Sean Connery, the coolest, studliest and most commandingly masculine 007 of all time (especially in the first two Bonds, the mostly tech-free Dr. No and From Russia With Love) and a bald man among men when he cast aside the toupee and carved out a formidable (if spotty) post-Bond career with firmly grounded performances in The Hill, The Man Who Would Be King, The Wind and the Lion, The Untouchables, The Name of the Rose, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The Rock…beautiful Sean Connery has risen from terra firma and is now hovering with angels.
A part of me feels a bit glum and forlorn, but then again the Scottish-born Connery had an amazing 90 years on the planet — 25 or 26 years of struggling to become a reputable actor, a bit less than 35 years at the top of the heap (Dr. No to The Rock) and the last 15 in luxurious retirement on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, in the flush Lyford Cay neighborhood.
Connery’s best Bonds (in descending order): Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, Never Say Never Again. (I’m sorry but I rewatched You Only Live Twice a while back and it hasn’t aged well.)
Finest post-Bond films: The Hill, The Red Tent, The Molly Maguires, Zardoz (a respectable failure), The Wind and the Lion, The Man Who Would Be King, Robin and Marian, A Bridge Too Far, The First Great Train Robbery, Five Days One Summer, The Name of the Rose, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, The Russia House, First Knight, The Rock.
Mixed-bag Connery-Hitchcock outlier: Marnie, an interesting film if not exactly a good one.
Connery stinkers (in ascending order): Medicine Man, Finding Forrester, Rising Sun, Wrong Is Right.The Anderson Tapes, Family Business, Meteor.
Temperamentally Sean was rarely…well, not always a day at the beach. Nor did he need to be. He came from a working-class, rough-and-tumble background, and could flash a serious temper when riled. I’ve also heard he had quite the libido. Around the time of Wrong Is Right I heard a story about an impulsive sexual matinee with a journalist in a hotel room. I know nothing, just loose talk.
The wham-slam-bam train compartment fight he had with Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love is one of the greatest hand-to-hand bouts in cinema history.
Connery will always be remembered for dressing down Nic Cage in The Rock with the following line: “Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”
Director-screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh (Armageddon, Die Hard With A Vengeance, the forthcoming Ice Road) confides that the “prom queen” thing was “one of the earliest lines contributed by Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, when they came in at Sean’s request to polish his dialogue.”
At that juncture Hensleigh “was working literally day and night to smooth out all the plot wrinkles required when Sean insisted that his character, SAS Captain John Patrick Mason, be re-imagined as a British national, thus requiring the almost overnight invention of the ‘aging James Bond’ character buried away in Alcatraz by the CIA and MI6.
“It’s a sad day,” Hensleigh remarks. “I loved Sean. He was difficult and demanding and made my life hell for six months, but [The Rock] was his comeback role and believe me, he knew it. I loved working with him.”