Connery, Sean

▪ 2000

      In April 1999 Scottish motion picture star Sean Connery cemented his legendary status as an actor when he placed his hand- and footprints in the sidewalk outside Mann's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. “The most important day of my life,” however, Connery said, was July 1, when the first Scottish Parliament in nearly 300 years had its official opening. Connery, on whose right forearm were tattooed the words Scotland Forever, proudly wore a kilt to the ceremony he had waited nearly 40 years to see.

      The award-winning actor was born Thomas Connery on Aug. 25, 1930, in Edinburgh, and he left school at age 15 to serve in the British navy. He worked at various jobs, including delivering milk and polishing coffins, before entering a Mr. Universe contest in the early 1950s. He placed third, but while he was in London for the competition, he landed a small part in the touring company of the stage musical South Pacific. For his new career he adopted a new first name, Sean.

      After honing his craft on stage, screen, and television, the charismatic Connery rose to fame portraying James Bond, best-selling author Ian Fleming's sexy superagent, in a series of five immensely popular films, notably Dr. No (1962) and Goldfinger (1964). Determined not to be typecast, he demonstrated his versatility by playing such roles as a 19th-century British soldier of fortune in The Man Who Would Be King (1975); a medieval monk in The Name of the Rose (1986), a role for which he was named best actor by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts; an Irish-American law officer in Prohibition-era Chicago in The Untouchables (1987), for which he won an Oscar as best supporting actor; and the Lithuanian-born commander of a Russian submarine in The Hunt for Red October (1990). In 1983, however, he was persuaded to return to his best-known role in the James Bond thriller Never Say Never Again.

      Although sometimes criticized for having moved to Spain for tax reasons, Connery had supported the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) from the 1960s, and there were rumours that he had been denied a knighthood by the British government in 1998 because of his active work for the SNP. In late December 1999, however, it was announced that Sir Sean's name was on the New Year's Honours List. That same month Connery was the recipient in Washington, D.C., of a Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement in the performing arts. He was a cofounder (1970) of the Scottish International Education Trust, a charitable organization dedicated to providing scholarships for young Scots and to funding a drama chair at Glasgow's University of Strathclyde. In 1998 Connery began negotiations with Sony Pictures to establish a state-of-the-art film studio in Edinburgh, and he arranged for his 1999 movie Entrapment, which was produced by his own Fountainbridge Films (named for the Edinburgh district in which he was reared), to be filmed partly in Scotland. In 1998 he also placed his Spanish house on the market and announced that he planned to begin living in Scotland again for at least part of each year.

Amy R. Tao

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