959), but his Hollywood career seemed to stutter from false start to false start.
It was on television that he had his biggest success. His outsize personality could barely be contained by the medium: it was inevitable he would make an impression. And he was lucky with his roles. He was cast against type as Alexander the Great in Terence Rattigan’s Adventure Story. Then, in 1961, he landed the plum part of Vronsky in Rudolph Cartier’s BBC adaptation of Anna Karenina. Here, he boasts an impressive aristocratic swagger as well as an early version of the Connery moustache, and counters Claire Bloom’s cerebral performance in the central role with a certain earthy flamboyance.
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