Sean Connery: Acting, stardom and national identity 9781526119100

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CONNERY

SEAN

A C T I N G , S TA R D O M A N D N AT I O N A L I D E N T I T Y

ANDREW SPICER

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Sean Connery

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Sean Connery

Acting, stardom and national identity Andrew Spicer

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Andrew Spicer 2022 The right of Andrew Spicer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 1911 7  hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover: Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King (1975). © Columbia Pictures/Photofest Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

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For Jim

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Contents

List of figures page viii Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 1 Forging an actor, 1953–61 14 2 Being Bond, 1962–72 48 3 In Bondage, 1964–73 83 4 Freelance star, 1974–83 115 5 Ageing star, 1984–90 154 6 Star as producer: Fountainbridge Films, 1991–2003 180 7 Iconic star 206 8 Scots actor/activist/icon 226 Conclusion 245 Film, television and theatre roles 254 Notes 258 Select bibliography 324 Index 333

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Figures

1.1 The breakthrough role: Connery as the washed-up prize fighter Harlan ‘Mountain’ McClintock in Requiem for a Heavyweight (dir. Alvin Rakoff, BBC, 1957). Photo: Roland Grant Archive/Photofest 25 1.2 Well-dressed muscle: Connery as Paddy Damion in The Frightened City (dir. John Lemont, Anglo-Amalgamated, 1961), intimidating construction firm executives 31 1.3 Connery as the ‘headlong passionate’ Count Vronsky opposite Claire Bloom as Anna in Anna Karenina (dir. Rudolph Cartier, BBC, 1961) 42 2.1 The trained assassin: Connery as James Bond in Dr. No (dir. Terence Young, Eon Productions, 1962) 58 3.1 ‘He never dwelt on the psychology of the character’: Alfred Hitchcock explaining the technicalities to Connery on the set of Marnie (1964). Photo: Universal Pictures/ Photofest. © Universal Pictures 87 3.2 ‘Sean Connery, the actor’: playing Sergeant-Major Roberts in The Hill (dir. Sidney Lumet, MGM, 1965) 94 3.3 Connery as the unfathomable Jack Kehoe in The Molly Maguires (dir. Martin Ritt, Tamm Productions/Paramount Pictures, 1970). Photo: Paramount Pictures/Photofest. © Paramount Pictures 104 3.4 Seedy, psychologically disturbed and out of control: Connery as Detective-Sergeant Johnson in The Offence (dir. Sidney Lumet, Tantallon/United Artists, 1973) 111 4.1 ‘A fertility god with brains’: Connery as Zed in Zardoz (John Boorman Productions/Twentieth Century-Fox, 1974)120 4.2 Connery as El Raisuli, the saviour of his people, in The Wind and the Lion (dir. John Milius, Columbia Pictures/ MGM, 1975). Photo: MGM/Photofest. © MGM 123

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Figures ix 4.3 The role for which Connery thought he should have been given an Oscar: as Daniel Dravot, facing death, in The Man Who Would Be King (dir. John Huston, Columbia Pictures, 1975) 4.4 An ageing, disillusioned Robin Hood: Connery with Audrey Hepburn in Robin and Marian (dir. Richard Lester, Columbia Pictures, 1976) 4.5 ‘Down through the spine of the story’: Connery as Major General Urquhart in A Bridge Too Far (dir. Richard Attenborough, Joseph E. Levine Productions, 1977). Photo: United Artists/Photofest. © United Artists 4.6 A ‘mature, autumnal Bond’: Connery in Never Say Never Again (dir. Irvin Kershner, Warner Bros., 1983) 5.1 The first father-mentor: Connery as Juan Sánchez Villalobos Ramírez, Egyptian immortal, explaining the way of things to his tutee Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) in Highlander (dir. Russell Mulcahy, Thorn EMI, 1986). Courtesy BFI 5.2 Medieval Sherlock Holmes: Connery as William of Baskerville with Adso (Christian Slater) in The Name of the Rose (dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, Neue Constantin Film/Cristaldi Film/Les Films Ariane, 1986). Photo: Twentieth Century-Fox/Photofest. © Twentieth Century-Fox 5.3 Connery as Jim Malone, demonstrating the ‘Chicago Way’ to his admiring pupil Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) in The Untouchables (dir. Brian De Palma, Paramount Pictures, 1987). Photo: Paramount Pictures/Photofest. © Paramount Pictures 5.4 Father and son: Connery and Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (dir. Stephen Spielberg, Paramount Pictures/Lucas Films, 1989) 5.5 Man of destiny: Connery as Marko Ramius in The Hunt for Red October (dir. John McTiernan, Paramount Pictures, 1990). Photo: Paramount Pictures/Photofest. © Paramount Pictures 6.1 ‘It’s mature, absolute, thrilling love’: Connery as Barley Blair, wooing Katya (Michele Pfeiffer) in The Russia House (dir. Fred Schepisi, Pathé Entertainment/MGM, 1991). Photo: MGM/Photofest. © MGM 6.2 High-octane entertainment: poster for The Rock (dir. Michael Bay, Hollywood Pictures, 1996). Photo: Buena Vista Pictures/Photofest. © Buena Vista Pictures

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x Figures 6.3 Manipulative romantic hero: Connery as ‘Mac’ MacDougall in Entrapment (dir. Jon Amiel, Fountainbridge Films/Twentieth Century-Fox, 1999). Photo: Twentieth Century-Fox/Photofest. © Twentieth Century-Fox196 6.4 Connery as William Forrester and surrogate son Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown) in the semi-autobiographical Finding Forrester (dir. Gus Van Sant, Fountainbridge Films/Columbia Pictures, 2000). Photo: Columbia Pictures/Photofest. © Columbia Pictures 202 7.1 Iconic actor/iconic role: Connery as King Arthur with Julia Ormond as Guinevere in First Knight (dir. Jerry Zucker, Columbia Pictures, 1995). Courtesy BFI 211 7.2 Cinematic apotheosis: Connery as Draco, confronting Bowen (Dennis Quaid) in DragonHeart (dir. Rob Cohen, Universal Pictures, 1996). Photo: Universal Pictures/ Photofest. © Universal Pictures 213 7.3 Connery receiving his BAFTA award (1998). Courtesy BFI 218 8.1 Scots activist: Connery gazing round the abandoned shipyard of Harland and Wolff on the Clyde in The Bowler and the Bunnet (dir. Sean Connery, Scottish Television/Sean Connery Productions, 1967), the documentary Connery helped write, and which he directed, co-produced and narrated 232 8.2 Connery takes a helicopter up to Fettes College, where he used to deliver milk, in Sean Connery’s Edinburgh (dir. Murray Grigor, British Tourist Authority, 1982). Courtesy Murray Grigor 237 8.3 Connery discusses the conception and content of Being a Scot (2008) with Murray Grigor in 2007. Courtesy Murray Grigor 238

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Acknowledgements

I first wrote about Connery in 2001 in the collection British Stars and Stardom, edited by Bruce Babington. The idea of writing about Connery at length was the result of an approach by Martin Shingler as part of the BFI/Palgrave Macmillan Film Stars series. As my research progressed, I felt that I needed more space than that series allowed to discuss Connery in the way that I felt was necessary, given the duration and scope of his career. However, I remain grateful to Martin for that initial stimulus, without which I would not have embarked on this study. I am very grateful to Matthew Frost at Manchester University Press for accepting a longer monograph, for his encouragement, and above all for his patience in acceding to numerous delays: this book has been a very long time in coming. I would also like to thank Manchester University Press’s anonymous reviewer for some sage advice. In the course of this lengthy journey I have incurred numerous debts, which it is my pleasure to acknowledge here. Various colleagues and friends have supplied references, contacts, encouragement and wise counsel: James Chapman, Llewella Chapman, Steve Chibnall, Charlotte Crofts, Josie Dolan, Charles Drazin, Agata Frymus, Mark Glancy, Kathrina Glitre, Helen Hanson, Sue Harper, Tony Klinger, Paul McDonald, Vincent Porter, Neil Sinyard, Justin Smith, Rod Stoneman and Estella Tincknell. Specific debts are acknowledged in the notes. As always, I benefitted from Brian McFarlane’s ever-generous enthusiasm and his eagle-eyed reading of draft chapters. Although there is scant archival material for Connery, I am most grateful to the staff at the following institutions for their help: the BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham; the Bill Douglas Centre, University of Exeter; the British Film Institute Library; the British Library; the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; and the Theatre and Performance Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum. I should like to give especial thanks to Barbara Hall for her expert assistance in navigating the Margaret Herrick

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xii Acknowledgements collection and locating relevant documents; she accomplished far more in the time available than I would have been able to achieve. I should like to extend warm thanks to those who were generous enough to be interviewed about Connery: Murray Grigor and Alvin Rakoff. I learned a great deal from their insights, knowledge and understanding. I would also like to thank Steve Kenis for shining a light on the profession of being a talent agent. The Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education at the University of the West of England provided some study leave time to help me prepare the manuscript as well as research costs. I have two particular debts, which have materially strengthened this study, although I am, of course, responsible for any inaccuracies or misperceptions. My partner Joyce Woolridge read through all the, numerous, chapter drafts with her usual acuity and insight that has helped to shape my argument. She also compiled the filmography and index. Without her support this book would never have been completed. Jim McCarthy also read through the later chapter redrafting, offering numerous insights and enthusiastic encouragement, as well as meticulous proof-reading. This book is dedicated to Jim for a friendship that now spans nearly forty years.

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Introduction

Iconic superstar Sean Connery was one of a select few stars who have become an instantly recognisable cultural icon, someone whose image and distinctive voice have penetrated deeply into global popular culture and public consciousness. In part, his iconicity derives from being the ‘original’ James Bond; but one of Connery’s most significant achievements was to reinvent himself as another archetype, the father-mentor, which allowed him to enjoy a second period of superstardom from the mid-1980s onwards. He became a much-loved ‘screen legend’, the recipient of several ‘lifetime achievement’ awards and a knighthood in 2000. Connery was, above all, a Scottish actor, activist and icon, who played an important, if controversial, public role in championing the cause of an independent Scotland. He was by far the most famous and commercially successful post-Second World War British actor, the only one who could command the same salary as the top American stars.1 Connery appeared in Quigley’s widely cited annual poll of Top Ten Money-Making Stars seven times (Table 0.1).2 Although the first four occasions were for playing Bond, the later listings demonstrate his popularity as the father-mentor. Connery appeared in sixty-five films and his stardom spanned four decades, from Dr. No (1962) to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), a career of exceptional longevity.3 Connery was voted the top British star in a 2001 Orange Film Survey of more than 10,000 UK respondents.4 In October 2013, ten years after his last screen appearance, he was still first in the prestigious Q Scores of America’s favourite British actors. This poll revealed he had strong appeal throughout America and with all ages.5 Acutely conscious of his star status throughout his career, Connery emphasised that he had ‘a very strong international foundation. Outside the United States, there isn’t an actor who gets better exposure or success ratios in any country than me.’ 6 Connery’s determination to maintain superstar status was often in tension with his equally fierce drive, as his close friend Michael Caine disclosed,

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Table 0.1  Connery’s appearances in the Quigley poll of Top Ten Money-Making Stars Year

Position

Film

1965 1966 1967 1971 1989 1990 1996

1 2 5 9 9 8 7

Goldfinger Thunderball You Only Live Twice Diamonds Are Forever Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade The Hunt for Red October The Rock

‘to be the best actor he can become … He is absolutely determined to become as good as he can.’ 7 Connery was, throughout his career, a risk-taking actor who fashioned an impressive body of work, the range and variety of which is rarely recognised. Bond, I contend, was a great acting creation, as was Connery’s street-smart Chicago cop in The Untouchables (1987), for which he won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. Connery could compose a masterly study in simmering, tightly bottled resentment as a rebellious coal miner in The Molly Maguires (1970), or invest a role with expansive exuberance and panache – his Arab sheik in The Wind and the Lion (1975). Connery’s personal favourite – the one he felt deserved an Oscar – was as the working-class con man in The Man Who Would Be King (1975), a highly intelligent and moving portrayal of a character who is naive and credulous, seduced by his own dreams of greatness. His performance elicited Pauline Kael’s enthusiastic judgement: ‘With the glorious exception of Brando and Olivier, there’s no screen actor I’d rather watch … His vitality may make him the most richly masculine of all English-speaking actors.’ 8

Aims and approach This study is not a biography – there are a dozen of those, another marker of Connery’s status – but provides a comprehensive account of Connery’s career as a professional actor, explaining how and why he achieved sustained international stardom and iconic status. The labour of acting is generally absent from popular discourse about stars, which ‘emphasizes their lives, their loves, their toys, and their tragedies – everything about them except how they go about their professional work as performers’.9 My focus on Connery’s professional life means there is no attempt in what follows to uncover his ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ self – the object of a biographical approach

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Introduction 3 – which assumes, as Paul McDonald argues, that the individual is the source and origin of stardom, star qualities are innate and indefinable, and the achievement of stardom somehow preordained.10 That sense of inevitability is enshrined on Connery’s official website: ‘His humble beginnings, growing up in a working class neighborhood in Edinburgh, gave no indication of the achievements that were destined to come.’ 11 This discourse permeates oral testimonies that have a, highly suspect, retrospective prescience. Robert Hardy, who played Prince Hal opposite Connery’s Hotspur in the BBC’s An Age of Kings (1960), opined, ‘I never had any doubt he was going places.’ 12 Such remarks also ascribe a factitious agency to his career. As Michael Billington notes, ‘Almost every film-star interview one sees on television or reads in the press still rests on the precarious belief that actors are totally autonomous creatures royally dictating the state of their career.’ 13 Reflecting on his limited agency even as a major star, Charlton Heston observed: It depends on the projects that are brought to you and while a few of us are in the position to, as they say, ‘put a film together’, that’s not an infinite possibility. You can put films together that appeal at a certain time to the people in the studios. So I don’t think an actor can therefore plan his career goals.14

In contradistinction to a biographical approach, this study understands Connery as a mediated, ‘commodity self’, a ‘creature of signification’.15 Rather than conceptualise stardom as a single, settled state, I analyse it as a complex, mutating occupation that is both a material entity – a performer who is paid a salary – and a discourse that shapes how that labour was recognised and valued. I pay close attention to how that stardom was fashioned across a variety of different cultural, social and commercial contexts. I examine what is publicly available about Connery’s stardom in any medium, encompassing his films and attendant promotion (usually controlled by the production company or studio); publicity (including gossip, and magazine and newspaper articles); reviews, criticism and commentary (including career retrospectives); awards and accolades, all of which constitute ‘specific positions from which to speak the star’.16 Rather than trying to determine the factual accuracy of information circulated about Connery, I contextualise and interpret that ‘data’ as part of the discursive construction of his star persona, that unstable amalgam of the fictional images and public projections of a real person, which changes over time. Connery had certain physical qualities that were the raw material of stardom – height, good looks, a magnificent physique and an attractive voice – but, as Barry King argues, analysis needs to focus on ‘the manner in which stars enter popular consciousness as public figures’.17

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Stardom as an economic phenomenon My analysis is centrally concerned with Connery’s economic value and his labour as a professional actor, aspects of stardom that have received less attention than the conventional focus on a text-based interpretation of stars’ cultural significance. Adrienne McLean notes that this approach erases any sense of the labour involved; stars are not thought to work but to ‘be’ as a function of their textual representations.18 In contrast, Paul McDonald advocates a ‘pragmatics of star practices’ that analyses the meaning of star performances as part of their social, cultural and professional activities as stars.19 Building on the work of King, McDonald and McLean, alongside Danae Clark’s work on the cultural politics of actors’ labour, my aim is to contribute to the growing number of star studies that examine stars’ working lives, situated within the particular industrial systems in which that work takes place.20 In essence, this study offers what might be called a political economy of stardom as performative labour. Connery, like all stars, had a basic economic function, defined succinctly as ‘a widely practiced strategy for securing and protecting production investments, differentiating movie products, and for ensuring some measure of box-office success’.21 Stars help to make the product, the individual film, uniquely differentiated but also stabilise demand through the predictable appeal of their star persona or brand, which promises a range of pleasures that producers hope will entice and satisfy audiences.22 In Marxist terms, stars are ‘congealed labour’, ‘something that is used with further labour (scripting, acting, directing, managing, filming, editing) to produce another commodity, a film’.23 As labour and the product of labour, commercial assets and hired hands, stars occupy a liminal space between capital and workers, forming an elite cadre of actors with the capacity to attract production investment and sell films, thereby attenuating the inherent costly risks of commercial feature film production.24 Ned Tanen, who worked as an executive for two Hollywood studios, Paramount and Universal, articulates the industry perspective: ‘A star has two things an actor doesn’t have: charisma and the ability to sell tickets. Eddie Murphy will sell tickets all around the world to a movie that’s not a very good movie. That is a movie star.’ 25 Although stars’ ability to ensure box-office success has been frequently debated and often disputed, and defies precise calculations, it is a widely held belief within the industry, buttressed by regular compilations of ‘star power’ in the trade press and star power polls such as Quigley’s.26 As David F. Prindle comments astringently, ‘whether or not stars sell a picture (or a television series) is not important. What counts is that producers believe that they do.’ 27 Connery was preoccupied with his salary throughout his career, not only as the just reward for his labour, but because it acted as a

Introduction 5 marker of his industry status. In doing so, he contributed to what Alexander Walker describes as a circular and self-fulfilling system in which huge star salaries

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have a significance not entirely financial. High fees were proof of unique talents. Because a star was paid so much, or was said to be paid it, she must be worth it. Money created its own charisma in an industry short on certainties but well provided with shibboleths … people owning the talents profited in their turn from the mystic aura of being ‘worth’ such colossal amounts.28

Gerben Bakker contends that stars’ principal value ‘may have resided not in their power to guarantee a hit, but rather in their ability to guarantee publicity. Stars were giant promotion machines, which in a short time could create a high brand-awareness for a new film.’ 29 Stars function within particular systems of production, distribution and exhibition in which their relative economic power varies. This study traces how Connery’s stardom changes as he navigated different systems from the BBC’s ad hoc hiring practices, through an old-fashioned six-picture contract with Eon Productions (the Bond producers) in the 1960s, to becoming a freelance actor from the early 1970s onwards. His contract with Eon covered not only salary and conditions of employment but also ownership or possession of his image as Bond. Connery struggled to gain a share in the merchandising that exploited his image.30 However, the supposedly enhanced independence and control over his role and image as a freelance star was severely constrained by the major studios’ unaltered grip over finance and distribution, which ensured stars’ continued dependency on executive decision-makers.31 The extent and nature of this control varied as the international film industry itself transformed, arguably three times, over the course of his freelance career. In the ‘post-studio’ system, power shifted from studio to agent, and an important concern of this book is Connery’s relationship with his agents.32 Analysing that relationship forms part of my exploration of the ways in which Connery attempted to manage his career in these shifting conditions, the efforts he made to extend his creative and financial control over his films and their promotion. I detail the ways in which he tried to intervene – with studio executives, producers, directors, writers and fellow actors – in how his part was conceived, often altering or even fundamentally reshaping his character. Through these interventions, Connery fulfilled Patrick McGilligan’s definition of the ‘auteur’ star who is able to alter significantly the style and meaning of a film. However, as McGilligan makes clear, this label does not deny the essentially collaborative nature of film production, but registers a star’s importance in that process.33 I also attend to Connery’s accumulation of symbolic capital – the role of awards and other forms of cultural recognition which themselves enhanced

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his status and salary – thus understanding stars as both symbolic and cultural entities in the ‘symbolic commerce of stardom’.34

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Acting and performance Focusing on stars’ work as professional performers includes investigating and analysing the training and creativity they bring to their performances, ‘the bank of knowledge and experience that actors draw on to produce the gestures, expressions, and intonations that collaborate and combine with other cinematic elements to create meaning’.35 This approach to examining Connery’s screen performances foregrounds the process of image making over an exclusive focus on image analysis, embedding the interpretation of Connery’s performances in their conditions of production.36 As argued throughout, Connery’s acting skills were the product of long experience and rigorous, if unorthodox, training. The directors Connery worked with considered he was an accomplished and thoroughly professional actor who was also prepared to experiment and take risks. Richard Lester, who directed Connery in Robin and Marian (1976) and Cuba (1979), admired a star who refused the easy, conventional route of finding ‘roles that they can do well, where they can exude that brand of charm and just go through and have a career that way’.37 However, analysing performance as professional labour does not solve the significant problems of interpretation screen acting presents. On one level this reflects the inherent difficulties of identifying how much a performance owes to the actor rather than the professional skilled labour of the other principal creative personnel – writers, directors, cinematographers and set designers – and thus pinpointing the actor’s specific contribution within the orchestrated costuming, make-up, lighting, framing, editing, set and sound design mobilised to enhance performance. On another there are the problems of describing in prose the meanings derived from the kinetics of acting, the use of facial expressions, voice, gestures, posture and movement.38 Although, in Chapter 1, I discuss the benefits Connery’s acting received from attending Yat Malmgren’s classes, which promoted a particular system through which a character is conceived and executed, I am mindful of the caution expressed by Daniel Smith-Rowsey in his discussion of actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: ‘no one can say what technique an actor uses in a given scene … to suggest a given formula leads directly to an onscreen gesture or expression is usually misleading’.39 Additionally, these performative aspects do not have fixed meanings but take place within the shifting framework as to what constitutes ‘good’, ‘expressive’ or ‘truthful’ acting that is historically contingent.40 In Kael’s estimate of his qualities in The Man Who Would Be King cited above, Connery’s naturalistic register

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Introduction 7 and contained, reactive rather than overtly expressive style was trumped by the showier theatricality of Olivier, or the tortured Method acting of Brando. There is a further problem in interpreting stars’ performances: ‘the tension between story and show, or between the representation of the character and the presentation of the star’.41 Audiences expect stars to infuse every role with their persona as well as inhabit the specific character required by the narrative and in that process create a correspondence between star and role such that it is impossible to imagine anyone else playing that part.42 Viewers’ encounters with stars are always informed by the publicity surrounding their casting in particular roles and their transtextual personae, the types of role with which they are associated. As Philip Drake argues, ‘Every performance therefore retains traces of earlier roles, histories that are re-mobilised in new textual and cultural contexts. In fact this is actually an economic condition of stardom, which relies on the continuing circulation and accretion of the star image.’ 43 This expectation creates what Jeanine Basinger contends is ‘an unarticulated dialogue between fans and the star on-screen. It was a high level of non-verbal communication, yet a simple language of sex, desire and pleasure that everyone could speak.’44 This combination of character and transtextual persona constitutes the ‘presence’ of the star, their accumulated weight and force. John Boorman, who directed Connery in Zardoz (1974), admired the intelligence and skill he brought to the realisation of Zed, but reflected, ‘Sean is always himself and that’s the kind of extraordinary thing about a movie star, he can be another person and play another role and yet remain himself. The kind of actor who disappears into a role is a different kind of actor.’ 45 Connery’s transtextual persona was, like that of other stars, shaped through association with a particular genre or genres.46 Although he starred in eighteen thrillers, Connery was most strongly associated with the twenty-four actionadventure films in which he appeared. These included the Bond films with their contemporary setting, but, more typically, also ones set in a semilegendary or mythic past such as The Wind and the Lion or First Knight (1995), in which he played King Arthur. Yvonne Tasker argues that actionadventure films provide a narrative justification for extended displays of the muscular male body, and their generalised settings have a geographical or temporal ‘placelessness’ in which the hero often fights for a community that has rejected him or which is threatened.47 In what follows, I explore how, as Connery’s career developed, his athleticism – the grace of movement that elicited so much admiring comment – was combined with wisdom and moral authority in the father-mentor, which became a transtextual and transnational archetype. However, as will be discussed, appearing in actionadventure films militated against Connery’s being recognised as a major

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actor because such roles went against the convention of ‘good acting’ as the sustained portrayal of a complex character.48

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Stardom, iconicity and national identity Film stars have been understood as playing an important role in the development of national cinemas and the projection of national images since the silent era.49 Major stars are often seen as representing their nation. John Wayne, for instance, is thought to represent the ‘first American Adam’.50 In his analysis of Sophia Loren’s representation of Italy, Stephen Gundle argues that she came to be ‘seen as a timeless symbol of her country’s spirit, someone who stands above fashion and shifts in popular taste’.51 Discussing European stardom in more general terms, Tytti Soila claims that vernacular stardom has a strong relationship to specific national, cultural and political circumstances and that cultivating home-grown stars became an ‘urgent quest’ for many European countries in proclaiming the strength and distinctiveness of their national film industries.52 As I argue elsewhere, British stars incarnated cultural types that were nationally specific and distinct from their Hollywood counterparts.53 However, Connery’s relationship to national identity, specifically Britishness, is complex and problematic. From the outset of his career, Connery was determined to preserve a close affinity with his Scottish working-class roots, which he considered essential to his success: ‘My strength as an actor, I think, is that I’ve stayed close to the core of myself, which has something to do with a voice, a music, a tune that’s very much tied up with my background experience.’ 54 This commitment to retaining an aural marker of his origins coloured the remainder of his career, and his distinctive voice with its unmistakable Edinburgh burr formed an indelible and much-imitated facet of his persona. I discuss the various ways in which this strong connection with his native Scotland was an important anchor when Connery’s success as Bond made him part of the nomadic ‘mobile elite’ of global capitalism.55 Connery was both an international star whose image was circulated and consumed globally and a transnational star who worked across the British, American and European film industries.56 Although his stardom forms part of a much longer historical migration of European stars to Hollywood, which offered the possibility of stardom on a scale unavailable in their indigenous film industries, Connery’s rugged working-class Scottishness made his image, even as Bond, decisively different from the hegemonic middle-class Englishness that had been the dominant international image of Britishness heretofore.57 Bond’s cosmopolitan internationalism and the father-mentor’s placelessness incorporated Connery’s Scottish-inflected Britishness into a transnational identity that challenged the congruence of star and nation.

Introduction 9

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Connery was not a British star, nor a typical European émigré star, or an ersatz American one. Analysing his anomalous status, which eludes and unsettles these existing categories, thereby contributes to an emergent body of work that examines the complex, contradictory and unstable nature of transnational stardom and of the ways in which these mobile figures challenge concepts of the national and the nature of ‘belonging’.58

A note on methodology and sources This is an empirical study informed by the theoretical approaches adumbrated above. The focus on the labour of stardom necessitates describing and interpreting the precise nature of Connery’s economic and cultural agency, which requires finding sources that provide verifiable, or at least reasonably sound, information about budgets, contracts, conditions of employment, and the nature of his relationship with production companies, producers, agents, screenwriters and directors. Ideally, this would be based on archival documentation. Alas, there is no Sean Connery archive. Connery was, by his own admission, someone who did not retain memorabilia from his acting career: ‘I don’t have one script of the movies I made, and I don’t have any photographs.’ 59 On another occasion Connery stated that he was temperamentally averse to ‘hoarding’ and therefore had not kept any correspondence nor written diaries – ‘I’ve never kept a record of anything, I gave everything away’ – which he attributed to his Romany heritage.60 Connery did not provide commentaries on DVD versions of his films; the nearest he came was appearing on Mark Cousins’s series Scene by Scene in which he commented on a few selected moments from some of his most famous films.61 Being a Scot (2008), which Connery co-wrote with Murray Grigor, contains a vivid account of his early life but is not a conventional autobiography, with little information about the making of his films. Its engagement with Scots history, politics and culture is itself revealing about the identity Connery wished to project as someone more concerned with Scotland’s traditions and aspirations than his own life story.62 I have consulted what archival material exists, principally at the BBC’s written archives, the British Film Institute Library and the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, supplemented by studio documentation – mainly in the form of production notes – and the trade press. Particular frustrations were the absence of contractual documentation, the lack of material about Connery’s relationship with his agents and detailed information about Fountainbridge Films.63 Jane Gaines is quite right to observe that whereas a contract ‘contains confidential information about the real conditions under which the star

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works’, autobiographies, interviews and personal appearances ‘promise indexicality but deliver only myth’.64 However, in addition to documenting Connery’s professional career, it is precisely his ‘star myth’ that forms the other principal concern of this study. To understand the Connery ‘myth’ requires scrutiny of a huge volume of publicity and promotional material alongside the numerous interviews and personal appearances he gave, despite being characterised as ‘one of the world’s most private stars since Garbo’.65 Unsurprisingly, Connery is the object of extensive attention in other autobiographies – nowhere more suspect than when they attempt to be fair and balanced, as with ‘Cubby’ Broccoli’s When the Snow Melts (1998)66 – all of which contributes to the myth’s construction and reconstruction, understood not as falsehood but as an operative discourse with material effects. Although I discuss the genesis and production of all of Connery’s films, the nature of my attention is selective. Detailed analysis is reserved for those that were significant in establishing, maintaining or reconfiguring his stardom and those in which his acting accomplishments are best displayed, even if not commercially successful. I pay careful attention to the films’ reception, both at the box-office and in contemporaneous reviews in newspapers and the trade press. Although any significant differences between the American and British reception of his films are commented on, I do not attempt to analyse the reception of Connery’s films and perceptions of his stardom in other countries or cultures, beyond acknowledging his global reach. It would be extremely interesting to investigate how Connery was understood and appreciated in Europe and in Asia but this would, I suggest, constitute a separate study, organised in another way and based on a different body of research.67 Analysis of the contemporaneous critical reception of his films is not to advance the idea that these reviews had a material effect on a film’s success. If they were uniformly bad, that might have been a contributory factor, but critics’ assessment is often at odds with a film’s box-office performance and thus, if anything, constitutes an index of critical taste rather than being a proxy for audiences’ views. However, the value of reviews can lie in critics’ often wide-ranging knowledge of Connery’s previous films and their assessment of the ways in which a particular film does, or does not, add to the meaning and currency of his stardom at particular moments, thus representing another mode through which the ‘Connery myth’ is constructed and reconstructed. Reviews also provide what are often astute analyses of a star’s performance, most valuably for films that have attracted little, if any, academic analysis. My own analyses are constrained by the need to provide a career-length study rather than an exhaustive account of particular films, and my attention to these films is focused entirely on Connery’s role and influence rather than attempting a comprehensive interpretation.

Introduction 11

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Organisation of the study Chapters 1–6 are organised chronologically, tracing the vicissitudes of Connery’s professional acting career as he moved through a range of changing industrial and cultural contexts. They explore how these systems shaped the nature of Connery’s stardom and the extent of the creative and economic agency he was able to exercise in the development of his star persona. Only through such a linear ordering can one understand why his career developed in the way that it did, the choices he made, their repercussions, and their relationship to broader social and economic change. Each chapter takes a roughly ten-year period, divided not by arbitrary decade boundaries, but by the moment at which his stardom changed significantly. As a theoretical counterpoint, each chapter raises a significant problematic associated with stardom. Chapters 7 and 8 focus more on the cultural and public dimensions of Connery’s stardom, exploring his role as an iconic archetype. Chapter 1 explores the significance of the particular social conditions from which Connery emerged, and the importance of physical display in his cultural formation. Its principal focus is on his haphazard development as a professional actor, the significance of his unorthodox training, and the ways in which he negotiated the three interlocking but separate production contexts of theatre, television and film. My intention throughout this chapter is to give this formative phase of his career its proper attention and integrity rather than adopt the conventional stance of interpreting every element as an anticipation of becoming James Bond, which, I argue could not have been predicted nor was something towards which Connery worked. Chapter 2 focuses on Connery’s international stardom playing James Bond, emphasising its nature as a particular form of stardom, the ‘serial star’, the product of an industrial form of authorship in which the producers regarded Connery as a replaceable component in the franchise, claiming it was the character, not the actor, which generated the series’ extraordinary success. I argue that this produced an intensified form of typecasting, commodification and entrapment, the usual hazards of the successful star. The scale of the ‘Bond phenomenon’ threatened to engulf Connery’s whole identity, and his complete identification with a fictional figure did not allow him to develop a separate star persona; nor was his acting achievement in creating the screen Bond recognised. How Connery tried to deal with these frustrations is the subject of Chapter 3, which examines the same period from the reverse perspective, exploring Connery’s attempts to gain recognition as a talented actor capable of playing a variety of roles. I demonstrate that although Connery had considerable success in winning critical recognition for his thespian accomplishments, they failed to interest the cinemagoing public, thereby illustrating the profound

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difficulties stars have in altering their persona – in Connery’s case his persona as Bond – and of gaining audience acceptance in different roles. The shift from contract to freelance stardom is the conceptual focus of Chapter 4: the types of role Connery was able to negotiate during the 1970s as a transnational star working principally in Hollywood. I argue that he was more successful in the first half of the decade working with directors – John Boorman (Zardoz), John Milius (The Wind and the Lion), John Huston (The Man Who Would Be King) and Richard Lester (Robin and Marian) – who had the autonomy and the intelligence to sense his possibilities as a particular kind of star best suited to playing archetypal, mythical roles in which the Bond persona could be reworked. However, in the second half of the decade, Connery struggled to find appropriate roles as the studios reasserted their control. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of his underrated return as Bond in Never Say Never Again (1983) as his career seemed to circle back on itself. Connery may have returned to Bond, but it was as an ageing superspy. Chapter 5 explores the cultural politics of the ageing star, analysing why Connery managed that notoriously difficult transition so successfully. Central to his success, I contend, was his development of a coherent new persona, the father-mentor, which started fortuitously in Highlander (1986) but gained industry traction as the ‘Connery role’ for which he won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor in The Untouchables (1987), which also restored him to A-list stardom. Although the discussion of ageing stars and the cultural politics of the father-mentor continues in Chapter 6, its core concern returns to stars’ agency. Its principal focus is on how Connery tried to extend his economic and creative control role by becoming an executive producer and by founding a production company, Fountainbridge Films, in 1992. The chapter concludes with a careful scrutiny of his final two films – Finding Forrester (2000) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) – which represent the twin drivers of his career: the search for challenging roles and the desire to be a major star. Chapters 7 and 8 are less concerned with the economic aspects of Connery’s career than its cultural significance, exploring the processes through which he became an iconic star. In Chapter 7 I argue that very few stars achieve iconic status, building on Edgar Morin’s explanation of film stars’ mythic function.68 Although I consider Connery’s whole career, the main focus of this chapter is on the 1990s when critics and fellow professionals acknowledged Connery’s legendary status; DragonHeart (1996) was a full-length filmic homage. I demonstrate how a succession of public accolades – including three ‘lifetime achievement’ awards, tributes, festschrifts and hagiographic documentaries – all contributed to this construction, which was noticeable

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Introduction 13 for its elegiac quality. I suggest reasons why Connery was thought of as the ‘last star of Hollywood’s Golden Age’, despite its obvious factual inaccuracy. Connery’s role as Scottish icon was a component of his iconicity, but is treated separately in Chapter 8 because it was the result of different processes. The chapter brings together the various elements – actor, activist and icon – that constituted Connery’s identity as a Scot in a coherent analysis. I examine in detail Connery’s very public and sustained activism for the cause of an independent Scotland. These chapters provide the most extended discussion of a theme of the whole study: the evolution of the Connery myth, how this came into being, what it has come to mean, what purposes it serves, how it has been carefully staged and managed and the ways in which it is constantly being reimagined. The myth embodied many admirable qualities but, as I discuss, was patriarchal and one that had a darker side in apparently condoning male violence. The Conclusion attempts a provisional assessment of Connery’s significance and summarises what his career reveals about the nature of stardom as an economic and cultural phenomenon and its complex relationship to national identity.

1

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Forging an actor, 1953–61

It wasn’t until I decided to become an actor that I really began to make something of my life.1

The conventional understanding of Connery’s career is that he had virtually no training or experience as an actor before starring as James Bond. However, very little that Connery achieved in this early period, 1953–61, foreshadowed Bond; indeed, the parts he played often pointed in a very different direction. Although, as Connery acknowledged later, he could not have played Bond without previous acting experience, this formative period was the one during which he gradually acquired the acting skills that would sustain him throughout his professional life; playing Bond was just one facet. This chapter therefore gives close consideration to his, albeit unorthodox, training, which informed the way in which Connery approached acting and how he interpreted a role. In this period his most substantial acting work came through television, a largely unexamined aspect of his career that was, as I demonstrate, extensive and highly successful, culminating in starring roles in several major BBC dramas. Although this is not a biography, my analysis of Connery’s career necessarily entails an overview account of his origins as a working-class Scot, born in an Edinburgh tenement on 25 August 1930, because his early life shaped the way in which he understood acting as a profession and moulded his whole identity.2 Connery was brought up in straitened circumstances at 176 Fountainbridge, an upper-storey tenement flat – a kitchen-cum-sitting room with a bed alcove and a bedroom off the main room, with no hot water, bathroom or electric lighting and a communal lavatory four floors down. Fountainbridge was an industrial area dominated by the rubber factory where his father worked. His mother also worked long hours as a cleaner. From the age of nine, Connery rose at 6 a.m. to help with a milk round. Although he was bright enough to pass the qualifying examination for Boroughmuir High School, Connery turned down the opportunity of a more academic education by going to Darroch Secondary because they played

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football rather than rugby. He left there at thirteen: ‘I wanted to work, earn money and play soccer.’ 3 Although Connery’s recollections of his upbringing are neither bitter nor sentimental, they depict a milieu ‘completely governed by economics’, where every action had a price tag. This sense of confinement created a yearning for something better: ‘I wanted to do something with my life. I wanted to have some pride in it, feel the joy of it. There was too little joy around.’ 4 Connery’s desire for enlargement and opportunity was coupled with wanderlust: ‘When I was a boy, I dreamed. I wanted to see exotic places.’ 5 The first attempt to satisfy that need was to join the Navy at seventeen. Although he signed for twelve years, Connery was invalided out after two years with duodenal ulcers, a condition he later attributed to his inability to accept strict regulation and orders from officers he did not respect.6 Although he returned to a circumscribed world of manual labour – bricklayer, steel-bender, cement mixer, printer’s assistant, French polisher – Connery aligned himself with the ‘movers’, the Scots who go out into the world to make their mark, rather than the ‘stayers’ who clock in at the local factory and only dream of a better world, as he emphasised in the infamous 1965 interview in Playboy: I find there are two sorts of people in the world: those who live under a shell and just wait for their pensions, and those who move around and keep their eyes open. I have always kept my eyes open – and been prepared to raise my middle finger at the world. I always will.7

Connery admired success: ‘Between conquered and conquerors I always choose the conquerors, always. Nothing appeals to me more than strength, energy, enthusiasm.’ 8 From the vantage point of a conqueror who achieved international stardom, the key to achieving success seemed to Connery to be a question of determination and industriousness: ‘I believe there is nothing to stop people getting on. More people stop themselves than are stopped by other people. My own experience proved that to me.’ 9 Although, as this chapter documents, there were many other factors, Connery’s upbringing forged a lifelong belief in individualistic competition and self-help, an ideology that became ingrained in his own account of his career, in studio profiles and in interviews. For example, a 1965 studio profile characterises Connery as ‘extremely self-reliant and individualistic. He believes in rugged competition’, which is then supported by quoting Connery’s own ideas about self-reliance: Things are a lot easier now than when I was growing up. People grow up now being handed things on a platter. I’m not saying it’s wrong, only that it’s wrong for me. In the end, your only safeguard is yourself … Contentment is marvellous for some people but I like to keep changing.10

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Building the ‘perfectible body’ Connery’s determination to succeed and escape the narrow circumscription of his life initially took the form of training his body through sport and bodybuilding. Although Connery had enviable natural endowments: striking good looks and height (six feet two inches), how he came to use his body as an actor – the combination of size and power with ease and grace of movement so often commented on – has its basis in various forms of physical training. During his late teens and early twenties, Connery joined the Dunedin Amateur Weight-Lifting Club; played semi-professional soccer for Bonnyrigg Rose in the Scottish Junior League; and spent a period as a lifeguard at Edinburgh’s Portobello outdoor swimming baths earning £6 a week.11 He became something of a local celebrity, known as ‘Big Tam’ because he was still called by his first name, Thomas. Connery’s accomplishment as a bodybuilder was sufficient to win a bronze medal in the ‘tall men’s’ class in the Mr Universe contest in 1953.12 However, photographs of that event reveal a highly developed musculature but without the pumped-up bulk that constitutes the ‘serious’ contender. Connery was appalled at the immobility of dedicated bodybuilders and resolved to retain an all-round athleticism.13 The later famous publicity shots showing him performing handstands in front of Ursula Andress on location for Dr. No (1962), demonstrate his supple muscularity and control rather than sheer size. Although Connery was sceptical about bodybuilding as a potential career, it began the process of understanding his body as a form of display. From the age of nineteen he became a sessional male model for life classes at the Edinburgh School of Art. A painting dating from 1949 by Richard Demarco, who became a successful artist and promoter of visual and performing arts, shows Connery’s lean but well-defined musculature.14 One young art student recalled, ‘He had an exotic look about him, as if he belonged to another planet. He was beautiful, but he was also innocent and possessed of a natural grace.’ 15 This appreciation of the distinctive qualities of Connery’s male beauty, the otherworldliness that counterpointed his physicality, are echoed frequently in later reviews of his theatre and on-screen performances, which, coupled with his grace of movement, separate him from conventional beefcake. The life classes were also a form of control. Connery recalled that holding a pose for 45 minutes at a stretch ‘was arduous but quite a good discipline’.16 The classes paid well: he could earn 15 shillings an hour, far more than working as a labourer.17 More importantly, they offered what he called the ‘entry into another world’, a glimpse of a cultural milieu beyond his immediate working-class horizons.18 Earning money from bodily display extended to Connery’s early days as a jobbing actor in London. He modelled clothes for Vince (‘Bill’ Basil Joseph

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Green), who had a studio at 49 Manchester Street in Central London. Green had been a stage photographer before the war but had subsequently branched out into fashion and bodybuilding photography.19 Being a Scot contains two studio portraits of Connery for Health and Strength magazine, his body shaved and oiled.20 The first depicts the upper torso and head, with Connery gazing upwards and off into the distance, a pose Richard Dyer argues is typical of the male pin-up to suggest spirituality – ‘he might be there for his face and body to be gazed at, but his mind is on higher things’ – and an ‘upward striving’ that distances the male model from merely carnal pleasures.21 The second is a full-length portrait clad only in tight trunks that mould the buttocks, with Connery adopting a more dynamic pose – head down but pointed away from the camera with the right arm thrusting a sword – in an overt demonstration of achieved phallic power and mobilised musculature. These photographic portraits show how close Connery had come – broad shoulders, long flowing muscles, neat waist and slim hips – to attaining the classic ‘perfectible body’ in the dominant Western Graeco-Roman tradition.22 As Dyer argues, the first bodybuilding star, Eugen Sandow, traced his lineage back to the Greeks and Romans, his poses a ‘conscious emanation of the classic statuary’ in which the built body of the white male represents an idealisation of physical perfectibility.23 Michael Williams has shown how a vernacular classicism underpinned the creation of Hollywood stardom in which male stars represented an idealised combination of the athletic gracefulness of Apollo with the bodily strength of Hercules, a beauty not just of the surface but of the whole being, an association that conferred cultural prestige as living works of art.24 For Connery, the repercussions were lifelong, becoming part of his legendary status as the ‘last’ of Hollywood’s Golden Age stars, as discussed in Chapter 7. The importance of bodily display to Connery’s development as an actor was thus fourfold. It enabled him to become more self-confident; it was a way of earning money; it afforded access to the middle-class world of art and culture; and it allowed Connery to gain increasingly precise control over both his body and also the effect that body had on an audience.

Becoming an actor It was his height and physique that provided Connery with his introduction to acting when, having responded to a newspaper advertisement, he was hired as one of the ‘six-foot plus’ extras for a five-week run of The Glorious Days – a pageant about the life of Queen Victoria – starring Anna Neagle at Edinburgh’s Empire Theatre in January 1953.25 He was able to extend

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this experience through his bodybuilding connections: one of his fellow contestants in the Mr Universe competition was leaving the chorus line of South Pacific – then in the last months of its run in London’s Drury Lane Theatre and about to go on tour – and suggested he apply for the vacancy. Connery had no experience, and, according to some accounts, was inept and truculent at the audition, but he had the physique and the bearing the part demanded. Once the booming voice from the darkened auditorium was assured that those were indeed Connery’s own shoulders, he was engaged.26 Produced by Jerome White, South Pacific was one of the most successful post-war touring shows, and during the production’s two-year tour, from October 1953 to September 1955, Connery learned how to move in synchronisation and the rudiments of singing. A year in to the run, he gained a speaking part as Lieutenant Buzz Adams.27 Although a strenuous, demanding life, acting, even at this level, provided a relatively healthy pay packet: £14 a week at a time when a skilled labourer earned £8.28 During the tour, he was careful to continue the discipline of bodybuilding, visiting gyms to lift weights in whichever town he was based as a possible insurance policy if the adventure failed.29 Acting was another form of escape and of satisfying Connery’s restlessness: ‘It was the idea of travelling around in the theatre. My father’s family was part tinker – so perhaps there’s something about that which prompts me to feel I should be going somewhere, rather than staying where I am.’ 30 A touring production also offered a form of freedom and social mobility, joining ‘the bohemian, eccentric life of the mysterious class of people who populate theatrical life’.31 However, although the initial appeal might have been travel, variety and a different way of enlarging his horizons, as the tour progressed, Connery began to take acting as a profession more seriously. One repertory actor, Moray Watson, recalled that when the South Pacific cast arrived at the Liverpool digs in which he was staying, Connery asked the landlady they be introduced as a way of getting into repertory. In particular Connery wanted Watson in turn to introduce him to Willard Stoker, the producer at the Liverpool Playhouse.32 Connery’s acting ambitions were also encouraged through his friendship with an older and much more experienced American actor, Robert Henderson, who played Captain Brackett. Henderson urged him to attend matinée performances in every town they visited but above all to read widely in the classics – including Ibsen, Proust, Shakespeare, Shaw, Stendhal and Tolstoy – as well as more modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and T.E. Lawrence.33 Connery recalled: Getting through these books and engaging with them was hugely important to me. The fact that I read them, learning new words as I went along, greatly



Forging an actor, 1953–61

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increased my confidence and self-esteem. It gave a balance to my life and a better identity, just as bodybuilding had done for me physically at an earlier time.34

Connery’s fervour for cultural knowledge is confirmed by other professionals. Frank Hauser, for whom he worked later at the Oxford Playhouse, recalled an ‘avid learner, a real demon for work. It was almost unsafe to mention a play to him – if he didn’t know it he’d go straight out and buy it.’ 35 Acting also offered longer-term prospects than a sporting career; Henderson was instrumental in Connery’s decision to turn down an offer from Manchester United to become a professional footballer.36 By the end of the tour he had determined on acting as a career. In addition to advice and support, Henderson apparently told Connery, ‘if you look like a truck-driver and talk like Dostoevsky, I think you could make a success in films’.37 Although this may be the wisdom of hindsight, Henderson sensed Connery’s distinctiveness was in his ability to convey qualities and depths that belied the muscular body, projecting opposing traits. This observation seems to have lodged deeply in Connery’s sense of his developing professional identity because he kept coming back to it in interviews or profiles: ‘An actor is more interesting if he has contrasting qualities, if he is other than he appears.’ 38 Robert Sklar argues that this duality is a hallmark of stardom: ‘Actors with only one dimension do not often become stars. Actors who create surprise, embody contradiction, impel the spectator to hold two conflicting ideas in the head at the same time, stand a better chance.’ 39 This duality – already noted in the comments of the life class student – expressed itself in a different way in Connery’s attitude to his career, the determination to be a major star and the desire to become an accomplished actor capable of playing a variety of roles. Henderson recalled that Connery ‘didn’t just want to make it big in Hollywood or wherever – he wanted to learn too, he wanted to be big and good’.40 As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, Connery rarely coasted as an actor and retained his desire to learn and develop his craft through to the end of his career. As discussed throughout this study, Connery was always interested in the aesthetics of acting and regarded acting as an art form. His creativity expressed itself in other forms. John Boorman remembered that Connery wrote poetry every evening during the filming of Zardoz (1974) and Diane Cilento, to whom he was married for eleven years (1962–73), recalled that he wrote a ballet and produced ‘an amazing painting he’d done, which depicted a figure being crucified upside down with a blazing sun behind him’, which became the cover image for her first novel, The Manipulator (1967).41 Connery soon recognised that his strong Edinburgh accent was an impediment to being understood and thus a barrier to gaining speaking parts.

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Millicent Martin, who worked with him on South Pacific, found his accent virtually impenetrable.42 Connery recalled, ‘The queer looks I was getting was because the cast couldn’t fathom my Scots accent. They thought I was Polish.’ 43 Connery’s account of his attempt to enhance the clarity of his diction is worth quoting at length because it reveals the complex interrelationship between self-improvement, class and generational consciousness, and authenticity, identity and employability that characterise his development as an actor: I bought a reel-to-reel Grundig tape recorder for a hefty £60 and began to hear myself how heavily accented my voice really was. Of course I wanted to be clearly understood. I practised articulating my words more distinctly. Yet at the same time I wanted to retain the personality of my own voice and to be honest to my Edinburgh roots. I didn’t care much for the declamatory style that actors were then expected to bring to a part, especially in Shakespeare plays. For me it separated the head from the heart. When I recorded myself on tape, declaiming Hamlet in the received Shakespearian manner, it rang utterly false to me. How could I ever bring an emotional dimension to a part if I would always be enunciating clipped elocutions … I wanted to keep my own natural voice and remain true to myself. I wanted to sound like me, not someone else, yet to be clear and understandable … I felt I couldn’t be honest with myself or express any emotion truthfully if I tried to re-invent my speech patterns in an actorish declamatory way … I was going against the fashion of the times, since all actors, regardless of their background, delivered their lines in the well-articulated plummy vowels of standard English.44

I will return at this chapter’s end to situate Connery’s decision to keep his native accent in a broader generational shift in the acting profession in Britain, but his determination to retain what he often referred to as the ‘music of his home tune’ was part of distancing himself from a profession still dominated by the English middle classes. Connery had an admiration for American culture that was characteristic of the British working classes during this period, and his role models were not English actors such as Ronald Colman but American – Burt Lancaster and Robert Mitchum.45 Connery saw in them the physicality, directness and authenticity that he wished to convey as an actor; he thought American actors in general had ‘much more feel for realism than in Europe [which] somehow divorces acting from real life. In Britain acting is still associated more with being statuesque and striking poses and declaiming with lyrical voices.’ 46 Retaining a regional or national accent became part of his generation’s attempt to close the gap between their working-class experience and their acting style and formed part of an emerging trend in which the theatrical ‘poetry voice’ was becoming outmoded.47 However, that shift was hard won and only made itself felt gradually. Connery’s efforts to improve his vocal clarity were apparent to Llew Gardner

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– Connery’s landlord in his early days in London – who recalled that ‘there was no resemblance at all between the way he talked after the lessons and his accent before’.48 However, they apparently did not satisfy Michael Bentall, the Old Vic’s artistic director, who told Connery, ‘You don’t fit into the composition here. Take elocution lessons. Study your diction.’ 49 Bentall’s remarks are replete with the prejudices of someone who still preferred the ‘plummy vowels of standard English’ and actors with proven connections. Without training at a London drama school or extended repertory experience, Connery had little prospect of becoming an established theatre actor. His only connection to the theatrical network was through Henderson who, at the end of the South Pacific run, was able to offer his protégé a series of small parts in several productions at London’s Q Theatre near Kew Bridge in Brentford for £6 a week. However, that only lasted for five months until February 1956, when the theatre ceased staging professional productions because of dwindling audiences.50

Small-screen actor: early television roles Chin Yu, who had appeared as Bloody Mary in South Pacific, advised Connery to sign up with the agent Richard Hatton.51 In his 1973 overview The Modern Actor, Michael Billington paints a rather jaundiced picture of agents as an unregulated profession for which no qualifications were needed beyond placing an advertisement in The Stage for three successive weeks. He notes that there were over 800 licensed agents in Greater London alone.52 However, Hatton had a solid reputation as an ex-actor who was well-informed and hard-working, with a network of contacts in the film and television industries as well as the theatre.53 From 1956 Hatton handled all the direct negotiations over pay and conditions for Connery, guiding his career through to 1972. Without attempting to exert any major influence over his choice of role, Hatton proved to be a very capable negotiator and involved himself attentively in Connery’s affairs. Hatton had a close association with Ashley Famous Agencies, and its Los Angeles representative, Ben Benjamin, looked after Connery’s affairs whilst he was in America.54 Initially, Hatton recognised that the prospects for his new client lay in the conventional route of bit parts in films but also the burgeoning opportunities that were starting to emerge as television became an important medium, replacing repertory as the main source of employment and on-the-job training for actors. As Michael Sanderson argues in his social history of acting From Irving to Olivier, television was the most important transformative force on the profession during this period.55 It has been estimated that the acquisition of a television set in the 1950s reduced family theatre-going by 20 per cent and cinema-going by 39 per

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cent. Television’s rapidly increasing popularity is indicated by the exponential growth in licences, from 763,941 in 1951 to 3,858,132 in 1961.56 Whereas the previous generation of British actors might reject television as substandard and tawdry – ‘rent and tax jobs’ – the new generation recognised its value, embracing the opportunities the burgeoning medium offered, which was particularly accommodating to working-class actors in the range and variety of roles that were provided.57 As John Caughie has argued, ‘serious’ drama was an important component in the development of early television because it lent prestige and ‘quality’ to public service broadcasters.58 The BBC broadcast BBC World Theatre (1957–59) and Sunday Night Theatre (1950–9), which became The Sunday Night Play in 1960. Independent Television (ITV), which began broadcasting in September 1955, created additional drama series, most notably Associated Rediffusion’s Television Playhouse (1956–63) and Associated British Corporation’s Armchair Theatre (1956–74). During this first phase of his television career, Connery worked exclusively for the BBC, through to his ‘breakthrough’ role in Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957). My analysis of Connery’s television work draws on the work of scholars who have examined the production context of ‘early’ television, including the resources that were available, the technological constraints and the pressures of live performance.59 Its particular focus adds to a growing body of work that emphasises the ‘professional and artistic processes’ whereby actors contribute to the realisation of television drama, thereby recognising the importance of their agency alongside the more frequently discussed ‘authorship’ of the director, writer or producer.60 In several ways, early television was an actors’ medium. Caughie emphasises that at this formative stage, immediacy and the direct transmission of live action were judged to be the essential aesthetic characteristics of the medium aiming to enable audiences to follow a continuous live show that approximated to a theatrical one in which the performances of the leading actors were a key focus of attention.61 One contemporaneous commentator considered that for an actor, television has all the advantages of the theatre in being able to go straight through the play as a single creative whole, and all the advantages of the cinema in being able to interpret his character intimately through close-up. The director is therefore very much more the servant of the actor in the television ‘live’ production than he is in the cinema. Although his personal style may emerge in the way he plans his production and directs his actors, in the end he will depend almost wholly on them to sustain the atmosphere of the final performance.62

Another judged that continuous performance was ‘television’s key advantage over film. The small screen, the small audience, the semi-darkness, all encourage a drama of high emotional and poetic intensity. The discontinuous

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film performance, even by the cleverest film actor, always suffers by comparison with a TV performance that really clicks.’ 63 In order to achieve high-quality performances, early television drama productions were budgeted with reasonably generous rehearsal times. Michael Barry, BBC’s Head of Television Drama (1952–61), believed in the value of the rehearsal period – typically ten days for an hour-long drama and three weeks for a longer production – considering that the intimate relationship between actor and director during rehearsal was actually closer than in the theatre: when an actor had a question that on stage would have required him to step out of the rehearsal and call to the director, far off in the depths of the auditorium, in television they were so close that a query was understood and answered by a nod or a glance without interruption. Not until the penultimate stage, when the production moved into the studio did the director and the actors separate.64

Because of this close relationship, Barry judged rehearsals to be the most creative period of a production, involving numerous nuanced exchanges between actors and director about the interpretation of scenes and characters before the mechanics of the studio setting came into force and the director, seated in the control room, was physically separated. Television drama during this period therefore offered acting opportunities that were often more fine-grained than theatrical ones and without the discontinuous ‘fragmentation’ associated with film acting, excellent conditions within which Connery could develop his craft.

Punching through: Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957) Connery had walk-on parts or very minor roles in six television dramas during 1956: The Escapers’ Club,65 Epitaph, Dixon of Dock Green (Season 2, Episode 1, ‘Ladies of the Manor’), The Condemned, The Terror and Sailor of Fortune (Season 2, Episode 13). Two of these – Epitaph and The Condemned – were for Alvin Rakoff, a Canadian ex-journalist who had joined the BBC in 1953.66 One of Rakoff’s functions was to bring acclaimed American plays to British screens as an alternative to adaptations of the classics or West End successes that were the staple fare in this era. A celebrated example was Rod Serling’s original teleplay Requiem for a Heavyweight, first broadcast on 11 October 1956 as part of CBS’s Playhouse 90 series starring Jack Palance as Harlan ‘Mountain’ McClintock, a washed-up prize fighter, scarred and punch-drunk, who has to cope with the realisation that the life he has known for fourteen years is over and the betrayal of his manager

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who wants to exploit him as a show wrestler. Requiem formed part of the American Golden Age of ‘situational dramas’ in which the characters, usually working-class, ‘were the damaged and confused, the walking wounded of the American dream’.67 Drawing on the tradition of realist, left-wing Popular Front theatre, these dramas were filmed in a style that ‘sought to combine the immediacy of theatre with the intimacy of close-up film, giving a sense of dimension to “small lives”’.68 Rakoff intended to replicate this style for the BBC production, hiring Palance to repeat the role on 31 March 1957 for Sunday Night Theatre. With Serling’s approval, Rakoff wrote some short additional scenes that would enable him to make the transitions that in the US production had taken place during commercial breaks.69 Palance pulled out close to transmission, which meant that Rakoff had to find a replacement at very short notice. Connery completely lacked the experience for such a major role but Rakoff told me in interview that, from their previous encounters, he considered Connery to be ‘co-operative, intelligent, quick and directable. Someone who listened carefully to others, was thoughtful and attentive.’ Rakoff thought Connery ‘was not a great natural actor – but he was keen, willing to learn and willing to listen’.70 He also had the physique to be convincing as a heavyweight boxer and, because he had boxed in the Navy, knew the basic moves. Rakoff’s wife-to-be Jacqueline Hill, cast as the employment agency officer who befriends Mountain, encouraged him to take the risk of using Connery, because ‘the ladies would like it’. Rakoff also recognised that for a role which would challenge most British thespians, Connery did not suffer from the usual ‘baggage’ of theatrically trained actors who, in Rakoff’s experience, tended to over-act badly in television drama at this time. Like Henderson, Rakoff recognised Connery’s duality, a powerful physique coupled with a vulnerable innocence that fitted him for a role which he intuitively understood – ‘a poorly educated workingclass figure looking to better himself and achieve stability, rootedness and a sense of belonging, the need not to be degraded and humiliated no matter what happens’.71 Playing McClintock aligned with Connery’s determination to project a working-class authenticity and his interest in American culture. Nevertheless, his casting was a huge gamble. Barry had pronounced anxieties, suggesting Rakoff should think seriously about replacing Connery. ‘It was as close to an order as a man of Michael’s nature gets.’ Rakoff had the customary three-week rehearsal period to try to iron out what he saw as Connery’s shortcomings at this point: his lack of breath control and clarity of diction, wavering American accent, difficulty in loosening up and relaxing, and limited ‘ability to convey emotion, especially emotion relating to thoughts’. Rakoff, in addition to working intensely with Connery, ensured he was supported by experienced actors in the other major roles: including Hill as the putative love interest, Warren Mitchell as Army, his

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1.1  The breakthrough role: Connery as the washed-up prize fighter Harlan ‘Mountain’ McClintock in Requiem for a Heavyweight, BBC, March 1957

trainer, and the American actor George Margo as his venal manager Maish. No filmed recording remains of Connery’s performance but Rakoff kindly invited me to listen to his audio-only version, describing the staging and movement as the tape played. Although the Edinburgh burr comes through, Connery makes a reasonable fist of the American accent and portrays convincingly Mountain’s innocence and vulnerability in the timbre of his voice. His timing is good and his voice expressive, conveying both the character’s longing alongside his frustration and suppressed violence. Whereas the Playhouse version began with McClintock being helped back to the dressing room after having been knocked out, Rakoff chose to open with the penultimate round of the fight itself as, wiping blood from his badly cut eyebrow, Mountain desperately tries to last to the end. This much more dramatic opening was the opportunity to display Connery’s magnificent physique to advantage and allowed ‘the audience to sympathise with the character’s pain and humiliation before he utters a word’.72 Requiem received almost universal praise. Roy Boulting, acting as guest critic for the Evening Standard, declared it was ‘the best piece of television

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I have ever seen. Performances, grouping, lighting and set all excellent.’ 73 The established television reviewer, Peter Black, enthused about the ‘semidocumentary play from the American school which is about something as well as about somebody’; he considered Connery played McClintock with ‘quiet certainty’ and that his performance ‘grew as the play proceeded to a sad, noble figure … his simplicity and helplessness produced a play with many moving passages’.74 Harold Conway, who also praised this ‘splendid model from America’ that took ‘the shackles off television drama’ and ‘shook Sunday night out of its accustomed mediocrity’, thought that Connery ‘made the part utterly believable, immediately likeable’.75 The Daily Sketch’s critic judged ‘Mr Connery’s performance was an outstanding demonstration of television acting from the outset. He is star material if ever I saw it.’ 76 The Listener’s reviewer commented, ‘This is neither a fragrant play nor a tribute to the noble art. But its producer … let it have every chance, and the dramatist ought to go down on his knees to Sean Connery, with or without gore-blood.’ 77 The Times disliked the saccharine romance that intruded into ‘This self-sufficient and wholly masculine situation’ but praised Connery’s ‘shambling, inarticulate charm that almost made his love affair credible’.78 The only occasional criticism was that the make-up, perhaps in reluctance to obscure Connery’s beauty, did not convey the physical damage this veteran fighter had suffered over the years. The BBC’s analysis of audience reaction picked up this point, noting that although viewers thought Connery ‘made a very good impression’, several thought ‘he was not at all like a boxer in his looks … by no means the ugly man he was supposed to be’.79 Connery was given considerable attention in the Sunday papers. Paul Boylif in the Sunday Pictorial – which had a picture of Connery’s shoulders and chest across most of its entertainment page – compared Connery to Marlon Brando in physique and sex appeal.80

Forgotten by Fox Connery’s success in Requiem attracted two offers of long-term, seven-year contracts from Rank, the major British film company, and Twentieth CenturyFox.81 In a Picturegoer profile in June 1957, Margaret Hinxman opined that Fox’s offer would be more attractive to Connery not only because, apparently, Rank had asked him, ‘What type of actor are you?’ but also because an American studio offered a more obvious route to international stardom, ‘a role in which, I suspect, he rather fancies himself’.82 Connery would have been well aware that Rank was in the process of shedding many of its long-term star contracts.83 Fox, by contrast, was a major Hollywood studio with greater resources and global reach and offered Connery, through

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Bob Goldstein, the company’s head of European casting, a lucrative contract with a guaranteed wage of £120 per week whether he worked or not.84 Film work was much better paid than television with theatre a poor third.85 Even a starring role in a top West End production only commanded a salary of £75 per week.86 The Fox contract settled Connery’s immediate financial worries and made him reasonably affluent. A 1960 Picturegoer article depicted the successful man-about-town, with a preference for bachelor independence in his ‘neat and tastefully furnished … smart mews flat’ in St John’s Wood.87 Hatton had already obtained minor roles for Connery in several films released while the Fox contract was being settled. He was a stammering thief in Montgomery Tully’s low-budget thriller No Road Back (February 1957) and was eleventh billed in Hell Drivers (July 1957), an unusually realistic thriller, written and directed by the American exile Cy Endfield for Rank, which has become a cult film through its galaxy of British acting talent led by Stanley Baker with Rank star Patrick McGoohan playing the villain.88 He had an even smaller role as the second welder in Time Lock (August 1957), shot in fifteen days on a budget of £30,000 by Gerald Thomas and produced by Peter Rogers at the tiny Beaconsfield Studios.89 Connery was paid £100 for four days’ work. Thomas recalled, ‘I didn’t mark him down as a particularly good actor. He didn’t make an outstanding impression.’ 90 Action of the Tiger (August 1957), for MGM-British, was slightly more prestigious, but his part was again tightly circumscribed as a brawny, brawling, bearded Irish first mate who tries to seduce the heroine (Martine Carol) in this Cold War action-adventure film starring the American Van Johnson. However, if Connery imagined that his contract with Fox would elevate him into more prestigious roles, he was rudely disappointed. Over a five-year period he only appeared once for Fox, in the D-Day epic The Longest Day (1962), but its commercial success did nothing to further Connery’s career as he had a minor role as a roistering Irishman, Private Flanagan, whose appearances amount to about three minutes’ screen time.91 Fox was historically a writer-led rather than star-building company. However, the studio had begun recruiting a new generation of actors in the late 1950s, even running a talent school on the studio lot. A studio brochure from December 1957 listed Connery in a group of a dozen new recruits that included Pat Boone, Stephen Boyd, Sophia Loren, Jayne Mansfield, Elvis Presley, Tony Randall and Joanne Woodward. However, by 1959 the studio in-house magazine Dynamo had added Gary Crosby, Bradford Dillman and Stuart Whitman to the list, but Connery’s name had disappeared.92 Clearly Fox had lost interest in promoting his career – a British actor living in London – unable, perhaps, to decide in what roles he could be cast. In retrospect, Connery wryly referred to his time with Fox as his ‘“too” period’, in which he was

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judged ‘too big’, ‘too tall’, ‘too Scottish’, ‘too dark’, ‘too something’ for the parts that came up.93 During this period, Fox was a company in turmoil, its head of production Darryl F. Zanuck constantly at odds with the studio head Spyros Skouras. Although Zanuck had left in 1956, his replacement, Buddy Adler, was unable to halt the dwindling revenues leading to substantial cutbacks and redundancies.94 Grooming new stars was therefore not a high priority. Fox executives were reported as finding Connery’s Scottish accent problematic.95 Connery was also considered to be ‘uncooperative’, turning down several roles he thought unsuitable.96 One Fox executive complained that he was overly forthright in both manners and dress: ‘Even if you did manage to persuade him to wear a suit for a business meeting, you were just as likely to discover that he had no socks on. It didn’t do, not then.’ 97 A loan-out that seemed to have potential was Another Time, Another Place (May 1958), a Lana Turner vehicle at Paramount that was widely publicised. It gave Connery his first prominent billing; Paramount’s promotion emphasised that he was ‘personally selected by Miss Turner for the role’.98 However, that role – as Mark Trevor, a BBC war correspondent, who has an affair with an American journalist Sara Scott (Turner) – proved difficult and unrewarding in a production Connery claimed was still being rewritten when shooting commenced.99 He protested that Paramount wouldn’t allow me to see the rushes and I came in at least three weeks into a picture for a role that was to be seen at the start, so I was a scrambled egg in it. I’d no influence or authority at this time, so my protests went unheeded. But at least I learned from it.100

The result was that, looking very ill at ease, Connery gave one of his worst performances in a film uniformly disliked by critics that fared indifferently at the box-office. One reviewer commented, ‘Connery, in his first big part, gives the impression that he is reading his lines from a none-too-helpful prompt board.’ 101 Connery himself was later openly critical about his casting, complaining, ‘They took me, a stalwart Scot, and refined me down to a soft-spoken B.B.C. commentator. What a fate!’ 102 He told Picturegoer’s reporter in March 1959 that he had become disillusioned with the Fox contract and regarded the Turner film as a ‘mistake’.103 More significant, partly because he spent three months in America whilst shooting the film, was his role in Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People (March 1960), a piece of Oirish whimsy billed as ‘Sparkling with LEPRECHAUNS and LAUGHTER!’ Connery plays a young labourer, Michael McBride, hired by the local English landlord to replace O’Gill (Albert Sharpe) as estate gamekeeper. He falls in love with O’Gill’s daughter, Katie (Janet Munro), and, after thrashing his rival (Kieron Moore), sings a duet with her, ‘Pretty Irish Girl’ (later released as a single) to celebrate their happiness.

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It was a straightforwardly likeable performance: Connery is handsome and dashing as the ardent young lover anxious to please but prepared to stand up for himself. Walt Disney himself attended the much-publicised world premiere in Dublin’s Theatre Royal in June 1959, and the company’s welloiled publicity machine ensured that Darby O’Gill, slickly promoted, performed well at the box-office.104 Connery’s North American profile led to offers to appear in US television serials, including Maverick (1957–62). Connery rejected these overtures: ‘They might have earned me a fortune but they’d have finished me as an actor.’ 105 His decision was no doubt influenced by a reluctance to enter into a further long-term contract but also indicated his determination to develop his skills as an actor and play a range of parts. Connery’s role in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (July 1959) for ParamountBritish was another example of a lacklustre loan-out, despite its $750,000 budget.106 Although Connery makes a dramatic entrance disguised as an African, blacked-up and bare-chested, he is killed relatively early by Tarzan (Gordon Scott) as befits a black-hearted, drunken villain. The final two films Connery made before Bond – On the Fiddle and The Frightened City – were for Anglo-Amalgamated, an enterprising, independent but low-budget British production–distribution company. Neither of these co-features, released as part of a double bill for domestic consumption, enhanced Connery’s status but both deserve scrutiny for their contrastingly accomplished performances that indicate how far Connery had come from his chorus-line days. On the Fiddle (October 1961) was a picaresque service comedy, part of a sub-genre that poked fun at military discipline and wartime heroism.107 Connery, his dark hair combed forward and curled to accentuate the breadth of his face and its potential for open-eyed innocence, played a slow-witted, muscular Gypsy, Pedlar Pascoe, the foil to Alfred Lynch’s quick-thinking Cockney rogue, Horace Pope, constantly inventing new ‘fiddles’ to dodge work and make money. In a disciplined and unselfish performance, Connery creates an innocent character with his own integrity rather than a caricature simpleton. Pascoe eats his food ravenously, yet with a painstaking deliberation as if unsure if there will be another meal to follow, having volunteered for army life because it offers ‘regular grub and a place to sleep’. He is often about to speak but hesitates with a quizzical expression hoping Pope will step in and think of something. Connery’s muscularity and strength are the focus of many scenes, depicted bare-chested on several occasions as he performs some menial task with dexterous grace. Though generally Pope’s docile sidekick, Pascoe has one delightful scene when he is sent to seduce uptight staff officer Flora McNaughton (Eleanor Summerfield) in order to stop her perpetual inspections of the kitchen which disrupt the pair’s cushy life. Having got himself invited inside her hut by

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offering to remain on sentry duty for the entire night, Pascoe hurries back with a sprig of lavender clenched in his teeth as well as the coffee and sandwiches Flora had requested. As she smells the lavender that evokes her childhood, he gathers her up. ‘Put me down airman. And take your boots off’, Flora murmurs as Pascoe lowers her gently towards the bed, thereby retaining the character’s respectful innocence even as he completes the task of her seduction. The Monthly Film Bulletin thought both central characterisations were thoughtfully created: ‘Connery is almost equally believable. His slow, conscience-ridden and rather gormless Pascoe is the ideal foil for Pope’s quick-wittedness.’ 108 The plot of The Frightened City (August 1961) is sub-Edgar Wallace – Chicago-style gangs taking over London – but, as Steve Chibnall notes, it forms one of three films written in the late 1950s by Leigh Vance that capture a society in transition ‘from relative stability based on well-understood class modes, sexual customs and economic practices into the déclassé, permissive and commercially rapacious 1960s’.109 Connery’s Paddy Damion represents this shift, transforming from old-fashioned cat burglar into suave thug, the muscle for a well-organised protection racket. Damion is upwardly mobile, rising out of his class with aspirations to wealth, sophistication and gentility. Immaculately attired in his expensive suit, he scatters cigar ash whilst removing contracts from his leather attaché case as he puts the squeeze on a construction firm. Connery’s physical beauty and power is again emphasised – first shown in a gym throwing a heavier man in a judo bout before showering and dressing for the admiring gaze of his girlfriend Sadie (Olive McFarland). In contrast to his fellow mobsters, Damion moves with a deft, lithe economy, intelligent enough to understand immediately the potential of the ingenious scheme proposed by crime boss Waldo Zhernikov (Herbert Lom) with whom he exchanges witticisms. He also seduces the exotic and beautiful Anya (Yvonne Romain), the appropriate accessory for the new executive class. However, Damion is a divided figure, caring as well as ruthless, and in defeating Zhernikov who over-reaches himself, Damion re-engages with his roots, recognising Sadie’s solid virtues and agreeing to be a witness who will expose the racketeers. The long-suffering Inspector Sayers (John Gregson) approves his rehabilitation but knows this is merely a temporary halt in an inexorable tide. The Frightened City was hardly noticed by reviewers. However, it was a first glimpse of what became the Bond template: an undercurrent of menace and violence; the muscular strength and power in fight scenes; an ability to withstand punishment under interrogation by the police; a sexual liaison with an exotic woman; above all the sardonic intelligence and mordant wit complete with withering one-liners. Damion is also the well-dressed figure of discerning consumption, embodying the social changes Bond personified

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1.2  Well-dressed muscle: Connery as Paddy Damion in The Frightened City (1961), intimidating construction firm executives

and helped shape. As Robert Koehler notes, ‘you can see the same alluring suavity, the droll mind he brought to Bond … It proves that Connery imposed himself on Bond, not the other way round.’ 110

‘A better tuned instrument’: actor training As his acting career developed, Connery became increasingly conscious of his lack of formal training, which neither the BBC nor Fox provided. Coming somewhat late and haphazardly to the profession meant that Connery did not attend any of the London drama schools that, along with a period in repertory, constituted the conventional training route for British actors. During this period, the London acting conservatoires diversified their recruitment through accepting working-class pupils usually paid for by local authority scholarships.111 However, the memoirs of Connery’s contemporaries evince a pronounced scepticism about the value of the training provided. Roger Moore, for instance, who attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) but left after a year, recalled, ‘I learnt all aspects of voice production and diction. They taught me how to talk “properly” without a South London accent, the art of mime, fencing and ballet … and something called “basic movement”, which consisted of wearing swimming shorts and bending and stretching whilst swinging my arms.’ 112 In his overview, Michael Billington characterises their curriculum as pragmatic rather than theoretical,

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a craft-based approach that focused on deportment, fencing, elocution, diction and ‘manners’. He quotes RADA’s principal, Hugh Cruttwell: ‘We supply vocational training for a profession.’ 113 The immediate stimulus to undertake some formal training came from Diane Cilento with whom Connery appeared in an ITV production of Anna Christie in August 1957. Cilento was a more experienced actor than Connery at this point, had attended RADA and had the added cachet of coming from a much higher social background but one that was cosmopolitan rather than stolidly English: as the daughter of two distinguished Australian medical practitioners. Cilento later commented, ‘We were in a different place in that production.’ 114 Even before they became lovers, Connery sensed that Cilento was someone who could offer advice that would enable him to improve as an actor. For her part, Cilento was instantly attracted to a performer who ‘took risks’ and ‘possessed an enormous store of emotional energy’.115 She recommended he attend private elocution lessons with Cicely Berry, then a voice coach at the Central School of Speech and Drama, whom Cilento considered ‘a wonderful instructor’, imaginative, dedicated and inspiring.116 Berry saw voice training not as the eradication of regional accents and the imposition of an artificial elocution but as an expression of the ‘inner life’ through which actors find their true potential. She advocated getting inside the words we use, responding to them in as free a way as possible, and then presenting that response to an audience … It is about making the language organic, so that the words act as a spur to the sound, and so that flexibility and range are found because the words require them.117

Berry’s training would seem to have offered Connery the opportunity to improve his vocal clarity without losing the ‘music’ of his ‘home tune’, to use his voice as a means of finding the emotional dimension of the part whilst retaining the core of his Scottish identity, thus refining and extending the process he had already begun with his tape recorder and early elocution lessons. Even more significant, Cilento persuaded Connery to attend classes given by the Swedish dance and movement teacher Yat Malmgren.118 Connery spent thirteen months (April 1958 to May 1959) as a private pupil at the Drama Centre, Malmgren’s movement studio in the West End, attending classes three times a week.119 The particular attraction of Malmgren for someone making his way in a profession dominated by people from more privileged backgrounds and a different social class was that he encouraged each actor to bring their own ‘lifeworld’ into the way in which they created characters.120 As with Berry’s vocal training, Malmgren’s system was designed to sensitise actors to the relationship between physical activity and mental or emotional states in order to understand the deeper motivations of the

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characters being performed and how to convey these to an audience.121 The overriding aim was for actors to transform themselves into the characters played as completely as possible, physically, emotionally and psychologically. Malmgren recalled Connery’s aptitude and was another creative professional who sensed Connery’s duality, his union of strength and size with a swift, discerning intelligence: ‘Sean had a magnetic sphere of physicality that had a drawing quality, but his intellect is very projecting, very quick and that goes on all the time. He has a particular combination of sensuality and emotion combined like a he-man cocktail.’ 122 The basis of Malmgren’s teaching was Rudolf Laban’s Mastery of Movement (1950), which identified and analysed the spatial-temporal axes of human movement rather than isolated gestures or postures.123 Malmgren recast Laban’s system from a generalised ‘movement psychology’ into a more pragmatic training regime in which movement is analysed as the interaction of four factors: Weight – the strength and force of an action; Space – the place, direction and shape of movements, how a body occupies space whilst static or in motion; Time – the temporal span of a movement, its speed, rhythm, whether sudden or sustained; and Flow – understanding the continuities, pauses, scope and restrictions of a movement and the degree of energy and control being exercised. These movements express the four mental factors of Sensing, Thinking, Intuiting and Feeling, respectively.124 Analysis of these factors was linked to differing character types, derived from Jung, thereby linking movement to psychological states and thus to a character’s inner, imaginative life.125 Through the use of gestures, gait, posture and vocal qualities (pitch, timbre, tone, resonance, accent), an actor could transform themself into an ‘imaginary body that will convey the actions and the inner life of the character’.126 Malmgren’s system includes an ‘analytic phase’, in which the actor builds a character through collecting cultural, historical, sociological and biographical data. This becomes the basis for the ‘synthetic phase’ in which those insights are integrated into particular physical actions and tone of voice, thereby encouraging a constant dialogue between imagination and action in which the actor is required to think deeply about any character’s motives, history or context to convey their ‘inner attitudes’.127 Thus the development of physical control was complemented by an emphasis on the ‘historical imagination’, encouraging an actor to engage with a wide range of classical and contemporary drama. In the most detailed account of Malmgren’s ‘system’, Janys Hayes argues that it places actors in charge of the creative process through a series of deliberate choices as to how they convey a character’s desires, disposition, aims and strategies. Mastering the system would eventually enable actors to understand and precisely control the expressive qualities and meaning of their voices, movements and gestures: ‘every muscle twitch, every idiosyncratic

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gesture, every shift in posture is suddenly exposed to layer on layer of readable meanings’ that convey a character’s inner state.128 In this way, an actor’s movements and vocal inflections can become as replete with meaning as the lines they speak, as does understanding where their body needs to be positioned and moved in order to command space and achieve maximum dramatic impact in each scene. Through attending Malmgren’s classes, Connery was exposed to a coherent ‘system’ of training that was in many ways more advanced and intellectually rigorous than he would have encountered at the established drama schools, which, as noted, were pragmatic and vocational. The work of Konstantin Stanislavski was well known at the time – Henderson passed on his copy of An Actor Prepares to Connery during the South Pacific tour, which, of course, he read avidly.129 However, as David Shirley has shown, the passage of Stanislavski into British curricula was ‘erratic and piecemeal’. There was no British equivalent of the New York Actors Studio and there was even a ‘degree of antipathy’ to the American ‘Method’ system that developed there, which never managed to gain a foothold in Britain.130 Shirley argues that Malmgren’s system absorbed elements of Stanislavski’s Methodology of Physical Actions whereby an actor translates impulses into the physical actions and gestures of a character, but couples the Stanislavskian search for the ‘truthfulness of the emotion’ with the ‘interpretative demands of an extremely diverse repertoire’ of texts.131 Connery often referred to the significance he felt Malmgren’s training had for him. In Being a Scot, he argued that it enabled him to gain control over the parts he played: ‘Learning about the dynamics of Weight, the Space you occupy, the reach of Time and the emotion of Flow soon provided me with the essentials in creating a character, and I have used his system ever since.’ 132 In Malmgren’s classes, We learnt a cohesive terminology … It was a remarkable period for me. It proved that with the proper exercises you can reshape your physical structure. Nothing like the weight-lifting exercises I’d done, but attacking yourself from within, from the head through to the base of the spine to awaken yourself physically, completely, so that you became a much better tuned instrument.133

I think the key to understanding Malmgren’s importance lies in that last phrase. Connery had already developed a supple muscularity and a high degree of consciousness as to how to hold, control and display his body – Henderson recalled that that even during his days in South Pacific, Connery’s ‘grace in movement was amazingly good’.134 What Malmgren’s training provided was an enlarged framework through which to understand, develop and refine that process. However, considering the tenets of Malmgren’s teaching helps to explain the significance Connery gave to movement and

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positioning, and his frequent determination to strip down dialogue: ‘The dance to me is all important. The place where you stand, how you use your space, is the number one priority. How you stand in relation to other people in scenes, how you dance with them – that’s what it’s all about.’ 135 Malmgren’s system thus formed part of a complex, gradual process of mastering his craft, rather than a transformation. Absorbing its emphasis on space, movement and positioning distinguishes Connery from many other of his contemporary British actors. Richard Burton, for instance, gave little attention to movement, relying on the dialogue and the power of his sonorous voice to animate his performance style.136

Television actor and star The disappointments and frustrations of Connery’s Fox contract meant he was eager to continue working in television. However, despite the fanfare that attended Connery’s performance in Requiem for a Heavyweight, as Rakoff recalled, the BBC had no star-building mechanism. The continuum of laudable plays was the corporation’s sole concern; actors were chosen to play specific roles rather than material sought for a particular actor. Hatton therefore negotiated Connery’s next five television appearances, from August 1957 to November 1959, with ITV companies. In the absence of recordings or detailed accounts of these ITV productions, it is difficult to judge their importance to Connery’s development as an actor. However, in career terms not only did they keep him working but the roles were reasonably varied, providing a roughly equivalent experience to a spell in repertory theatre, with the added advantages, as discussed, of intimate dialogues between actor and director and without the incessant need to change roles. Connery played another boxer in The Square Ring (June 1959) but the major role of Docker Starkie making his comeback went to George Baker.137 As mentioned, Connery appeared in Anna Christie (August 1957), opposite Cilento in the title part, as Mat Burke, whom Eugene O’Neill describes as ‘a powerful, broad-chested six-footer, his face handsome in a hard, rough, bold, defiant way. He is about thirty, in the full power of his heavy-muscled, immense strength.’ 138 However, like McClintock, this is a role that demands pathos and vulnerability as well as macho swagger. It requires the actor to convey the depths of the tormented struggle through which Mat gradually and painfully comes to accept Anna’s past as a sex worker that would allow the pair to build some sort of future together. Connery also starred in Granada’s The Crucible (November 1959) as another strong but conflicted masculine figure, John Proctor, described by Arthur Miller as a farmer in his middle thirties who is ‘powerful of body’

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and ‘a sinner not only against the moral fashion of the time, but against his own vision of decent conduct … respected and even feared in Salem, he has come to regard himself as a kind of fraud’.139 Connery’s portrayal of Proctor, the tragic hero of this corrosive allegory of the McCarthyite communist witch hunts, who accepts the guilt of his infidelity but is redeemed by refusing to save himself by betraying others, garnered widespread critical praise, one reviewer judging his performance to be ‘unusually polished and imaginative’.140 Connery was one of the leads in The Boy with the Meat Axe (November 1958), an example of the realistic plays about contemporary themes Sydney Newman championed when he took over control of Armchair Theatre in April 1958. Newman describes it as the ‘first production that made me feel I was coming close to my objective of producing plays about the turning points in British life’.141 Connery plays the brother of a working-class Roman Catholic girl (Virginia Maskell) who is outraged when she decides to marry a divorced man (Richard Pasco). Although he makes no comment on Connery’s performance, Newman considered that the action simmers ‘with the murderous feeling implied, latent in the mass of prejudice underneath’, praising Philip Saville’s direction that ‘gave it pace and searing emotion and captured beautifully its gritty working-class reality’.142 Connery was paid £60, rather less than the 79 guineas (£83) he had been paid for Requiem.143 His final role for ITV was in a ninety-minute Play of the Week, The Pets (October 1960), based on Robert Shaw’s first novel The Hiding Place (1959), a fresh take on the POW story, which had been praised for its depth and subtlety of characterisation.144 Shaw, another Hatton client, and Connery played two British bomber pilots who are kept incarcerated by Hans Frick (Max Adrian) in the basement of his house in Bonn after their Lancaster had been brought down in a raid. Frick, who initially saved them from the Gestapo, comes to rely on their companionship, never revealing that the war has ended. Imprisoned until 1952, they escape and are disconcerted to find a relaxed and prosperous Germany, becoming convinced the Allies lost and only eventually discovering the truth. Shaw plays Wilson from the Western Isles of Scotland, who has found captivity a tranquil period giving time to write and reflect. Connery plays the Londoner Connolly, seven years his junior, nervous and unsettled, who finds incarceration a huge emotional strain, perpetually anxious about his wife and suffering presentiments of his death and so he ‘looked much older than he was; powerful, handsome, but everything about him seemed used up’.145 It is unfortunate that no copy of The Pets remains because the scenes between Connery and Shaw in From Russia with Love (1963) or in Robin and Marian (1976) suggest this would have been an absorbing drama given the two actors’ contrasting styles and the somewhat counter-intuitive casting.146

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Connery returned to the BBC with Colombe (January 1960), the earliest of his television productions that can be viewed.147 It was a shortened version of Jean Anouilh’s 1951 play set in a turn-of-the century Parisian theatrical milieu. Connery plays Julien, intent on becoming a great pianist, who, having married Colombe (Dorothy Tutin), a flower-seller, entrusts her to the care of his actress mother (Françoise Rosay) whilst he is on military service. Colombe enjoys the relaxed morality of the theatre world, taking a succession of lovers, including Julien’s step-brother, Paul (Richard Pasco). As the producer, Naomi Capon, argues in a Radio Times article, at the play’s centre is the clash between Colombe’s relaxed, pragmatic hedonism and Julien’s unbending, high-minded puritanism.148 The most moving moment occurs when Julien, desperate to understand why Colombe finds Paul attractive, grabs his stepbrother savagely and kisses him passionately on the lips: ‘Kiss me as you did her … Kiss me and show me what makes them love you. Show me what makes them weak.’ Connery’s performance has elements of the yearning and desperation he essayed in McClintock but with an undercurrent of repressed anger and resentment. Julien is often shown brooding and resentful, simmering with rage, the cruel mouth slightly twisted, in permanent opposition to mores he can neither accept nor understand, scarred by his mother’s desertion and callousness, and conscious of the fate of his father who blew his brains out. As Capon’s article makes clear, Colombe was conceived as a vehicle for Tutin and the chance to have Rosay perform on television for the first time, with Connery playing a subsidiary role. Although he brought vigour and energy to the part, Connery tends to over-emote, betraying his relative inexperience or perhaps his unease in this particular role. The BBC’s viewers seem to have found his performance convincing, though ‘two or three were puzzled’ by his accent, which one described as ‘a cross a between Irish, Scotch and Canadian’, a reminder that his decision to retain his ‘native tune’ was not the easiest way to get on in his profession.149 It also demonstrates that Connery was still learning his trade, needing suitable roles to perform with confidence, and that the BBC was unsure how to cast him. No recording of the contemporary drama Without the Grail (September 1960) survives but the camera script in the BBC archives reveals a sub-Heart of Darkness drama about a tea planter, Felix Barrington (Michael Hordern reprising his role in the original radio play), in Assam who ‘goes native’, engaging in a range of ‘unspeakable’ practices.150 Connery plays an ‘ambitious young man’, Innes Corrie, sent to investigate why Barrington is no longer sending supplies back to the UK. Although a ‘sizeable group’ of the BBC’s viewers thought Connery ‘played convincingly’, this was not a star-building role in a drama many judged far-fetched, slow-moving and obscure, with

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an abrupt and unsatisfying ending. Its ‘reaction index’ of 54 fell ‘well below’ the norm of 64.151 A much more significant opportunity came through being cast as Hotspur in An Age of Kings, the most ambitious Shakespearean production yet attempted on television with each episode costing £4,000.152 An Age of Kings orders Shakespeare’s eight history plays, ‘depicting the turbulent reigns of seven monarchs’, into a chronological sequence and was broadcast over fifteen episodes screened fortnightly on Thursdays at 9 p.m. and repeated on Sundays between April and November 1960. An entry in the production files argues that the BBC had undertaken something beyond the resources of any theatrical organisation: ‘The task presents a well-nigh insuperable problem to the economy of the usual theatre season … the production is intended to be a landmark in the BBC’s Shakespearian tradition’ and not something that a theatre would find commercially viable.153 As Hotspur/ Harry Percy, the eldest son of the Earl of Northumberland, Connery appears in the first four episodes, becoming a dominant presence in Part 3, ‘Rebellion from the North’ and Part 4, ‘The Road to Shrewsbury’ in which the Earls of Northumberland and Worcester gather forces to depose the ‘ungrateful’ monarch Bolingbroke/Henry IV whom they helped to the throne. Connery’s salary was £750.154 Casting Connery, who was not classically trained, in a major Shakespearian role would seem a bold decision, although the BBC’s producer, Peter Dews, may have been aware of Connery’s performances at the Oxford Playhouse discussed below. However, Hotspur was a particular kind of part. As the director, Michael Hayes, noted, ‘Hotspur’s speech is not versified in the way others’ are and therefore suitable for an actor with other strengths than speaking blank verse.’ Through his Fox contract and film roles, unsuitable as they might have been, Connery had become a name, and Hayes makes it clear that he wanted an actor with glamour and panache to play Hotspur: ‘he was more renowned than the rest of the cast. He was a star with a star’s outlook.’ This remark offers another glimpse of how Connery was regarded within the English acting profession: not ‘one of us’, shuffling between Stratford and the BBC, but a film actor who could be cast in certain specific roles. However, Hayes praised Connery’s consummate professionalism and acknowledged that he was neither loud nor showy but confident, at ease with live Shakespeare: ‘he certainly carried it off with a dash. His relaxation – that’s what I remember; that’s the gift he brought to us from films. Technical proficiency that allowed him to bawl.’ 155 Robert Hardy, who played Hotspur’s adversary Prince Hal, also noted that Hotspur talks differently from the other characters around him and thought Connery ‘achieved this thing of bringing a part to himself quite wonderfully’.156

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Connery’s performance bristles with energy and motion, constantly getting up and down from his chair, banging on the table and pushing furniture aside as he moves around the cramped sets with sinewy litheness; in his first scene with his wife, Kate (Patricia Heneghan), he leaps onto the bed to plant a very sensual kiss. Although Connery tends to rush headlong into some speeches, missing opportunities to accentuate key words, he never declaims, always striving to make the verse appear the product of spontaneous thought, creating a character whose emotions are volatile and swift-moving. He clearly recognises the power of the close-up, as in the scene in which he reads a letter from one of his fellow rebels, his features expressive of rapid and urgent thinking. He was favoured by the number of close-ups he is given and in the occasional reaction shots, very rare in this production. Although Hotspur is a ‘gallant fool’, whose impetuous bravery and defiance are defining characteristics, like Prince Hal, he is a young man trying to find his role in the sordid world of power politics. Connery’s performance thus attempts to project Hotspur’s uncertainties as well as his bravado. In homage to Olivier’s famous performance at the Old Vic in 1944, Connery has Hotspur stammer on the letter ‘w’, which enables him to slow his occasionally headlong delivery even as it creates a sense of vulnerability. Although it is inconceivable he would lose in single combat to Hardy’s chicken-chested Hal, of course he must, and Hotspur’s death becomes a tragic moment in which Connery gives expressive conviction to the inevitability of his downfall: ‘But thought’s the slave of life, and life, Time’s fool. / And Time, that takes survey of all the world, / Must have a stop.’ Overall, Connery’s confident, convincing performance elicited frequent praise from reviewers in what The Times considered was ‘a landmark in the BBC’s Shakespearian tradition’, which achieved UK audience figures of six million, extremely high for ‘serious’ drama.157 One critic commented that Connery was ‘physically relaxed, not at all fazed by the verse speaking, and … considerably more dynamic than the leaden Shakespearean actors around him’.158 Despite his importance to An Age of Kings, Connery was not one of the major stars of the production. What one might call his television stardom came through two adaptations produced and directed by Rudolph Cartier, acclaimed as one of the most important pioneers of modern television drama, highly regarded for his versatility and knowledge of modernist European drama, which gave a more international dimension to BBC productions.159 Although Cartier was renowned for the imaginative ways in which he used space expressively and cinematically, he also understood the importance of actors: ‘one has to invent a new style. It isn’t theatre, it isn’t cinema, it is some cross breed between the two. On television you have to see the faces as near as possible, which you cannot in theatre, nor in cinema.’ 160 Like

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Rakoff, Cartier did not pre-plan everything but allowed performances to evolve for as long as possible, only finalising camera movements during the last week of rehearsal. He considered ‘directors must be good with actors … I don’t tell them how to do it, I tell them what to feel and they have to express it in their own terms … Every actor shall use his own resources, his own feelings, this is my way of directing.’ 161 Connery’s first production for Cartier was in Terence Rattigan’s Adventure Story in June 1961. Adventure Story is a character study of a conqueror, Alexander the Great, corrupted by conquest. Rattigan stated that it was about a man ‘who gained the whole world and lost his soul … I tried to discover what was in Alexander’s heart that drove him on in his tempestuous, ruthless, invincible march.’ 162 The action is framed and punctuated by a tormented Alexander on his deathbed in Babylon wondering, ‘Where did it first go wrong?’, proceeding through eleven scenes that depict Alexander’s conquests from the age of twenty until his death aged thirty-two. The role offered Connery the chance to show Alexander’s gradual transformation from boyish, charismatic exuberance to hardened, vindictive autocracy, suspecting treachery in every gesture of his subordinates. As in An Age of Kings, Connery inhabits his character emotionally and bodily rather than simply declaiming the lines, understanding the eloquence of his gestures and movements. He moves confidently around the sets in command of every gesture from the lithe expansiveness and tactility of the early scenes to the stiff, brittle actions of the closing ones where he has become increasingly isolated, his movements cramped, guarded and wary, haunted by loneliness and insecurity as he comes to resemble physically the Persian tyrant, Darius, he thought to overthrow. Although Connery’s command of language is assured, even more impressive, in contrast with the other actors who take up their positions and speak, is the way in which he thinks about movement and gesture. On the eve of the crucial battle against Darius, he stares at his hands that start to shake uncontrollably: Instead of wobbling his hands rhythmically from the wrists, in the classic war movie tradition … Connery’s hands give unnerving little spasms, fluttering slightly as he massages them, as if they’ve just been beaten. Vitally, it avoids a stock visual cliché, and concentrates the performance on the whole body, as Alexander suddenly seems hesitant, half depressed and half elated by this signal of his impending destiny.163

One could attribute this expressiveness to Malmgren’s influence; it certainly resonates with the intelligence that Connery brought to all his roles. Adventure Story had been staged in March 1949, starring Paul Scofield as Alexander, to mixed, occasionally hostile reviews, with some critics considering that it was beyond Rattigan’s range, ill-conceived, overblown

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and pretentious.164 Reviewers of the television adaptation were often equally critical about Rattigan’s achievement, but Connery’s performance was praised consistently. The Times’s reviewer considered that he ‘played with intelligent and well-directed force; he never, even as a reluctant tyrant, completely lost the impetuous charm on which Mr Rattigan insists at the play’s opening. Certain inflections and swift deliberations of gesture at times made one feel the part had found the young Olivier it needs.’ 165 As an index of his television stardom, Connery appeared on the front cover of the Radio Times on 8 June 1961.166 Although critics might be sceptical about the play, viewers were not. Adventure Story’s reaction index was 78, well above the norm of 64, and they ‘could not find enough praise’ for Connery’s performance even though, as usual, his accent came in for some criticism.167 Connery’s success as Alexander led to his casting as Count Alexis Vronsky in Anna Karenina (November 1961), a copy of which was rediscovered in 2010 in the BBC’s own archives.168 Cartier used a modern European adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel – Marcelle-Maurette’s 1954 play that focuses exclusively on the doomed grande passion of Anna and Vronsky – to produce what he called a ‘modern psychological drama’, one that, in particular, enhanced the role of Vronsky.169 It was a prestigious production costing £10,281, ‘the highest we have been given for any Drama production as a special project’, transmitted on 3 November 1961 and released for US syndication on the same date.170 Connery played opposite the more experienced Claire Bloom in the showier part of Anna. Bloom, trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and on stage since she was fifteen, had been feted for numerous performances in Shakespeare and Chekhov as well as starring in international films such as Chaplin’s Limelight (1952), and Alexander the Great (1956) opposite Richard Burton. However, this was her most important television role and it speaks volumes for Connery’s status that he was thought capable of starring alongside someone of her stature, even if he was paid rather less: £500, as opposed to Bloom’s £750.171 Connery looks resplendent in his military uniforms and, as Andrew Rissik notes, had become confident enough to recognise that the role called for understatement and suggestiveness rather than any extravagant gestures, ‘that enormous sexual and dramatic energy could be created simply by standing there and being the object of attention’, using the close-up reaction shot as the way ‘to suggest in the man a real depth and sadness beneath the contained, rather bluff exterior’.172 Overall this is Connery’s most carefully constructed television performance, depicting Vronsky’s transformation from the bored, indifferent soldier, stiff and distracted as he waits for his mother’s arrival at the station, through the ardent lover, aroused yet almost stupefied by a passion he has never experienced and cannot control, finally hardening into a man trapped by an increasingly oppressive, claustrophobic

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1.3  Connery as the ‘headlong passionate’ Count Vronsky opposite Claire Bloom as Anna in Anna Karenina (1961)

relationship. Connery is at his most compelling in the later scenes, after their relationship has turned sour, suggesting, through carefully contained, wary gestures and a measured, detached tone, the futility of his attempts to be ‘reasonable’ in a situation in which they are tearing each other apart. As Geoffrey Macnab notes, Connery brings an undercurrent of menace and sadism to the role that gives a malevolent edge to his containment in the face of Anna’s increasingly impossible demands that lead inexorably to her suicide.173 The BBC’s Audience Research Department reported that Connery was praised by viewers almost as much as Bloom in a production that was much admired.174 The Times’s reviewer judged that Connery’s performance as the ‘headlong passionate Vronsky’ was the ‘most successful’ in the production.175 Connery’s success seemed to presage continued employment. Joy Jameson, on behalf of Richard Hatton, wrote to Michael Barry on 3 December 1961, ‘I think you’ll agree that he had an absolutely splendid press. He is very keen to do another play for the BBC.’ 176 Cartier was eager to continue their association, offering Connery the part of Oderbruch in Carl Zuckmayer’s The Devil’s General and explaining:



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Although the part of Oderbruch … does not enter until page 62 he holds the last half hour of the play, with tremendous power and integrity together. / Needless to say how happy I should be if you could see yourself in the part and looking forward for a chance to work with you.177

Cartier wrote to Connery’s agent on 14 September 1961 offering further television roles, including Wuthering Heights, again co-starring with Bloom, which was ‘still very much under consideration’.178 It is intriguing to imagine how Connery might have played Heathcliff, but by this point he had been cast as Bond.179 These Cartier productions proved to be the culmination of Connery’s television career, but one further role needs to be considered: Macbeth (January 1961) produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Company for which Connery’s salary was a modest $500 (£178).180 However, this was the chance to tackle a major Shakespearian play, an opportunity Connery had been denied two years earlier when he had to turn down the role in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop production because he was nursing Cilento through a bout of tuberculosis.181 This Canadian version was a highly stylised, expressionist production, imaginatively conceived and directed by Paul Almond using chiaroscuro lighting to illuminate the gigantic angular sets by Austrian designer Rudi Dorn. Almond deploys extended close-ups of Connery’s sculpted, mask-like face, which, together with the wide-shouldered costumes that accentuate the breadth of his torso, give his performance a monumental quality. He is also given numerous expressive close-ups. Connery recalled that Almond accepted his suggestion to deliver the lengthy soliloquies as voice-overs, freeing him to concentrate on finding the most appropriate facial expression to convey their brooding, haunted quality and the ‘inner attitudes’ that would bring his performance to life.182 One could be forgiven for thinking that this idea was also a shrewdly pragmatic suggestion from an actor who had a mere ten days to prepare for the role. Connery gives an accomplished rendering of Shakespeare’s verse though his performance is uneven, occasionally fighting the lines. He is at his most effective after the murder of King Duncan has been performed, giving a tense and absorbing rendition of a man haunted by the deed, and in the final scenes where he lurches between braggart defiance and weary acceptance of the inevitability of his downfall, conscious of the emptiness of his life.

Performing the classics: theatre actor Although, as discussed, Connery had little prospect of establishing himself as a theatre actor, he was deeply conscious that it was performing on the stage through which reputations for acting excellence were founded, conferring

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cultural prestige and symbolic capital in inverse proportion to monetary rewards. He therefore returned to the stage, appearing at the Oxford Playhouse three times over an eighteen-month period from May 1959 to November 1960.183 In order to do this, Connery had turned down a salary of £15,000 to play Count Ordóñez in Samuel Bronston’s El Cid (1961), which would have been an opportunity to take an important role in a major Hollywood production. At the Playhouse he earned a mere £25 per week and had to pay his own hotel bill.184 The Playhouse was an independent, subsidised company that had reopened in 1956 under the direction of Frank Hauser and Minos Volanakis to present a diet of serious plays with a predilection for European drama.185 Hauser was keen on Connery performing in several plays, considering he ‘had a great natural grace. He stood very well on stage, he looked good and he had a very strong stage personality.’ 186 However, he also recalled that Connery still needed considerable help with stagecraft and his approach to the part.187 Connery reprised his role as Mat Burke in Anna Christie, opposite Jill Bennett as Anna. One critic pronounced his performance ‘magnificent’, as he ‘seized happily upon Mat’s Irish braggadocio and, in the more sincere moods of the character, illuminated the man’s alternating savagery and tenderness with unfailing conviction’.188 Connery played a very different role as an aristocratic Italian diplomat in Luigi Pirandello’s Naked (November 1960) opposite Cilento, who had provided the translation for this rarely performed play.189 His performance again prompted enthusiastic reviews: ‘As the seducer torn between lust and remorse Mr Connery makes an unforgettable impression.’ 190 However, it was in his earlier performance as King Pentheus in The Bacchae in May 1959 that Connery had most impact. The Playhouse’s version, translated, designed and directed by Volanakis, was a major production: the first time Euripides’ play had been revived since 1908.191 The Bacchae is the great clash between antithetical modes of being, between the ordered, purposeful and responsible rationality of Pentheus and the irrational, disorderly wildness of Dionysus and his female devotees, the maenads, who have left the city of Thebes to revel on the mountainside. As its ruler, Pentheus pursues and imprisons Dionysus as a threat to the social order. The pivotal moment occurs when Dionysus, sensing his interest in what the women are doing, suggests Pentheus should disguise himself in women’s attire and wig so he may gaze without being noticed. As Pentheus stares at his reflection in a mirror, he gives way to an impulse to dance, thus surrendering to his sensual, emotional self. This act leads to his destruction, torn to pieces by his mother Argave and her female companions who have been driven into an uncontrolled frenzy when they catch Pentheus spying on them. Cilento recalled that when required to dress as a woman, Connery ‘met the challenge without any of the coyness that generally attends macho

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actors who get into drag’.192 Christopher Fettes, co-founder of the Drama Centre with Malmgren, remembered Connery’s performance as ‘profoundly disturbing’.193 Connery was perhaps able to make that impression because of what he had learned from Malmgren: the ability to focus all his energies and thinking into how to convey the ‘yielding’ aspects of his masculine self in an unselfconscious embrace of the joy of releasing the feminine side of his character. Reviews of the production considered Connery captured both Pentheus’ repression as well as his ecstatic release. One critic admired the way in which Connery ‘gives the heartsick Pentheus exactly the right exasperated bullying impatience until the moment when his unconscious desires betray him’.194 Connery also appeared in two other stage roles at different theatres. He played opposite Sybil Thorndike in The Sea Shell in October 1959, a comedy written by the American dramatist Jess Gregg and performed at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh. The Scotsman praised his memorable entrance and fine performance.195 Connery’s final stage role was as the Assyrian general Holofernes in Christopher Fry’s translation of Jean Giraudoux’s Judith (June 1962) at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Clad in a costume that revealed his hirsute torso and muscular thighs, Connery, ‘did little but looked magnificent’ in one critic’s verdict.196 Henderson commented, ‘Never before on the legitimate stage had he the chance to show off that remarkably beautiful physique.’ 197 However, these remarks rather undersell the role. Giradoux depicts Holofernes as more than a muscular conqueror. Holofernes is able to be seduced by Judith precisely because he has the imagination to respond very deeply to the power of her beauty and his yearning need for feminine companionship that he has been denied for so long.198 It was a role, I suggest, in which Connery was able to express the duality, the strength allied to sensitivity, which was the essence of his appeal.

A new generation of actors A 1957 profile of Connery in the News Chronicle – ‘Britain’s Brando Shows ’em’ – described him as ‘the contemporary hero … designed on American lines. Tall, broad, with features rugged rather than regular, he looks earthy, unschooled, basic … blessed with luck, talent and utter disregard for convention, he’s shown how to build a career without influence, and without too much hypocrisy.’ 199 In the accompanying photo Connery is dressed in an open-collar shirt, jumper and zip-up jacket, which suggests someone consciously refusing to appear as a conventional English actor in tweed jacket and tie.200 The comparison to Brando is quite crude – Connery is a very different actor – but it shows that Connery is perceived as much closer

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to American models than British ones. His rejection of the middle-class English gentlemanliness of established British actors, although individually determined, was aligned with an emerging generation of working-class British male actors – Alan Bates, Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Terence Stamp – whom commentators considered created a new type of antihero on and off screen that undermined the ‘old-school-tie traditions of London’s theatrical Establishment’. Newspaper articles and publicity material constantly stressed their rebellious, anti-authoritarian obstreperousness, partly because they were convenient symbols for the cultural and social processes that were transforming British life, including increased social and geographical mobility, a liberalisation of attitudes towards sex, unconventional lifestyles and above all the rise of a more affluent working class that challenged the existing middle-class hegemony.201 These celebrated actors were part of a profession that was changing from the ‘well-bred, public school actor’ that had dominated since the 1890s towards a more inclusive social mix.202 Only 2 per cent of actors had come from the artisan/manual class before 1945; by the late 1950s that figure had risen to 24.6 per cent.203 Actors were no longer recruited almost exclusively from prosperous or solidly professional middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds whose families could afford the expensive training.204 Although Connery was moving forward on the tide of history, what this account of his early career has shown is that the success he achieved was hard won. His decision to retain his Edinburgh accent enabled him to achieve an authenticity and emotional truth in his performances, but it did not make him readily employable or necessarily endear him to audiences, as the comments from BBC viewers showed. Connery’s career was forged without being part of any group or movement. He was not associated with The English Stage Company at the Royal Court nor Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, the two companies in the vanguard of change.205 Indeed, he had no connections in the acting profession: ‘I didn’t go to RADA or public school. And I don’t belong to any special group of actors.’ 206 Despite his starring role in several major productions, Connery confessed that he ‘never felt comfortable at the BBC … I was not one of the old boy network … I certainly could have appeared in the hundreds of parts that didn’t come my way.’ 207 This lack of ‘background’ or connections made his journey from chorus-line beefcake to Shakespearean actor all the more remarkable. Although his film career was frustratingly insubstantial, as one of his biographers notes, ‘At the beginning of the sixties Connery’s theatre career had progressed well; he had had a number of major roles and the reviews had been, by and large, favourable.’ 208 He was also a major television star.

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Connery’s success was the result of application rather than natural gifts. As Rakoff and others discerned, he had an aptitude and an appetite to learn, taking what opportunities he could and making every effort to acquire the literary culture denied by his truncated education. He was determined to make a success of acting because, as the epigraph indicates, it enabled him to make sense of his life, providing freedom and expanded cultural horizons, and satisfied his restlessness and his competitiveness. His labours were, for the most part, well remunerated but these commercial satisfactions were allied to Connery’s reverence for culture and art. He was an actor who took risks and although he sought commercial success and hoped to achieve international film stardom, he was prepared to appear on the stage for a miniscule salary if it meant the opportunity to challenge himself and extend his range. By the early 1960s, through assiduous self-discipline, and a willingness to develop his craft through a combination of advice and formal training, Connery had learned to inhabit imaginatively a range of roles through increasingly precise control of movement, gesture and vocal shading. Although his performance in The Frightened City may have anticipated James Bond, one can contend that Connery seemed an actor destined for a rather different future. Although he would never have been a major theatre actor where the power of connections was most entrenched, he could well have continued working in television, especially as handsome, slightly exotic leads: Heathcliff, or perhaps Mr Rochester. What is most evident in this period is that Connery tended to be cast in costume roles rather than gritty contemporary dramas, his size and physique suggesting an epic presence. The power of that presence derived from Connery’s duality, the combination of brawn allied to intelligence and sensitivity. His most accomplished performances were playing strong but conflicted men – Alexander, Matt Burke, Holofernes, Hotspur, Macbeth, Pentheus, John Proctor and Vronsky – confident in the power and strength of their handsome male bodies but forced to acknowledge their limitations, vulnerability and more tender emotions. Connery’s hard-won achievements as an actor, however, had no bearing on his becoming Bond, which completely transformed his career and engulfed his whole identity.

2

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Being Bond, 1962–72

I don’t think any role changes a man quite so much as Bond. It’s a cross, a privilege, a joke, a challenge. And as bloody intrusive as a nightmare.1

As the epigraph indicates, Connery had an ambivalent and multifaceted relationship to the role of James Bond. As a working-class Scot who refused to conform to the dominant conventions of screen acting, he was hardly the obvious choice for Ian Fleming’s high-class Englishman. As discussed in the previous chapter, there was almost no continuity between the character of Bond and any of his previous roles, except the unremarked The Frightened City. The disparity between Connery’s own identity and the role was so pronounced that his casting came as a surprise even to close friends such as Michael Caine, who put his money on Rex Harrison, ‘your living image of upper crust good living’.2 Connery later recalled that it had been ‘a joke around town’ that he was the one ultimately chosen.3 The reasons why Connery was cast are analysed in detail in the next section for what they reveal about how the producers understood the character of Bond and the qualities they perceived in Connery. For Connery, the role of Bond promised to fulfil his goal to become an international film star, the career he hoped would flow from the Fox contract, but which had been frustrated consistently by the studio’s failure to provide suitable or even substantial roles. It was the chance to be the star of a UK-based but internationally oriented series, an almost unprecedented opportunity for a British actor. However, a point often forgotten or omitted, attempting to animate Fleming’s ‘blank slate’ into an engaging screen character was also a sizeable acting challenge. I explore the ways in which Connery drew on the experience and training he had gained over the previous decade to create the character of Bond and how he developed the character as the series progressed. However, as Connery observed, Bond also became a ‘cross’ and then a nightmare as the series’ extraordinary success – the ‘Bond phenomenon’ – threatened to absorb not only his entire acting career and his private life but his very identity. The second half of this chapter analyses the consequences

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of this success and why it caused an acrimonious and irreparable rift between star and producers. Although the ostensible reason for what became a very public quarrel was money, an equitable share of the spoils, that was a symptom of something much deeper. My discussion examines the limitations of the agency Connery was able to exert as a ‘serial star’ understood as a form of ‘industrial authorship’ in which the production company not the star holds the whip hand. The posters that screamed ‘Connery is Bond’ may have sold millions of cinema tickets but they did nothing to develop Connery’s own star persona away from that role. The paradoxical casting of Connery as Bond also raises important questions about national identity in a series produced by a British-registered company (Eon Productions) designed for global consumption and bankrolled by an American studio, United Artists. This chapter discusses the particular nature of Connery’s international stardom and his contribution to ‘Bondmania’ in which the figure became a new folk hero and cultural icon.

Searching for Bond In the tangled weave of memories, recollections, post-hoc rationalisations and obfuscation, it is impossible to arrive at a definitive account as to why Connery was chosen as Bond, but some elements can be established with a degree of certainty. The choice of Connery is bound up with the production processes that led to the creation of the screen Bond. These have been examined in detail elsewhere and can therefore be summarised in brief here.4 Eon Productions, the partnership between Harry Saltzman, who held the rights to the Bond novels, and Cubby Broccoli, an experienced producer of action-adventure films, was formed on 6 July 1961 as a British-registered company to make the Bond films. United Artists (UA) was prepared to provide production finance because its executives saw potential in a film series that could be made much more cheaply in Britain than in America; Eon would be able to access the Eady Levy, a production subsidy generated by a tax on ticket sales provided at least three-quarters of its film’s cast and crew was British and that the film was shot mainly in Britain or the Commonwealth.5 However, UA, not convinced the series would necessarily be a success, imposed a tight budget of under $1 million (£322,069) for the first film.6 These financial constraints were the most important determinant on who was chosen as Bond alongside Saltzman and Broccoli’s conviction that Bond should be played by a British actor, despite pressure from UA to cast an American lead.7 In the intense press interest and speculation that followed the announcement in January 1962 that Ian Fleming’s Bond novels were to be to be filmed,

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almost every major British star was mentioned as a contender for the role, including Stanley Baker, Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Rex Harrison, Laurence Harvey, Trevor Howard, James Mason, Peter O’Toole and Michael Redgrave.8 Fleming, who had no influence over the selection nor was involved in the production, favoured David Niven, or possibly Richard Todd.9 In his autobiography, Broccoli claims he had approached Cary Grant, the urbane hero of North by Northwest, British but an established international star and thus an ostensibly ideal choice.10 Broccoli may have fantasised about Grant playing Bond, but his standard fee of $300,000 (£100,000) per film (and 10 per cent of the gross) was way beyond what Eon could afford.11 Eon only had £21,064 to cover the entire cast costs, a third of the sum assigned to Tom Jones, the other British production UA was funding at this time, a further indication of the studio’s doubts about the series’ prospects.12 Michael Craig, a middle-rank British star, who had been the male lead in a number of Rank’s action-adventure films, claims to have been approached. However, in consultation with his agent, Craig considered that the salary being offered – he mentions a figure of £5,000 – plus the requirement to sign for a series, ‘wasn’t much of a proposition’; he later found out that a number of ‘actors of my age and experience had likewise turned it down’.13 These may have included Richard Johnson, the preferred choice of Terence Young, slated to direct the first Bond film, Dr. No.14 In addition to the budgetary constraints, Broccoli and Saltzman were convinced that because, in their view, the role was more important than the star, they needed someone without the ‘baggage’ of an established persona who could be identified as Bond by cinemagoers, especially if he played the role several times. Broccoli opined: the books were the ‘star’ … If the films were successful, they would make whoever played Bond famous. A star couldn’t have been tied up for a series of pictures; and we felt this to be vital. UA had failed with Micky Spillane because they used a different star for each time and the public got no chance to form an affectionate identification with him.15

David Picker, a leading UA executive, summarised the commercial logic: ‘When you’re doing something that you hope would be a franchise, you really want to have someone who is not a star who you can get options with so you can repeat the success of the first film.’ 16 Broccoli was an experienced producer of action-adventure films through his partnership with Irving Allen in Warwick Films (1952–60) and he could surround an inexperienced actor with a number of experienced ex-Warwick personnel in key roles. These included, in addition to Young as the director, scriptwriter Richard Maibaum, director of cinematography Ted Moore and production

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designer Ken Adam, alongside other crew members used to working together and the logistics of action-adventure production. Having decided on casting an ‘unknown’ actor, Saltzman fanned press speculation by persuading Patricia Lewis, the show-business editor of the Daily Express, to launch a competition in June 1961 to find the perfect Bond: ‘Competitors must be aged between 28 and 35; measure between 6ft. and 6ft. 1 in.; weigh about 12 st.; have blue eyes, dark hair, rugged features – particularly a determined chin – and an English accent.’ 17 As a result, six finalists were invited to a judging panel, which selected Peter Anthony, a model who had appeared regularly in lifestyle magazines such as Man About Town, as the one ‘who comes closest to James Bond’.18 However, this was clearly a publicity stunt as Anthony was summarily dismissed by Broccoli as someone who ‘lacks the technique to cope with such a demanding role’.19 According to Alexander Walker, there was a long-list of twelve contenders that was whittled down to three; he names Connery and Roger Moore but not the third.20 This was probably Patrick McGoohan, whom Saltzman considered suitable.21 Alvin Rakoff recalled that ‘Broccoli made it pretty public at the time’ that the choice was between McGoohan, Moore and Connery and considered that the ‘least likely was Sean. McGoohan was the best actor.’ 22 McGoohan declined because of his pronounced moral and ethical objections to the sex and violence.23 Broccoli, at least in retrospect, thought Moore was ‘slightly too young, perhaps a shade too pretty. He had what we called the “Arrow collar” look: too buttoned-down smart.’ 24 However, Connery was not chosen by default: he had qualities both producers admired and, according to Stanley Sopel, the production manager for the first seven Bonds and another ex-Warwick employee, was always the front-runner.25 Broccoli, who had been Lana Turner’s agent whilst working for Charles Feldman’s Famous Artists Agency, had met Connery in 1958 whilst he was working on Another Time, Another Place: ‘He was a handsome, personable guy, projecting a kind of animal virility. He was tall, with a strong physical presence, and there was just the right kind of threat behind that hard smile and faint Scottish burr.’ 26 Broccoli’s interest in Connery was sufficient to make the trip to Los Angeles for a screening of Darby O’Gill and the Little People on 28 June 1961.27 Apparently Broccoli then telephoned his wife, Dana, asking her to come over and watch the film to ascertain if Connery had the necessary sex appeal; her reaction was enthusiastic: ‘“That’s our Bond!’” 28 Saltzman seems initially to have been more hesitant. He thought Connery had been ‘dreadful’ in most of his previous films, although he recognised the actor had ‘suffered a … fatal miscasting all the way down the line’.29 Other accounts suggest Saltzman had been impressed by Connery’s performance in On the Fiddle.30 He telephoned its director, Cyril Frankel,

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who thought Connery could play the role ‘Standing on his head and reading a newspaper.’ 31 Although the actual meeting to discuss the part between Connery and the producers has become part of Bond and Connery folklore, it seems clear that Connery planned the impression he would make very carefully in consultation with Yat Malmgren, who advised him to walk into the audition ‘very self-assured, very large, very secure’, and to ‘press for deep’, meaning to command the space with his presence.32 Connery deliberately dressed down in baggy, unpressed trousers, brown shirt without a tie and suede shoes, pounding on the desk to make his point. Broccoli recalled that Connery’s answers were friendly and direct but more importantly did not give the impression that he despised the part, an important consideration for producers who wanted their chosen actor to identify wholeheartedly with the role: ‘He didn’t come on in the style of a classical actor who thought James Bond was a little too down-market for his talents.’ 33 Both producers thought Connery exuded the ‘strong masculinity’ the part needed, but probably even more important was his ability to move with a combination of elegance and menace. Saltzman recalled, ‘What impressed me was that a man of his size and frame could move in such a supple way’, and that he strode off with ‘the threatening grace of a panther on the prowl’.34 Crucially, Broccoli wanted someone whose appeal was different ‘from the conventional refined Englishness that was the norm for the previous generation’, an actor whose ‘strong physical magnetism and the overtones of a truck driver’ had broad appeal: ‘it thrilled the women, but more important, young men in the audience could feel there was a guy up there like them’.35 Broccoli concluded, ‘we were looking to give our 007 a much broader box-office appeal, a sexual athlete who would look great in Savile Row suits’.36 Saltzman, always publicity-conscious, thought Connery’s casting would create a stir. John Osborne, who had worked with Saltzman in Woodfall Films, recalled meeting him shortly after the role had been cast and being asked to guess who had been chosen. ‘I tried to be interested. “I don’t know. James Mason?” “Hell, no.” “David Niven?” “For Christ’s sake.” Harry paused. “Sean Connery.” “Harry, he’s a bloody Scotsman! He can hardly read.” I think my reaction pleased him.’ 37 Broccoli and Saltzman’s conviction that they had ‘got their Bond’ was not shared by UA executives, who were not impressed by the screen test Connery had agreed to reluctantly.38 However, George H. Ornstein, head of UA’s London office, who was also present at the interview, wired the studio’s head office to argue that Connery was ‘the best we have come up with to date, and I do believe that he could be James Bond’, hardly a ringing endorsement, but enough given the status UA afforded the project.39 UA continued to harbour reservations; one executive thought ‘Connery will

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never go over’, that is, he lacked appeal for the American public.40 Nevertheless, Guy Hamilton, who had been offered the direction of the first Bond film but had to decline, recalled that Saltzman in particular ‘was very hot for Sean’ and defended their choice vociferously to UA.41 On 3 November 1961, UA announced that Connery had been signed to play James Bond.42 Although Connery was temperamentally averse to signing binding contracts, he knew that he was not, as with the Fox contract, competing with other stars and being either ignored or loaned out, but would be the sole focus of the series: ‘When I took the Bond part, I knew it was going to be a big thing. Up until then, films like those were shot by American companies who brought an American star across to Britain and dubbed him “Canadian”. This was the first time they got a British actor.’ 43 Although, neither Connery nor anyone else could know Bond was going to be a ‘big thing’, his comment identifies accurately the scope of the opportunity if the franchise was successful: casting a British actor as the leading man in an international actionadventure thriller would mean global star status. However, he was in no doubt as to why he had been hired: he was available ‘for a price they could afford’ and prepared to sign a five-picture deal.44 His fee for the first Bond film was a modest £6,000, just under a sixth of the £35,700 Peter Finch had received for Warwick’s earlier The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), itself roughly half of the £71,000 (and 10 per cent of the gross receipts) Alan Ladd, as a major Hollywood star, had received for Warwick’s first film, The Red Beret (1953), almost a decade earlier.45 By comparison, Peter O’Toole was paid £43,646 for starring in the title role in Lawrence of Arabia (1962).46 Connery recollected that during the filming of Dr. No, No one dared presume anything. I was an unknown, Cubby Broccoli was not an international name, and we were projecting an English secret agent as a superhero. We were conscious of how tight the budget was. I can remember Cubby in Jamaica digging sand at the edge of the sea so we could get in the last shot before darkness … I’m sure he’s not dug much sand since then.47

Creating the screen Bond: Dr. No (1962) The comments of Broccoli and Saltzman make it clear that they had hired Connery for his looks, physique and sexual magnetism, a ‘truck driver’ who could be dressed in a Savile Row suit, rather than for his acting abilities. Their attitude exemplifies what James Cagney denounced as the Hollywood concept of ‘buying the body’: They do not think of intelligence. They do not buy you for what you can do. They buy you for your body … [what] makes a picture is a player with

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intelligence. But they have the idea, you see, that it is the body that makes the picture. Good acting is thinking, and unless there is some intelligence behind the picture, some imagination and sincerity, you have nothing. And the public is the first to detect it. In the end, you don’t fool the public.48

However, Connery had no intention of simply being a body and brought to the role his by now considerable acting experience and his sharp intelligence. He often took the opportunity to stress how much acting craft was required to play Bond: ‘Behind that success lay years of hard work. If the opportunity had come when I was younger, I couldn’t have taken it. I learned to play Bond by playing Macbeth.’ 49 In an extended interview in 1966 he argued, ‘If I hadn’t acted Shakespeare, Pirandello, Euripides, in short what is classed as serious theatre, I should never have managed to play James Bond. It’s not so easy that role. It’s a role for a professional.’ 50 As the series progressed, Connery was painfully conscious that the films’ publicity, including the press books, foregrounded his working-class origins and succession of labouring jobs but occluded his acting experience, thereby insinuating he was the producers’ ‘discovery’, yanked from his truck driver’s cab to perform as a suited secret agent.51 Hence Connery’s frequent recourse to emphasising his acting pedigree in interviews: I’d been an actor since I was twenty-five, but the image the press put out was that I just fell into a tuxedo and started mixing vodka martinis. And, of course, it was nothing like that at all. I’d done television, theatre, a whole slew of things. But it was more dramatic to present me as someone who just stepped off the streets.52

Because Bond was an existing fictional character there were certain constraints, but the novels offered Connery few clues about how to portray the superspy whom Fleming regarded as a ‘blank, not really a character at all … an entirely anonymous instrument … [I] let the action of the book carry him along … I didn’t intend for him to be a particularly likable person. He’s a cypher, a blunt instrument in the hands of the government.’ 53 Descriptions of Bond in the novels are typically terse and somewhat tantalising in their reticence: ‘[a] rather saturnine young man in his middle thirties … Something a bit cold and dangerous in that face. Looks pretty fit … Toughlooking customer.’ 54 Elsewhere, Fleming offers some basic physical characteristics – the ones on which the Daily Express competition had been based: ‘James Bond is about six feet tall and somewhere in his middle thirties. He has dark, rather cruel, good looks, and very clear, blue-grey eyes’, with a thin scar on his right cheek.55 However, although Bond’s character might be enigmatic, Fleming made it clear that he was a ‘modern hero for a violent age … I wouldn’t say he’s particularly typical of our times, but he is certainly of the times.’ 56 As Broccoli and Saltzman recognised, Bond was a departure

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from the conventional amateur public school hero of previous British actionadventure thrillers such as Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond whom Fleming thought outmoded; his role models were the American tough guy heroes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.57 Unlike his English predecessors, Bond is a highly trained professional agent, who, as Fleming emphasised, was ‘[h]ard, ruthless, sardonic, fatalistic. He likes gambling, golf, fast motor cars.’ 58 What Connery took from Fleming’s novels in preparing for the role was that Bond had to carry a sense of threat, of danger: ‘I took it seriously on one level which was one had to be menacing, one had to be strong enough to do all this stuff.’ 59 The principal screenwriter, Richard Maibaum, averred, ‘The most important thing in the Bond pictures is a pretense of seriousness. If your leading man doesn’t really appear to believe in what he is doing as either an actor or character, that will count against the performance’s effectiveness.’ 60 Young, having directed Connery previously in Action of the Tiger (1957), considered he had an ‘explosive quality … It’s a quality of suppressed violence, as if you never quite know when he’s going to turn on someone and absolutely rend them.’ 61 Honor Blackman, Connery’s co-star in the third Bond film Goldfinger, thought his performances retained ‘enough of the gritty Scot in there that you felt the underlying power underneath the very smooth surface’.62 Thus, following Malmgren’s precepts and in close discussion with his then-wife Diane Cilento, Connery decided that all Bond’s movements should be strong, economical and flexible, evincing a swift, decisive grace that ‘commands space’ and enables the character to retain a cool, poised assurance in any situation.63 Connery also observed from the novels that Fleming does not provide Bond with any backstory: ‘He has no mother. He has no father. He doesn’t come from anywhere and he hadn’t been anywhere when he became 007. He was born – kerplump – thirty-three years old.’ 64 His approach to creating Bond was not to psychologise a character he understood to be a fantasy figure but to develop the basic traits Fleming outlined. Connery recalled that when he first met Fleming in January 1962 after the first Bond film, Dr. No, had begun shooting in Jamaica where the author lived, there was certainly no dissension between us on how to see Bond. I see him as a complete sensualist, a man with highly trained sense, awake to everything; he likes wine, food, women, and his approach to life is quite amoral. He thrives on conflict, a quality I find lacking in present day society.65

Thus for all the differences of nationality and class, Connery saw a way to embody his own competitive drive, self-reliance and belief in individual enterprise. But as he thought further about the role, Connery recognised that Bond’s hedonism was linked to his self-control: ‘The proper sadist is

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always partly aware of what he is doing. He is never completely passionate. His mind is always working. That’s where the dividing line lies.’ 66 The role therefore offered Connery the possibility of using his dual qualities in a new way, combining physical menace with a coolly calculating intelligence. Bond’s self-control, verging on the sadistic, is also evident in his relationship to women. The films inherit the sexual politics of Fleming’s novels virtually unaltered. As numerous commentators have argued, the ‘Bond girl’ is a male fantasy of the ‘liberated’ woman, one emancipated from the social constraints of marriage, the family and domesticity but whose destiny is to be sexually available to men. Depicted as lithe, long-legged, full-breasted and young, the Bond girl is, as Bennett and Woollacott argue, Bond’s alter ego, fashioned in his image.67 The trappings of female empowerment – the independent lifestyle and the enjoyment of sex – that the Bond girl possesses are offset by her commodification and objectification.68 The Bond girl was played by a different actress in each film because, as Richard Maibaum argued in Playboy magazine in 1965, ‘the unknown beauty … has the piquancy and promise of an affair with someone every man secretly desires – la femme nouvelle’.69 If Connery endorsed Bond’s competitiveness and self-reliance, in his interview in the same edition of Playboy he also endorsed Bond’s attitude to women. In response to the question as to how he felt about Bond occasionally ‘roughing up’ a woman, Connery vouchsafed, ‘I don’t think there is anything wrong about hitting a woman … An openhanded slap is justified – if all else fails and there has been plenty of warning.’ He goes on to argue that part of Bond’s appeal is his ruthless decisiveness, which ‘explains why so many women are crazy about men who don’t give a rap about them’.70 These remarks may give an insight into why Connery was effective as Bond, but they certainly gained a notoriety that would haunt Connery later and affected his legacy as a star, as discussed in later chapters. However, they had no discernible effect at the time on his status within a highly masculinist film industry. Connery may have felt confident that he had assessed correctly Bond’s basic motivations but he recognised he needed help in realising Bond’s sophisticated elegance and polish, and especially dress sense, which were integral to the figure’s appeal.71 Always anxious to learn and ready to take advice, Connery placed himself under Young’s tutelage. Before the production departed for Jamaica, Young, an old Harrovian, ex-Guards Officer and member of the exclusive Hawks Club, had nearly two months – November and December 1961 – to provide Connery’s education in the manners and mores of the English upper class. Young had Connery’s shoes and shirts custom-made, the latter by Turnbull and Asser with their distinctive turnedback cuffs, and took Connery for fittings at his tailor, Anthony Sinclair, known for his particular style, what journalists termed the pared-down

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‘Conduit Cut’.72 Sinclair, who thought Connery was ‘a dream for a tailor’ with the ‘perfect athletic figure’, commented that his aim in designing the Bond suits was ‘to bring back the elegant Englishman, a hint of the dandy, plus a trace of the brute beneath’.73 As Llewella Chapman argues, Sinclair’s suits were cut to follow the contours of the body and thus to move in counterpart with the body’s movements in the action sequences, thereby creating a ‘mobile work of art’, the epitome of style and male fashion, someone who is ‘dressed to thrill’.74 Young made Connery wear these clothes as they toured West End nightclubs and casinos in order that Connery could get used to moving easily and comfortably in them. It was a question of precise points of detail as Connery was used to wearing clothes as a male model. The fine-tuning continued on set. Connery’s fellow actors observed how Young spent time showing Connery how to walk with a casual elegance that was not effete, refined but also rugged.75 In addition to menace and elegance, the third principal ingredient in the screen Bond is humour, which every commentator recognised as crucial to the series’ success. Bond’s dry-witted drollery and deft one-liners became a trademark that made Bond’s ruthlessness more palatable. Connery claimed he had insisted on this element before accepting the role: ‘I said I would be interested provided they put some more humour in the story. I felt this was essential.’ 76 He argued that Young agreed with him that ‘it would be right to give it another flavour, another dimension, by injecting humour, but at the same time to play [Bond] absolutely straight and realistically’.77 Although it is true that Connery habitually sought humour in the roles he played in order to reveal a character’s attitude – and a sharp, ironic humour is strongly evident in all his interviews – it seems more likely that he augmented an element that was already emerging. Creating the screenplay for Dr. No was a fraught process, and Young, who had previous experience writing for the screen, was invited by dissatisfied producers to work on what became the fifth and final version with his former continuity girl, Johanna Harwood, who received the screen credit.78 Comparing the differences between their draft and the previous one by Richard Maibaum and Wolf Mankowitz reveals that although the storyline is relatively unchanged, the dialogue is pared down, given more wit and polish, with additional opportunities provided to build and sharpen the humour.79 However, this screenplay was written in haste after the fourth draft, dated 12 December 1961, had been rejected and was delivered on 8 January 1962, only six days before filming began on the 14th.80 It was therefore written after Young had been working with Connery for a month and was thus fully appreciative of the actor’s intelligence and aptitude. Young took Connery to Jamaica a week before the rest of the production: ‘he’s not clever, he’s intelligent. In one week, he got the whole thing summed up, how he was

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going to play it, how he was going to look and all that. He’s a very quick study, believe me.’ 81 As noted, this collaboration between director and actor extended throughout the filming. Young encouraged a degree of improvisation, and therefore Connery contributed additional sardonic comments and some of the famous one-liners, including Bond’s ‘I think they were on their way to a funeral’ as he watches the pursuing vehicle crash down the mountainside.82 Remembering, in particular, his performance in The Frightened City, one can also argue that Connery brought an experienced actor’s timing and inflection, delivering the lines with an easy nonchalance that was essential to their effectiveness. Connery strove for this ‘quality of effortlessness’, which, he was quick to add, ‘doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard work to achieve that appearance of ease’.83 As Young averred, they agreed on an approach to Bond that was ‘not satire, it’s tongue-in-cheek, but no more than that. You had to play it with a straight face, but the audience had to realize that there was a sense of humour around the picture. Then they went with it.’ 84 That sense of humour is present from the opening scene in which Bond is introduced, shown gambling in ‘Le Cercle’ casino at Les Ambassadeurs, a sophisticated Mayfair nightclub. Young focuses first on the back of Bond’s head, then the shirt cuff, the deft, practised movement of the hands dealing the cards, cutting to a medium close-up of his face as Connery replies to the enquiry of the beautiful woman, Sylvia Trench (Eunice Gayson), with whom he is competing, ‘The name’s Bond’, followed by a brief pause to flick open his lighter and light a cigarette, before completing his remark in

2.1  The trained assassin: Connery as James Bond in Dr. No (1962)

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a slow, dry drawl, ‘James Bond’. The scene was changed extensively by Young and Harwood in the fifth draft screenplay, and in a 1974 interview Young claimed it was meant to have a faintly comic effect in its studied deliberation, which both invoked and slightly parodied the introduction of Paul Muni in Juarez (1939).85 Young thus gives Connery the Hollywood star build-up whilst making a slightly flippant joke of it, establishing the film’s tone of cool nonchalance, a refusal to take itself and the character completely seriously. It was also the opportunity to associate Bond, dressed in a beautifully cut tuxedo, with exclusive, elegant high-living and the occasion for his effortless seduction of Trench, the first in a long line of beautiful women drawn irresistibly to Bond as their object of desire.86 Bond’s cool masculinity, his unruffled, self-assured aplomb, is also offered for admiration and emulation by other males. The nonchalance and droll humour do not erase Bond’s threat as a trained assassin and the sadism that Connery saw as part of Bond’s calculating control. This is emphasised in several scenes: the lingering shot on Bond’s face in the telephone booth at the airport as he relishes what he will do to dispose of the bogus driver sent to meet him and in his sadistic pleasure in seducing Miss Taro (Zena Marshall) before handing her over to the authorities – as the calculating sensualist, Bond never allows his pleasure in sex to compromise his mission. Bond’s sadism is most evident when he kills Professor Dent (Anthony Dawson). After Dent fires into the bed in which Bond appears to be sleeping, Bond allows Dent to regain possession of his gun only to remind him, with amused commiseration, that it is a Smith and Wesson and he has fired his six bullets. He then shoots Dent twice. The first bullet in the chest twirls him round, the second lodges in his upper back. It is a chilling scene, placing Bond outside the gentlemanly code that would have considered such an action ‘unsporting’. And, on this occasion, Bond eschews a flippant remark, blowing on the silencer with an expression of resigned contempt. Johanna Harwood remembered that this scene caused considerable discussion. In the fifth screenplay there are three versions. In the ‘first alternative version’, Dent is killed in a gunfight between the two in which Bond, as a professional killer, ‘fires faster and more accurately’. In the ‘second alternative version’, Dent makes a swift movement towards his gun, but before he can reach it, Bond fires. Bond does not fire a second shot in any of the scripted versions. Harwood recalled that it was filmed ‘both ways in case the censorship objected’. Although Harwood argued against the more ruthless version, judging Bond would lose audience sympathy, she was overruled.87 The version agreed on reflected what Connery remarked was the importance of surprising ‘people who thought they knew how [Bond] was going to react to a situation. You’d play the reality, play the humour, have a bit of playful repartee with the audience, and do something

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unexpected.’ 88 The surprise, indeed shock here, is the cold-blooded calculation with which Bond performs an act that goes beyond a straightforward ‘professional’ killing. Of course, in addition to an intelligent and accomplished actor, the producers had ‘bought the body’ and although Young moves the action along at his characteristically brisk pace, he is careful to linger on Connery’s muscular masculine beauty: Bond is often shown bare-chested, revealing a hairy, brawny torso. His supple athleticism is also emphasised, as when he runs, with an easy, unbounded grace, bare-footed along the beach with Honey Rider (Ursula Andress), who also has a pleasurably athletic stride. This shared physical prowess gives a comradely equality to Bond’s relationship with Honey. As Andrew Rissik points out, in their first encounter, after she emerges from the waves like a modern Venus, Connery’s boyish grin and impromptu joining in of her song – ‘Underneath the Mangrove Tree’ – shows a warm and generous delight in the absurdity of their situation, which affords some depth and shading to the characterisation not present in the novel that offsets the sadism.89 This light-hearted element is of a piece with the film’s tongue-in-cheek treatment of the novels’ brand-name snobbery, which became the occasion for further flippant, lightly worn jokes shared with the audience: ‘I prefer the ’53 myself’, Bond replies as Dr No (Joseph Wiseman) reproaches him for grabbing a bottle of Dom Perignon ’55 as a weapon. The bantering humour that ripples through Bond’s scenes with Dr No inaugurates the witty masculine sparring between Bond and the arch villain that became another key element in the franchise. Bond is also humanised by his lightly flirtatious badinage with M’s secretary, Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell), suggesting an affectionate warmth and concern between the pair.90 Connery’s creation of a nonchalant, ruthless and sardonic assassin is contrasted with the Englishmen he encounters: the over-eager young man with the cut-glass accent sent to fetch him from Les Ambassadeurs; the stiff punctiliousness of the armourer, Major Boothroyd (Peter Burton); the denizens of Queen’s Club in Jamaica who reek of the mothballed gentility of colonial England; and above all M (Bernard Lee), pipe-smoking, hunched in his crumpled suit in a mahogany-panelled office with its pictures of famous British ships, which Adam designed to evoke traditional English good taste.91 Unlike the unqualified reverence in which Bond holds M in the novels, Connery’s respectfulness towards his superior is always tinged with deft insolence, what Christopher Bray calls Connery’s ‘mocking, unshockable, dignified yet dressed-down drawl’.92 bond: ‘Good evening sir.’ m: ‘It happens to be 3 a.m. When do you sleep 007?’ bond: ‘Never on the firm’s time sir.’

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This insolence distances Bond from his world, an aspect of characterisation that ‘could only be achieved by someone standing outside of it all and looking in’, not someone born to that world.93 As Pam Cook and Claire Hines observe, beneath his urbane sophistication, Connery’s Bond possesses many of the attributes of the 1950s rebel hero masquerading as a member of the Establishment, thereby producing an ironic commentary on its shortcomings in his disregard for authority, amorality, sexual conquests and contempt for middle-class hypocrisy. The conventional English gentleman’s stiff upper lip is replaced by a cool, modern version of masculinity in which the casting of a working-class Scot foregrounds class antagonisms and a critical attitude to Britain’s imperial legacy.94 The concept poster for Dr. No had been a silhouette of the Bond figure emphasising guns and women rather than Connery. However, the UK poster that was used, drawn by Mitchell Hooks, the well-known illustrator of paperbacks, foregrounds Connery in his tuxedo next to the title, the gun resting downwards with the women in a line to his left, indicating that by the time of its release, the producers had become convinced that Connery was a major asset in selling the film. After its opening on 5 October 1962 at the London Pavilion, Dr. No quickly became one of UA’s most successful releases in the UK market; it also did ‘outstanding business in Italy, Germany and many other European countries’.95 Broccoli later claimed that UA, reluctant to sell a film with ‘a Limey truck driver playing the lead’, only opened Dr. No at drive-in cinemas in Texas and Oklahoma.96 In fact, UA promoted the film assiduously. The campaign to make Bond a familiar name in America had begun as soon as the deal with Eon had been struck. Following the film’s success in Europe, UA paid for Connery, accompanied by Young, to embark on a US promotional tour in March 1963. Connery was introduced to national conventions of exhibitors and ‘important’ members of the press, and, accompanied by three glamorous models – ‘counterparts of the lovely companions with whom James Bond is traditionally involved in print and on screen’ – hosted a special preview of the film and a postscreening gourmet party in each city. The following day, Connery gave extended newspaper, radio and television interviews.97 Thus when UA released Dr. No in May, it was at major theatres in New York as a Premiere Showcase attraction and the film performed well.98 Although several UK reviewers considered the film, like the novels, morally objectionable, the majority thought the humour invited audiences to participate pleasurably in a knowing game in which the palpable absurdities of the fantasy could be accepted.99 Alexander Walker commented, ‘By putting their tongues often enough in their cheeks, the producers manage to turn Ian Fleming’s often unsavoury plot ingredients into what you could call sadism for the family.’ 100 In her study of the reception of the Bond films, Stephanie Jones argues that much of this acceptability was due to Connery’s nonchalant

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delivery of throwaway lines, which were ‘understood to rescue Dr. No from its potential to do moral harm’.101 The Daily Telegraph’s reviewer credited Connery with making the screen Bond ‘a lot less nasty than Fleming’s original [who] looks and acts tough, but is more sympathetic and less the Establishment cad than his prototype’.102 Some thought Connery was perfectly cast: ‘a flawless choice for the snob hero Bond, virile, tough, perfectly tailored and faultlessly knowing about everything from dry vodka martini to chemin de fer’.103 The Daily Mirror’s critic Donald Zec enthused, ‘He is a star, every seventy-four inches of him. What is he like? He has the brooding power of Marlon Brando, the smooth, highly polished manner of a young James Mason and the faintly arrogant charm that was the lethal chemistry of the late Errol Flynn.’ 104 Others thought Connery too different from Fleming’s original, ‘a somewhat rougher diamond than I envisaged’.105 American reviewers were less guarded about Connery’s appeal. Variety considered he was ‘handsome, charming, muscular and amusing … Mickey Spillane with class.’ 106 Variety considered Connery was set fair for a long series of films, a judgement echoed by the New Yorker’s anonymous critic who thought Connery ‘makes an admirable Bond – tall, dark, lithe, cryptic and cruel and I should think, on the strength of his triumph here, that he could go on starring in Fleming’s decalcomanias until his legs go out’.107 Time’s reviewer responded to the threat Connery exuded as he ‘moves with a tensile grace that excitingly suggests the violence that is bottled in Bond’.108 Connery’s accent attracted significant attention. The Times’s reviewer, for instance, detected a ‘faint Irish-American look and sound’, which was taken as a deliberate pitch for the American market.109 Although, as previously discussed, Connery’s retention of his Scottish accent enabled him to bring conviction and authenticity to the role, in retrospect, Walker argues that Connery’s Edinburgh burr accent was ‘probably a vital part’ in public acceptance of Bond: it avoided pigeon-holing Bond anywhere in the Anglo-Saxon class system, yet it was authentically ‘British’ enough to avoid any accusation that he had been located in some mid-Atlantic limbo. Connery’s burry drawl travelled well the world over and the very novelty of hearing a dialect tone that wasn’t noticeably lower-class issuing from a leading man’s lips usefully distinguished Connery from the now multiplying numbers of young newcomers on the British screen.110

As Rissik notes, if Bond had had an Old Etonian accent, many of the lines would have sounded sneering or arrogant whereas Connery sounded assured and self-confident, able to display ‘traditional English verbal dexterity … without the usual sexual aridity that went with it’.111 Connery’s voice – deep yet mellifluous and one of his major assets as an actor – also had an intriguing distinctiveness that was appealingly classless, which, coupled



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with his convincing physical prowess and sexual potency, was a significant element in Bond’s global appeal.

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‘Making Bond more and more like me’: Goldfinger (1964) Although Young praised Connery’s ability to size up the role of Bond, his performance in Dr. No showed it was a work in progress. Fellow actors, including Gayson and Marshall, recalled his nervousness.112 Connery betrays his relative inexperience in the delivery of certain lines where the stress is misplaced or over-emphatic. This is particularly evident in the scenes in the beachside bar, where his performance seems stilted and unsure, in stark contrast to that of Jack Lord playing Felix Leiter, who is far more relaxed and assured. Connery often rushes his expository speeches, giving the lines an unnecessarily breathless, staccato urgency; he often looks impatient or uncomfortable whilst sitting still, his exchanges with the other actors seem too abrupt, almost tetchy. It is as if Connery is not quite sure of the pacing of the scene, or how Bond should behave in the company of equals rather than adoring women, adversaries or M, where the relationship is clear-cut. Although Connery makes a good fist of projecting the gestures and mores of the haute monde, his movements are frequently a touch over-emphatic as he adjusts his cuffs, buttons or undoes his jacket, drawing attention to a gesture whose execution should be nonchalant and throwaway. UA had wanted the Bond films made in groups of two so that profits could be cross-collateralised.113 Thus filming of From Russia with Love began on 2 April 1963, a month before Dr. No’s American release, but with an increased budget of $2 million and tripling Connery’s salary to $54,000 (£18,000) with a $100,000 (£34,000) bonus.114 However, as James Chapman notes, its style is markedly different even though Young stayed as director, an indication that an understanding of Bond’s appeal was still uncertain. From Russia with Love is an atypical Bond – a straightforward, traditional espionage story replete with secret meetings, train journeys, border crossings, recognition codes and assassinations, and a linear narrative that offered the thrills of fast-paced action and moments of genuine tension.115 As a consequence, Connery plays a more conventional tough, resourceful, two-fisted hero who needs to overcome a series of obstacles to achieve his mission and has fewer opportunities to display the nonchalant urbanity that he essayed in Dr. No. However, members of the cast and crew noted his increasing confidence. Young considered that ‘He was more assured in every way. He was a little too eager in Dr. No. Now he’s cool’, having ‘got into the skin of the part’.116 Although reviewers were quite enthusiastic

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about the film, finding it exciting with the tension skilfully sustained, several missed the humour.117 Felix Barker argued that the producers ‘should be careful not to let Mr. Connery, the perfect, laconic 007, get quite so deeply engulfed in the adventures’.118 However, From Russia with Love was a huge success, the highest-grossing film released in 1963.119 It transformed Connery from leading man into major international star, reflected in an increase in salary to $50,000 for the next Bond film, Goldfinger, and 5 per cent of the film’s grosses.120 More significantly for his ability to develop the role, Connery was now able to exercise greater creative control. Paul Dehn had been brought in to revise Maibaum’s initial script, but Connery thought that its tone was wrong. He wished for a ‘serious approach’ to the humour as in the first two films, integrated subtly into the story and showing Bond’s wry detachment rather than knockabout comedy. He was also opposed to the Bond girl, Pussy Galore, bossing him around, judging Bond was overshadowed by Goldfinger throughout much of the action and did nothing to bring about his ultimate downfall. He therefore insisted Maibaum should be brought back to complete further revisions.121 His concerns had sufficient weight for Maibaum and Broccoli to fly on 3 February to Los Angeles where Connery was filming Marnie for a consultation about the script. After this meeting, Maibaum and Dehn worked on a fourth and final screenplay that was ready by 26 February 1964. Connery considered these revisions important in achieving the integrity of his performance, which he considered demonstrates what I believe is a subtler, more discriminating Bond than in the earlier films. It’s a process of development. At first it was I who had to model myself on the James Bond that Ian Fleming and the scriptwriters had shaped for me. But now I am making Bond more and more like me, instead of the other way round. I am trying to make Bond grow up a little in the same way I am growing.122

In the revised screenplay Maibaum, who had always insisted that the humour should not be too flippant, causing Bond to ‘lose his essential dignity’, placed greater emphasis on characterisation rather than spectacular set pieces, contending, ‘Goldfinger is what I call a “duel”: Bond versus Goldfinger. It is not, I repeat, a story about a robbery.’ 123 Connery allows slightly stronger traces of his Scottish accent to inflect his delivery of the dialogue, another gesture through which Bond was becoming his creation rather than Fleming’s resonantly English one. Although Fleming had been initially sceptical about Connery’s casting – ‘couldn’t be further from my idea of James Bond. Everything was wrong: the face, the accent, the hair’ – he came to appreciate the charismatic strength of Connery’s incarnation and, in a gesture of admiration, Fleming gave Bond a Scottish ancestry in his later

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novels, commenting that Connery was ‘Not quite the idea I had of Bond but he would be if I wrote the books over again.’ 124 If the Bond of From Russia with Love was an action hero whose activities are leavened by the occasional sardonic comment, Goldfinger reverses that balance by accentuating the wry, detached, playful humour. The new director, Guy Hamilton, thought the Bond films were essentially good-natured fantasies rather than realistic action-adventures and that ‘[p]laying games with the audience is the great fun of Bond, because they know the ground rules, they know the character’.125 The pre-credit sequences in Dr. No and From Russia with Love are thrilling, tense affairs that establish important plot information. By contrast, the opening of Goldfinger is an extended exercise in droll humour, completely detached from the film’s main action. Our first glimpse of Bond is as a diver swimming along a quayside with a seagull on his head as a disguise. As Hamilton makes clear in his DVD commentary, the seagull prop was deliberately unconvincing, a throwaway gimmick to cue the audience into an enjoyable fantasy, part of a scene that was a ‘wonderful piece of nonsense’.126 After Bond surfaces, the audience can enjoy Connery’s panther-like movements, in what the screenplay calls his ‘form fitting’ black wetsuit, which moulds itself to Connery’s athletic frame as he fires off a rocket gun that enables him to scale a wall with a grappling hook, knock out a guard and plant a series of explosives in a drug-baron’s operational base in an unnamed Central American country. In under 90 seconds his task is complete, whereupon Bond peels off his wetsuit to reveal an impossibly immaculate white dinner jacket. In the script this is already ‘complete with red carnation’, but in the film Bond pauses to place a red carnation nonchalantly in his buttonhole, adding a further refinement. He then enters a crowded bar to rendezvous with his contact and admire the gyrations of the tarantella dancer, Bonita (Nadja Regin). Glancing at his trademark Rolex Submariner watch, Bond calmly lights a cigarette at the precise moment a series of explosions takes place. ‘At least they won’t be using heroin-flavoured bananas to finance revolutions’, he remarks casually. Warned not to return to his room, Bond declares that he has ‘some unfinished business’ with the dancer. As Bonita emerges from her bath and he removes his jacket, she points to the gun: ‘Why do you always carry that thing?’ ‘I have … a slight inferiority complex’, he explains with mock innocence as they embrace.127 Never losing his guard, Bond spies the figure of a man reflected in her eyeballs, swinging Bonita’s body into his path. The fight ends when, having been thrown into the bath, the assassin grabs for Bond’s gun only for Bond to throw an electric fire into the bath water. ‘Shocking … positively shocking’, he concludes, exiting past Bonita left groaning on the floor. In many ways this pre-credit sequence epitomised to perfection the ‘subtler, more discriminating’ Bond Connery was creating,

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in which the actions of an athletic, resourceful but amoral action hero (definitely ‘unsporting’ to use a woman as a shield) are strong enough to be convincing but subordinated to the nonchalance of this dry-witted, cosmopolitan connoisseur, armed not so much with a gun as a carapace of droll wit, suavely attractive, immaculately attired and coolly detached. Bond’s relationships with women are also given more screen time. Investigating how Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) is able to cheat at cards, he surprises Goldfinger’s assistant Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) giving instructions from the balcony of her employer’s room. When he finds out she is paid just be to seen with Goldfinger, he replies, ‘Just seen … Just seen. I’m so glad. You’re much too … nice to be mixed up in anything like this you know.’ ‘I’m beginning to like you Mr Bond.’ ‘Oh, call me James.’ ‘More than anyone I’ve met in a long time.’ ‘Well, what on earth are we going to do about it?’, he murmurs as he draws the head of her reclining chair slowly upwards so they can kiss. This practised, yet richly appreciative seduction gives a more subtle dimension to Bond’s amorousness. It is ended by her death, asphyxiated by gold paint, which, when Bond discovers her body, elicits a moment of genuine pathos that Connery subtly invests with guilt, loathing, anger and disgust, ‘all with the merest twitch of a nostril, the tiniest clutch of his throat’.128 Bond is also powerless to prevent the death of Jill’s sister, Tilly (Tania Mallet). These moments of seriousness are a calculated counterbalance to the tongue-in-cheek fantasy in which the assault on Fort Knox is treated more as Goldfinger’s megalomania than a credible threat. In contrast to the relentless linear momentum of From Russia with Love, the plot of Goldfinger is relaxed and quite loose, a series of set pieces that depict Bond’s extended sparring – the ‘duel’ – with Goldfinger, whose droll quips match Bond’s: ‘Do you expect me to talk?’ ‘No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die’, as he tortures Bond with the castrating laser beam. The motif of the duel is extended to Bond’s relations with Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). Whereas the previous Bond girls were young, innocent and constantly imperilled, Blackman brought to the role her persona as Cathy Gale, the feisty, leather-clad heroine of The Avengers, and their relationship has a greater equality than in the earlier films. In her extended discussion, Elisabeth Ladenson notes that Galore’s name, like Goldfinger’s, condenses her whole character, producing an element of burlesque comedy, especially when ‘pronounced with delicate incredulity’ by Connery.129 She observes that the filmic adaptation significantly enlarges Galore’s role as Goldfinger’s private pilot and leader of the female flyers, ‘Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus’. However, her lesbianism, insisted on in Fleming’s novel, is downplayed in the film, alluded to lightly in her remark, ‘You can turn off the charm, I’m immune’, as she points a gun at Bond.130 However, after they exchange judo throws in the stable, Bond forces her down and her

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reluctance and supposed immunity give way to the onset of heterosexual desire, which results in her betrayal of Goldfinger and her union with Bond. Although playful, the scene is highly uncomfortable in its apparent approval of what is essentially a rape scene glossed as consensual which, as Hines points out, ‘illustrates well the limitations of such images of female strength and independence’ in the Bond films of this period.131 Much Bond commentary has, quite rightly, emphasised the importance of the ‘Bond formula’ in creating and sustaining the success of the franchise. Critics have delineated the various ways in which the anticipated elements – the title sequence, theme song, spectacular action sequences, exotic locales, Bond girls, gadgetry, Adam’s arresting set designs and the basic Jack the Giant Killer narrative structure – are all carefully varied between the films to ensure that the series remains fresh.132 What this emphasis tends to elide is the significance of Connery’s agency as the star. In his discussion of James Cagney’s importance in the creation of an American cultural type, the ‘city boy’, Robert Sklar remarks, apropos Public Enemy (1931): The written script provides a strong foundation for Tom Powers’ character, but Cagney does not merely inhabit or present this figure: in the precise dictionary sense he creates it. With his body he causes it to exist in a photographed image on the screen – he brings it into being. His short, quick movements, his clipped diction, his mobile eyes and mouth, are counterpointed with, at other moments, an almost sultry languor. These are the dual characteristics of the roughneck and the softie: combined, they shape a figure whose tension is barely under control – a bundle of suppressed rage, waiting to strike.133

My argument is that Connery’s Bond is a comparable acting feat in which he worked creatively with the scripts and the directors to forge an attractive, charismatic character whose witty, ironic, urbane allure allowed audiences to enjoy the fantasy without taking it literally. Goldfinger was a further evolution of this creation, effortlessly stylish, relaxed and nonchalant, the humour more knowing and engaging, modulating the action hero into the accomplished light comedian, in many ways similar to Cary Grant in North by Northwest. In what remains the most appreciative and discerning discussion of Connery’s acting accomplishments, Andrew Rissik, who uses the hyphenate Connery-Bond to express the indivisibility of actor and created character, argues that by Goldfinger the Bond films had become almost a star vehicle, its scenes designed as opportunities for Connery to display the ‘wry easy nonchalance that exuded star appeal’. He contends that in deliberately eschewing a fast-paced series of action sequences, Connery displays ‘the shrewdly calculated self-effacement of the actor who is entirely sure of his presence and weight’.134 In Rissik’s view, Connery had become ‘a British

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movie star built almost entirely along American lines’ who revised the whole idea of the English hero, even while he was playing a character that was the epitome of an English stereotype’.135 Rissik argues that Connery’s creation of Bond was ‘wide-ranging and complete in a manner that has only been true of the great stars of film legend’, embodying ‘stardom in the old, uncomplicated sense’ in an age that had started to see stars ‘not as iconic legends but as expertly gifted actors redeeming or extending roles. James Bond was one of the few stars that remained available to the adoring focus of susceptible audiences.’ 136 Connery’s old-fashioned star appeal as Bond was recognised at the time. In an extended discussion for the New York Times in 1964, Anthony Carthew argued that part of Connery’s success as Bond came because he ‘has the face and physique of the archetypal film star. Paint a thin moustache on him and you have the young Clark Gable, gray his hair and you have Cary Grant.’ 137 Although Connery’s achievement in creating Bond was occasionally mentioned by reviewers, it was his fellow professionals who were most appreciative of its qualities. Guy Hamilton thought Connery gave a more accomplished performance in Goldfinger than in the previous films, more confident in what he was trying to convey: ‘He was becoming more assured in front to the camera. His personality was breaking through.’ 138 Sidney Lumet, who directed Connery in several very different roles, argued that the apparent ease with which he played Bond was ‘one of the hardest kinds of acting’; it takes ‘talent and ability … to play that kind of character … It’s the movie equivalent of high comedy and he did it brilliantly.’ 139 Connery received (in absentia) a special award from The Variety Club of Great Britain on 20 March 1963 for ‘creating the role of James Bond’. In his biography of Connery, Christopher Bray interprets this as the industry’s customary failure to acknowledge his acting ability.140 I interpret the award quite differently: as the recognition by his fellow professionals that Connery had created an engaging, charismatic character distinct from Fleming’s dour original and which had become Bond in the public’s imagination.

‘Connery is Bond’: commodification and the serial star The release of Goldfinger was the moment at which Bond became a worldwide phenomenon that commentators dubbed ‘Bondmania’ or ‘Bondanza’.141 The film broke box-office records in many UK cinemas, and the London premiere at the Leicester Square Odeon on 17 September 1964 attracted a crowd of over 5,000, causing a near riot.142 Goldfinger was the film that secured Bond’s popularity in North America and in other markets, notably France, where Bond had not been popular.143 UA now had the confidence to release

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Goldfinger as its major Christmas film in America, arranging glitzy premieres at prestigious theatres and with an extended pre-release marketing campaign, including a promotional film shown on American television and a pre-recorded interview with Connery.144 Such was the appetite for Connery-Bond that some managers, in both Britain and America, kept their cinemas continuously open, pausing only to clear the auditoria of detritus before the next showing.145 To stimulate demand, UA released 1,100 prints of Goldfinger into worldwide circulation, which meant the film could be kept in almost continuous re-release around the globe, as well as accelerating the rate of box-office returns.146 The release of the fourth Bond film, Thunderball, in December 1965 only served to increase audience frenzy, out-grossing even Goldfinger and triggering the reissue of the first two Bonds in double bills.147 Bondmania was fed by a rapidly expanding themed merchandising industry in which the Bond brand was used to sell toys, games, clothing, alcohol, perfume and other health and beauty items, and high-value goods such as watches or cars.148 Variety considered this represented the point at which the film industry’s attitude to licensing changed from ‘promotional ploy’ to ‘big business’.149 It was also the instant at which Bond became a ubiquitous part of popular culture, with photo-spreads across numerous magazines and sales of Fleming’s novels worldwide increasing spectacularly.150 There was a plethora of spin-off spy films and pastiche Bonds, and also parodies, including Carry on Spying (1964) in which the inept secret agents battle the menace of STENCH.151 Bondmania made Connery a superstar, the first (and still the only) British actor to be the number one box-office attraction in America, according to the Motion Picture Herald survey of ‘top money-making stars’ in 1965. The Bond franchise sustained his ranking in the top ten: second in 1966 (Thunderball), fifth in 1967 (You Only Live Twice) and ninth in 1971 (Diamonds Are Forever). Connery, with a reported fan mail of 1,500 letters a week, had become a global celebrity whose popularity rivalled that of the Beatles.152 Playing Bond made Connery wealthy: he had become one of a very select number of stars who could command over $500,000 (c. £170,000) a picture and was paid a salary of £300,000 ($900,000) for Thunderball.153 Only Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were paid more per picture.154 Noted as ‘a shrewd bargainer’ by Variety, Connery had also negotiated a 10 per cent share of the licensing fee derived from the sale of ‘Bond-linked products’, which Cilento notes was the result of direct negotiations between Hatton and UA.155 In accepting a slightly lower salary for You Only Live Twice, $750,000 (c. £250,000), Connery ensured his share of the merchandising profits was increased to 25 per cent.156 Variety estimated that he earned $1,300,000 from the film.157 Connery had achieved his dream of international stardom. He was rich, feted and in demand, and the momentum of the Bond franchise showed no signs of slowing down.

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However, there were several significant problems that had already started to take the gloss off his achievement. During the filming of Goldfinger, Connery had made his anxieties public, telling Barry Norman, ‘I don’t want to go into details, but it concerns my artistic control of the picture … If we cannot come to terms, I don’t know that I will do the film.’ 158 As discussed, he was able to resolve these differences to his satisfaction but as the series moved on Connery became increasingly frustrated and resentful, the result of three factors: artistic differences about the direction of the series; what he perceived as his financial ill-treatment by the producers; and the mounting intrusion of Bond into his private life as he became completely identified with the character. Although Connery’s performance in Goldfinger was more subtle and accomplished, the film marked another turning point for the series in depicting Bond’s increasing reliance on technology and gadgetry, notably the famous silver-grey Aston Martin DB5 and its weaponry. Although it could be argued that Connery’s performance in Thunderball (December 1965) is even better than in Goldfinger, the focus of Thunderball is increasingly on gadgets: the climax of the pre-title sequence, for instance, is not an invitation to enjoy Bond’s nonchalant drollery but the thrill of watching the jet pack that enables Bond to escape over the Parisian rooftops before resuming the controls of the Aston Martin. Not only was Connery competing with an expanding array of gadgetry, he was dwarfed by the increasing prominence given to the escalating opulence of Adam’s sets, notably the titanic scale and ambition of Blofeld’s hideaway in an extinct volcano in You Only Live Twice. Indeed, the second half of that film becomes almost entirely preoccupied with the elaborate scaling of Blofeld’s stronghold, which had cost £350,000 to build, more than the entire budget of Dr. No. Rissik only slightly overstates the case when he suggests that Bond had become a ‘speaking extra for Adam’s sets’.159 Thus the increasing budgets of the Bond films and the far longer running times – Thunderball is 130 minutes – were not used to enhance Connery’s performance but rather the reverse, to diminish its significance.160 This diminution extended to the publicity. Whereas the early film posters had depicted Connery armed with a gun and an array of girls, the later film posters stress the gadgets and technological innovations.161 We have no direct access as to how audiences responded to the direction the series was taking, except that the box-office performance was undiminished, but critics, who had come to enjoy the increasingly sophisticated wit of Connery’s performances, were sceptical. Reviewing Thunderball, Dilys Powell commented, ‘Mechanical ingenuity undermines human resource’, thereby making Bond a hero rather more acted upon than acting.162 David Robinson thought Bond had become a ‘simplified superman’, with little effort expended to ‘establish him as the connoisseur playboy … there is

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little of that comic display of bonviveurship that was one of the charms of Connery’s almost gentleman 007’.163 Reviewing You Only Live Twice, critics felt strongly that the brio and elan with which Connery had invested the character in the previous films had evaporated because the films had ‘lost contact with what was smart and zesty about the first three. The machine has taken over’; ‘Bond, you are getting to be a bore. 007 you are becoming so overwhelmed with gadgets and gimmicks so hi-fi sci-fi, that the original joke is getting lost in its own machinery … There’s little of the Old Bond left.’ 164 In Alexander Walker’s deft summary, ‘the hardware became more fascinating than the hero’.165 Connery was well aware of this problem. He had told a journalist during the production of Thunderball, ‘We have to be careful where we go next because I think we’ve reached the limit as far as size and gimmicks are concerned … What is needed now is a change of course – more attention to character and better dialogue.’ 166 Variety reported that Connery agreed to a ‘hefty cash settlement’ to resolve the creative differences halfway through filming Thunderball.167 However, Connery appears to have been unable to influence the production of You Only Live Twice. As far as can be ascertained, he had little input into Roald Dahl’s screenplay that was tailored to the Bond formula rather than attempting to work on Bond’s characterisation, and Lewis Gilbert was not a director with whom Connery had a close rapport.168 The producers refused to accommodate Connery’s wishes by delaying filming, lightening the schedule or making the film less gimmicky.169 Connery made no secret of his frustrations, claiming that because of this emphasis the acting challenge had diminished: ‘the Bond films … don’t tax one as an actor. All one really needs is the constitution of a rugby player to get through those nineteen weeks of swimming, slugging and necking.’ 170 Although, as discussed in the next chapter, he managed to take on other projects that made fuller use of his acting abilities, Connery was vexed by the progressively lengthening production schedules that circumscribed the time he was able to devote to them. Despite his substantial financial reward for playing Bond, Connery would have known through reading the trade press that it was a fraction of the enormous revenue the series was generating for UA and its producers. One journalist estimated that Saltzman and Broccoli were set to make £2 million each from the first three films; Connery had netted around £250,000.171 In 1966, Variety calculated that the Bond films had already earned $52,775,000 in rentals plus $50 million a year in Bond merchandising and that by 1967 Saltzman and Broccoli were each earning £420,000 per film in producer’s fees and 75 per cent of the film’s profits, far more than Connery.172 By 1974 Broccoli and Saltzman had earned $30 million in salary payments and $70 million in profits.173 In the 1965 Playboy interview, Connery emphasised

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that what he earned was important: ‘I want all I can get. I think I’m entitled to it. I have no false modesty about it. I don’t believe in starving in a garret or being satisfied with artistic appreciation alone.’ He claimed his determination to be well paid for his hire derived from his upbringing where earning a living wage was a struggle: ‘One doesn’t forget a past like that.’ 174 What Connery wanted was a partnership, which would give him a far greater share in the profits and offer long-term financial security. Becoming a partner would also be a recognition of his importance: that it was his charismatic creation of a character with a broad-based appeal that was the core reason for Bond’s spectacular success. It would also afford him far greater creative control, not only over how Bond was presented as a character but over the direction the series was taking. He thought a partnership would also give him the chance to produce both films and the occasional stage plays and, in a calculated swipe at Broccoli and Saltzman, stated that he was ‘tired of a lot of fat slob producers living off the back of lean actors’.175 He even considered that the Bond franchise was successful enough for Eon, with him as a partner, to buy out UA and hence control a major studio.176 In view of Bond’s financial importance to UA, this was not merely fanciful but would have required Broccoli and Saltzman to take on increased risk and responsibilities. For their part, Saltzman and Broccoli always considered that it was the character of Bond, not the actor who played the role, that was the fundamental reason for the series’ success together with their own abilities, therefore Connery was dispensable. Broccoli commented disingenuously, ‘All I ever did to Sean Connery was make him an international star and a very, very wealthy man’, a comment that shows how little regard he had for Connery’s own creative contribution.177 Their view had the support of UA’s president, Arthur Krim, who thought it was the producers’ creation of the Bond formula that had provided sustained success.178 Thus Broccoli and Saltzman judged there was no reason to make Connery a partner, especially as there were escalating disagreements between the two of them; having a third voice would only have increased the tensions.179 Their attitude resembles what Jeanine Basinger characterises as the outlook of the pre-war Hollywood studios, which, having spent time, effort and financial risk to turn ‘nobodies into somebodies’, expected gratitude and docility.180 Faced with what he saw as their ungrateful intransigence, Connery’s relationship with the producers started to break down to the extent that he refused to speak to either and stopped working if Saltzman appeared on set.181 The third reason for Connery’s dissatisfaction was the relentless public exposure that superstardom brought with it, which became increasingly intrusive, the ‘nightmare’ to which he alluded in the epigraph that invaded his working and his private life. In his autobiography, Gilbert provides a vivid account of the efforts he had to go to during the filming of You Only



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Live Twice in Japan to maintain even a modicum of protection and privacy for Connery, employing a small task force of security guards to protect his star on set.182 In addition to the public clamour, Connery, having cooperated assiduously in the early promotion of Bond – granting interviews, attending premieres, providing copy for journalists – became increasingly irritated by and intolerant of the inanities of the paparazzi. He commented at the time: I find that fame tends to turn one from an actor into a piece of merchandise, a public institution. Well, I don’t intend to undergo that metamorphosis. This is why I fight so tenaciously to protect my privacy, to keep interviews like this one to an absolute minimum, to fend off prying photographers who want to follow me around and publicise my every step and breath.183

Connery’s ambivalent attitude to stardom was typical of the generation of young male working-class British stars who came to prominence in the 1960s.184 However, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, it was also characteristic of Hollywood stars who, from the mid-1950s onwards, worked independently of the studios and were constantly on their guard against being typecast and exploited. It was bound up, as Young recognised, with Connery’s sense of his own identity as a self-made man: ‘Sean could be the biggest star in movies since Gable. But he won’t be. He doesn’t give a damn for the ancillary assets of being a star. It’s not that he’s ungrateful; it’s just that he’s too concerned with personal integrity.’ 185 Unlike most major stars, Connery did not have a ‘large retinue of advisers, agents, managers, fixers, lawyers and general hangers-on continuously surrounding him’ and had rejected the idea of hiring a publicity manager to create an alternative, non-Bond image because this was merely the ‘same Mickey Mouse coin’.186 In a 1974 interview, Connery described himself as ‘really a secretive person. I don’t have a press representative … if you do that, you have somebody who’s virtually living with you.’ 187 Exposed to the direct glare of the press and public, Connery became particularly enraged whenever a journalist conflated the actor with the role, which made explicit his frustration that it was the part that had made him famous rather than that he who had made the character a global success. Young recalled Connery’s horror when, after the premiere of From Russia with Love, a woman returned his autograph in disgust, ‘ranting “No! I wanted James Bond.” It suddenly occurred to him that he was no longer a human being. He was a symbol.’ 188 Connery’s commodification as Bond had not only eclipsed his aspirations and abilities as an actor but was now threatening to eradicate his own identity, as even Bond’s producers recognised.189 However, their solicitousness did not extend to adjusting either the production schedules or the films’ promotion: the poster for You Only Live Twice simply stated

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‘This Man Is James Bond’ without even naming Connery, who was posed, somewhat precariously, on the rim of Adam’s enormous set. However, Connery’s problems were more deep-seated, connected to the nature of his stardom as a series character. Unlike the pre-war Hollywood studios, Eon Productions was not a star-making machine but a franchise manufacturer. Connery’s stardom was a product of a franchise based on a fictional character and not his own persona. This type of stardom went back to the early years of cinema. As Richard DeCordova remarks, in film series an actor appeared explicitly as the same character in film after film and ‘the personality thus constituted, the character’s identity, was conflated with the identity of the actor’.190 In the most extended discussion of ‘serial stardom’, Andrew Shail has shown how it constituted a parallel development to the emergence of the ‘picture personality’ from 1908 onwards.191 In this system, companies claimed copyright over the character and therefore promoted public interest in the character rather than the actor who played the part. Indeed, the fictional character could be played by more than one actor. This makes series easier to market as they are not influenced by any complications pertaining to a particular actor, ‘not contaminated by any real-life events occurring beyond their appearances in films’.192 In Shail’s view, this ‘star system without naming a performer’, was a version of ‘industrial authorship’ in which the production company, not the actor, called the shots, which he characterises as an economic category that exists without recourse to the system of ideas that produces the more complex concept of film stardom based on a star’s persona.193 Serial stardom was a system that drew attention to the importance of the manufacturing company in providing quality entertainment that consistently delivered the popular character appealingly packaged. The series character became a powerful means through which companies could control, by rejecting, demands from uppity actors who wished to possess and therefore market their own image rather than have it subsumed by the character.194 Shail identifies the Bond series as a late example of this phenomenon.195 As discussed, the public knew Connery’s name – ‘Sean Connery Is James Bond’ – but conflated Connery with this screen role so that the two became indivisible. As Playboy commented, Connery’s ‘public identification with Bond is so complete that the name of the character he plays is better known than his’.196 As Hollywood stardom developed, the series character tended to migrate to television. Had either Moore or McGoohan been chosen to play Bond, they would have switched from television to film franchise, from playing The Saint or Danger Man to playing Bond. Connery, who had rejected that route, now found himself in exactly that position, but on a spectacular scale, the star of an ‘upscale’ spy series that, for the first time in film history, was a major A-list production.197 Thus rather than Bond becoming an

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element of Connery’s developing star image, the ‘public sphere in which such images might have been developed successfully had already been usurped by the figure of Bond’.198 As Cook and Hines note, ‘rather than just being a character, James Bond has become the equivalent of a star persona in his own right’, which ‘transforms the accepted relationship between star and character by conferring star status on the different actors who play him, rather than the other way round’.199 This was the ‘curse’ of becoming Bond, which, as Rissik advances, was the obverse of his achievement in creating an iconic character: ‘Connery’s ability was to incarnate [Bond] and make his legend acceptable, and his persistent doom was to be confused with him to the point where his own talents lay unrespected and unmarked.’ 200 Connery made what he thought would be his last public appearance as Bond at the royal premiere of You Only Live Twice on 12 June 1967, where he told the Queen what was already public knowledge: he was leaving the series.201

Triumphal return: Diamonds Are Forever (1971) Connery’s withdrawal tested the producers’ conviction that the role was greater than the actor. However, what they looked for in his replacement was an ersatz Connery. Broccoli announced the next Bond would be ‘another Sean Connery type’ and that they were ‘looking for someone with the same qualities’ as Connery, not an actor who would impose his own interpretation, but a look-alike who could be moulded to fit Connery’s interpretation of the role.202 Their choice was George Lazenby, not an actor but a male model whose athletic abilities convinced the producers that he could play the role. Lazenby felt himself to be Connery’s ‘stand-in’ because the producers and directors ‘were teaching [me] to walk like Connery, master the Connery mannerisms’.203 Thus Eon had not only ‘bought the body’, they had bought a substitute version of the one they had lost. What they had lost, of course, was Connery’s intelligence, wit and understanding of the role, as the chorus of critical disapproval was quick to point out. Lazenby’s performance in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) was castigated as awkward, stiff and gauche; ‘mannequin’ being the favoured epithet. There was a corresponding praise for the absent Connery. One critic lamented how much she missed his ‘louche panache’, and that Lazenby ‘gives no hint of the tiger beneath the man about town skin that was the key to Bond Mark 1’s fascination for the female section of the audience’.204 Ian Christie tore aside the masquerade: ‘I don’t believe for a moment that this chap George Lazenby is James Bond. I know, and you know, that 007 is Sean Connery … this new fellow is clearly an impostor.’ 205

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The critics’ views would have counted for nothing had the box-office returns been substantial, but On Her Majesty’s Secret Service grossed $23 million worldwide, half the take of You Only Live Twice.206 In an unprecedented move, David Picker, who had become UA’s president in 1969 and considered Connery had been poorly treated, stepped in.207 Abandoning UA’s long-standing practice of a hands-off approach to individual productions, he exercised the studio’s rights over casting and overruled the producers’ choice of the American actor John Gavin, who had been placed on a holding contract.208 Fearing that a second failure might jeopardise the franchise, Picker had decided to secure Connery’s return whatever the cost; he flew to London to negotiate terms directly with Connery’s agent Richard Hatton.209 Hatton persuaded Picker to raise his initial offer of a $1 million salary to $1.25 million (an unprecedented figure for a single film that even topped Brando and Burton), 12.5 per cent of the film’s grosses and an agreement that UA would fund two pictures of Connery’s own choosing as producer and/or star.210 Balio estimates that Connery’s total compensation for agreeing to return was $5 million.211 Connery insisted that he would not be required to talk to either of the producers and that the shooting must be completed inside eighteen weeks otherwise he would receive $145,000 for each additional week.212 Connery was sensible of the scale of what was being offered: ‘the kind of money I’d never get again in my lifetime and the chance to make two films of my own’, which offered him ‘control over what is going on’.213 The longer-term consequences of the deal will be discussed in subsequent chapters, but the immediate result of returning to Bondage was Connery’s ability to exercise increased creative control over the production of Diamonds Are Forever (1971). He worked closely with Tom Mankiewicz, the young writer recommended by Picker who had been hired to bring new energy and ideas to Maibaum’s script.214 Mankiewicz recalled that Connery loved the script – which took the series’ self-referentiality to new levels and sent up the whole idea of the invincible superman – contributing detailed notes not just about his own but others’ parts: ‘it was the least self-centred script meeting I’ve ever had with an actor, much less a star’.215 Goldfinger’s director, Guy Hamilton, was brought back and he saw the film as the opportunity to push the franchise ‘this way and that’ by accentuating the fantastical elements in the script and the off-beat comedy.216 According to Hamilton, Connery was very pleased with the screenplay, suggesting alterations but agreeing that the character of Bond must be exaggerated.217 Whereas with Thunderball Connery had been concerned about the humour becoming too broad, he now accepted that this was the logical direction in which the character should go. Hamilton, Mankiewicz and Connery all sensed that, after almost a decade, Bond was no longer a figure of aspirational,

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cutting-edge cool but had become part of a more broadly escapist fantasy in which, for the first time, Fleming’s source novel was largely ignored. In contrast to his somewhat somnolent performance in You Only Live Twice, Connery appears to be enjoying himself hugely in Diamonds Are Forever’s extended romp through the garish Las Vegas locations amidst a succession of what Hamilton referred to as its ‘weird physical types’.218 Heavier and greying at the temples, his features fuller and with a greater openness to his face, Connery projects less grim cruelty and menace than a certain warmth and expansive humour.219 His relationship with the Bond girl, Tiffany Case (Jill St. John), is bantering and affectionate, in harmony with Bond’s changed role as a more tolerant, occasionally slightly bemused centre of the succession of bizarre incidents that substitute for a comprehensible plot. Gadgetry is not revered but sent up – as in the scene in which Bond makes his escape from the research laboratory in a moon buggy that bobbles along the desert landscape while cars and motorcycles crash around it. Traces of the old Bond dry wit occasionally punctuate the film, but the humour is generally broader. Diamonds Are Forever was thus Connery-Bond in a more parodic mode, displaying less concern for his credibility as the invincible secret agent. Here was Bond who had escaped Fleming’s framework, no longer eternally in his early thirties but an older man, more mature and self-reflexive, alive to the absurdities and the pleasures that being Bond provides and inviting audiences to share that conceit, a development of the role that Connery took further in his Bond swansong Never Say Never Again (1983), discussed in Chapter 4. Diamonds Are Forever was very successful at the box-office, grossing double the returns for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.220 That commercial success demonstrated Connery’s appeal but also an intelligent recognition by star, writer and director of the series’ changed appeal. Pauline Kael, who became one of Connery’s most eloquent and staunchest admirers, argued that the film ‘opened just at the right moment when people long for a familiar, unalienated hero with the capacity for enjoyment; the timing could not be better for Sean Connery to come back as Bond. He no longer wears that waxy deadpan of a sex-fantasy stud dummy; over the years he has turned the robot matinee-idol into a man, himself.’ She admired Connery’s relaxation, his ‘mature grace’ and the touches of ‘almost tenderness’ in Bond’s relationship with Case.221 UK reviewers welcomed Connery’s return as if greeting an old friend whose absence had been much missed. Most admired the film’s confidently tongue-in-cheek approach and recognised that Bond, now easing down on action, had become a period fixture. One critic – who thought Diamonds brought back the series’ ‘geniality’ alongside the ‘[p]reposterous predicaments, impossible menaces, and an invulnerable hero’ that was its métier – judged that ‘Connery’s thickened figure is all to

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the good, contributing solidity to his imposture’; another that ‘like good wine’ he had matured with the years and was now ‘fuller, rounder and smoother’; a third praised this ‘autumnal, mature James Bond’.222 Even the Monthly Film Bulletin, usually quite scathing about the Bond franchise, admired Connery’s relaxed, droll performance, which ‘proves again that he is irreplaceable as Bond, handling the script’s most worn double entendres like a master’.223

Bond as international cultural icon The scale of the Bond phenomenon extended beyond the success of individual films. Bond became an international cultural icon, expressing what Edgar Morin calls the ‘admirable coincidence of myth and capital, of goddess and merchandise [which] is neither fortuitous nor contradictory’.224 The process by which stars become cultural icons is discussed in detail in Chapter 7. However, Bond’s iconicity is dealt with here because of its significance for Connery’s career. In their seminal account Bond and Beyond, Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott contend that Bond is one of a select few fictional characters – such as Robinson Crusoe and Sherlock Holmes – which break free from their immediate origins and, through their circulation in a broad range of texts, lodge themselves in popular consciousness. Such a character becomes a mythic figure ‘that always transcends [its] own variable incarnations’.225 Their account demonstrates that Bond’s iconicity as a ‘mobile and variable signifier’ changes according to its historical context.226 The first phase begins with the serialisation of From Russia with Love in the Daily Express as a strip cartoon from 1957. In this version, Bond is a pre-eminently English hero, ‘embodying the imaginary possibility that England might be once again placed at the centre of world affairs during a period when its worldpower status was invariably and rapidly declining’.227 The release of Dr. No inaugurated a second phase in which Connery’s incarnation started to override the novel’s characterisation by broadening the figure’s social and popular appeal and extending its horizons internationally.228 Bennett and Woollacott argue that by the mid-1960s Bond represented a ‘new style and image of Englishness’ that embodied a cosmopolitan ‘classless modernity’ associated with Swinging London.229 Although Fleming’s Bond had a certain currency in America, it was Connery-Bond that best represented what Bill Osgerby designates as the American ideal of the ‘swinging bachelor’, an aspirational playboy adventurer and a hero of discriminating consumption in dress, tastes and lifestyle.230 Osgerby cites American sociologist Herbert Gans’s contention that ‘Bond

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displaced an older image of the “British gentleman” (“well-bred, sophisticated, reserved, public spirited”) by images of British men as “potent sexual idols, armed with unusual energy and vitality, and given to public declarations of skepticism and satire”’. 231 Claire Hines has explored in detail the links between Bond and Playboy magazine for which Bond embodied its fantasy ideal of unfettered masculine individualism and ‘classy’ classlessness.232 Life magazine considered Bond represented ‘the fantasy-bachelor of every married man’s dreams’, noting that in Italy ‘he is admiringly known as Mr. Bang, Bang, Kiss-Kiss’, as a salute to his international appeal.233 Vanessa Schwartz positions Connery-Bond as part of the growth of a cosmopolitan internationalism that gained ascendency in films in the late 1950s and early 1960s, depicting a new post-war culture of both real and imagined social and cultural mobility that ‘transcended the nation as an imagined community’.234 As discussed, Connery’s Scottish accent was an important element in the construction of a classless cosmopolitanism, which contributed to Bond’s international rather than national identity. Hence it was Connery-Bond rather than Fleming’s Bond that became the dominant image and discourse. Of course, the two are not entirely distinct. Connery-Bond retains the unwavering patriotism Bond displays in the novels; as Maibaum reflected, ‘Bond is absolutely dedicated to serving Queen and country; he never questions what he does or the morality of it’.235 This sensibility informs the first two films in which Bond is a Cold War warrior but, as noted, by Goldfinger in which Bond becomes more like Connery, the claims of duty and patriotism are subordinated to an increasingly ironic playfulness. In the novel You Only Live Twice, Bond undertakes a special mission to prove to the Japanese that Britain is not a second-rate power and reaffirms its world power status through his actions. In the screen version, this patriotism is playfully mocked: ‘The things I do for England’ is Bond’s flippant remark made whilst cutting the dress straps of Helga Brandt (Karin Dor), the second-tier SPECTRE assassin he delights in seducing as well as deceiving. Thus, Connery’s nonchalance and ironic humour were integral to a reconstruction of what had been a dominant image of national identity in which the English gentleman’s readiness to sacrifice himself for king and country is replaced by a detached cosmopolitan stylishness. The films’ reconstruction of national identity blends with their increasingly ironic take on Bond’s status as a British hero, supplanting it with ConneryBond’s legendary status as a celebrity spy. This had its beginnings as early as From Russia with Love in which Tatiana (Daniela Bianchi), the adoring Soviet cypher girl, has, as M comments, fallen in love with a photograph of Bond exactly as if he were a film star; the top assassin Red Grant (Robert Shaw) is animated by his desire to humiliate the ‘great James Bond’. In You Only Live Twice, Bond’s mythic fame has become a major motif, beginning

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with the elaborate hoax of his death, which is handled in a characteristically tongue-in-cheek way. With the world in crisis, ‘our man in Hong Kong’ (a neat salute to an outmoded imperialism) is making love to a Chinese woman who flips the bed over so that assassins riddle it with bullets. Inspecting the body, the Hong Kong police inspector remarks, ‘Well, at least he died on the job. He’d have wanted it this way.’ There follows an elaborate ritual burial at sea – as befits a decorated naval officer – in which Bond’s corpse is cast over the side. After being collected by divers, who bring the cadaver on board a waiting submarine, the wrapping is removed to reveal Bond in an immaculate commander’s uniform. Removing his oxygen mask he announces, with mock punctiliousness, ‘Permission to come aboard, sir.’ This extended joke, with its visual echoes of Goldfinger’s opening, was an indication of the increasing self-referentiality of the series and the assumption of an easy familiarity with previous films as well as playing with the notion of Bond as the nation’s saviour. In an early scene in Diamonds Are Forever, Bond switches wallets with the dealer he has just disposed of in order to put Tiffany Case off the scent. Examining the Playboy membership card with his name on it she exclaims, ‘My God! You’ve just killed James Bond!’ ‘Oh, is that who he was? Well, it just goes to prove no one’s indestructible.’ As noted, Playboy was the magazine most closely associated with promoting Bond, and this knowing reference was part of what Maibaum thought was the series’ way of staying ahead of the audience.236 As Cook and Hines argue, ‘Bond’s aura of “cool” resides in his ironic awareness of himself as a fiction, a pure image’, which offers a playful critique of white, heterosexual masculine heroism.237 This critique, as discussed, still requires the subordination of women. That critique is not present in Fleming’s novels but is an essential element of Connery-Bond: a product of the directors and screenwriters working with an actor for whom irony was a congenital disposition. Part of the appeal of Connery-Bond was to shift the ideology of Fleming’s novels so that it resonated with the 1960s zeitgeist. Richard Carpenter argues that although Bond is an archetypal hero whose adventures conform to an established mythic pattern, in the films his heroics are heightened to the point of absurdity through self-parody in order to appeal to a sceptical age.238 Connery’s projection of an ironic heroism became an important feature of his later career, as discussed in Chapter 5.

Connery and Bond It is impossible to exaggerate the significance playing Bond had on Connery’s career, transforming him from a minor British film actor into international superstar. It brought fame, wealth and celebrity status, providing the

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recognition he had dreamed of in his earlier career. The present account has emphasised Connery’s creation of Bond as a significant acting achievement, a process of gradual refinement and sophistication, transforming Fleming’s blank slate into a charismatic and attractive modern folk hero that reached its apogee in Goldfinger and Thunderball. Connery’s classless Scottish accent, dynamism, rugged working-class masculinity, sex appeal and graceful, elegant insouciance created a global phenomenon, an international icon that transformed the representation of the English gentleman hero into a figure that was modern, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, classless and sexy. The detachment and ironic wit with which Connery played the role differentiated Bond from the American-style action hero. Connery-Bond’s potent blend of English sophisticated elegance and American ruggedness made Bond a tremendously appealing hero for an increasingly sceptical age and afforded a different way for Connery to embody the duality that had characterised his earlier roles and was the core of his fascination as an actor. Although he became frustrated by the glare of stardom and the direction the series took, Connery recognised the marvellous opportunity the role provided: ‘There’s an impression around that I have been constantly rebellious about playing Bond. This is not so … the Bond character has brought me money and fame – and I’m not such an idiot that I regret either.’ 239 It was also an acting opportunity which he embraced wholeheartedly: ‘I am not ashamed of the James Bond films. Quality is not to be found only in the Old Vic, portraying Bond is just as serious as playing Macbeth on stage.’ 240 Connery’s somewhat defensive remark reflects his annoyance at how his acting ability was consistently marginalised. That annoyance was part of a deeper and more protracted struggle between the series’ producers and their star, whose acting accomplishments they neither rated nor sufficiently rewarded. For Broccoli and Saltzman, Connery was one, replaceable, element in the Bond package and as the series extended, a less and less important one amidst the colossal sets, gadgetry and the escalating spectacle of the action sequences. In their view the role made Connery a star and not the reverse, and their refusal to make Connery a partner reflected that assumption. Stardom, as discussed, did not sit easily with Connery. His impatience with typecasting, commodification and the invasion of his private life was compounded by his ambivalent attitude. He valued the money, enjoyed the fame but had little time for the glitz and the glamour, which did not endear him to his employers or the press. Part of his clash with Saltzman and Broccoli was his reluctance to play out the public role of the star, an attitude that many thought derived not only from his desire to preserve his privacy but also from a belief that it would compromise his integrity, the sense of an authentic self that had made Connery determined to retain his Edinburgh accent.

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Nevertheless, as Rissik argues, for all his modernity Connery-Bond was an old-fashioned star who offered the traditional pleasures of star gazing and star longing in an era dominated by Method actors whose mode was introspective authenticity and downbeat realism. Walker thought Connery’s Bond a ‘dream figure in a traditional mode, not a social rebel’, one who was ‘liberated’, enjoying an uninhibited sexual freedom rather than antiauthority.241 In my view, Connery’s cool irony enables him to be both glamorous and rebellious, making the figure of Bond uniquely appealing. However, the success of the franchise concealed a more profound and intractable problem about the nature of the stardom Bond represented: Connery was a star as a serial character rather than as ‘himself’, that is, the development of a persona that belonged to him rather than to the character he embodied. The most deep-seated and long-lasting effect of Connery’s superstardom as Bond was to be trapped in that image. Connery could leave the series but he could not shed the Bond persona, an international icon whose lustre resided in the figure of Bond and not in Connery, who had no star persona that was separate from Bond. Connery recognised this problem as early as 1964 when he began the process of finding other roles and images that he hoped would also find public acceptance, enabling him to sustain his stardom beyond Bond. Despite this recognition, Connery’s attempts to ‘escape Bondage’ was a process that took nearly twenty years, as discussed in the next two chapters.

3

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In Bondage, 1964–73

I don’t want to be only known as Sean Connery, the man who plays James Bond. I want to be known as Sean Connery, the actor.1

This chapter covers the same period in Connery’s career as the previous one but from the reverse perspective, discussing the various ways in which he attempted to escape being ‘in Bondage’, which became a journalistic cliché. Bond became a global cultural icon and anything else Connery did was inevitably ‘meshed in the myth of Bond’.2 As he commented at the time, ‘An actor hates to be typecast. I don’t want to be Bond all the time. It riles me when people call me Bond off the set … That’s why I’m making pictures like Woman of Straw, in the hope that audiences will accept me in other parts.’ 3 This sense of entrapment imposed by serial stardom – playing the same role repeatedly and being identified solely with that figure – and the tension between his image as Bond and Connery’s aspirations as an actor – intensified one deleterious characteristic of stardom as an occupation, neatly summed up by Connery’s coeval Clint Eastwood: You get trapped by an image … You make an impact in a certain kind of role and everyone thinks you’re that person. It’s nice in a way – you’ve set out to do what you wanted to do. But I don’t carry a .44 Magnum around. And if I were to play in a remake of Dr. Kildare, the audience might say ‘Wait a minute. He’s doing a few operations now, he’s tending to paediatrics, he’s helping a couple of old people. But eventually he’d better start shooting.’ 4

Connery’s challenge was not simply to find roles that were different to Bond but to construct an alternative persona that the cinemagoing public would accept. In the absence of actual archival documentation, it is difficult to be definitive about Connery’s contractual status with Eon Productions. Robert Sellers claims that Connery was required to make ‘one Bond picture per year, along with a stipulation that his non-Bond films be produced under the aegis of Broccoli and Saltzman’. Sellers argues that this stipulation was ‘ultimately dropped’, but does not provide evidence for this assertion or a

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date.5 In the negotiations in late 1963 with Universal for Connery to appear in Marnie – discussed in detail below – Eon’s lawyers made it clear that the loan-out agreement had to go through Eon’s holding company Danjaq: ‘Danjaq SA employs Sean Connery and it has the right to render his services including the provision of his services as a performer’; the correspondence emphasises that Connery has ‘no position at Danjaq’.6 However, this seems to have been an assertion of Connery’s legal status rather than determining negotiations. In the snatches of correspondence available in the papers of several directors with whom Connery worked during this period, he appears to have had a free hand in what roles he played in non-Bond films without reference to Eon. Directors communicated directly with Connery via his agent Richard Hatton, though it was always clear that Connery took the decision and Hatton’s role was to negotiate terms and conditions of employment.7 However, Eon retained the stipulation that the non-Bond films did not interfere with the Bond films’ production schedules. Connery was therefore unable to accept an offer to play the title role in John Ford’s Young Cassidy (1965) because he was making Goldfinger, thus denying Connery the opportunity to play a working-class hero who combined artistic aspiration and political activism.8 In what follows I explore Connery’s non-Bond roles and his probable reasons for choosing those parts. My argument is that his prime motivation was not economic but artistic, his determination to win recognition as an accomplished actor. Connery appeared in a heterogeneous mixture of genres during this period – psychological thriller, crime caper, melodrama, war, comedy, even a western – that were all designed to demonstrate his range and versatility, to test and stretch himself as a screen actor, their overriding purpose to dislodge the Bond persona. In the process Connery created some of his most memorable performances, which are discussed in detail partly because they have not, in my view, received their just recognition. However, how far these roles enabled Connery to achieve his desire to become recognised as a gifted actor and whether they succeeded in gaining audience acceptance remain the central questions.

Dissecting Bond: Woman of Straw and Marnie The tight production schedule of the first two Bond films did not offer Connery the chance to work on other pictures. However, his eagerness to appear in different roles was tempered by a determination to ensure that they were suitable. He therefore turned down Broccoli and Saltzman’s initial suggestion that he star in an adaptation of Berkely Mather’s leaden Pass Beyond Kashmir (1960), which would have been a reversion to the old

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Warwick formula of action-adventure along the lines of Zarak (1956) or Bandit of Zhobe (1959).9 A more promising opportunity came with Woman of Straw (1964), one of three films made for United Artists by the longstanding producer–director partnership of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph.10 Connery was hired after the major elements had been assembled, apparently following a direct approach by Hatton to David Picker at UA rather than through Eon; Picker thought the combination of Connery and the female star Gina Lollobrigida was a strong commercial proposition.11 Connery was attracted by a production commensurate with his star status, a glossy international thriller with a budget of $2 million, and the chance to work with an actor he much admired, Ralph Richardson.12 Connery plays Tony Richmond, a disinherited young man seething with revenge who, according to his own account, watched how his now wheelchairbound uncle Charles Richmond (Richardson) drove his father to suicide and then proceeded to marry his beautiful mother.13 Tony schemes to regain his ‘rightful’ fortune using Charles’s nurse Maria (Lollobrigida) as his accomplice. Exquisitely tailored throughout, Connery plays the cool, calculating and ruthless sadist he fashioned for Bond, but without redeeming features, exuding a sinister, glistening beauty. However, Woman of Straw is only a film of surfaces: scriptwriters Robert Muller and Stanley Mann completely fail to exploit the opportunities offered by Catherine Arley’s existential novel that portrays a society disturbed and dislocated by the war, or to fashion Tony as a fascinating Gothic villain. Not having had the chance to read the script in advance, Connery constantly suggested script alterations.14 However, he remained hampered by what was a two-dimensional role. Dearden and Relph’s forte was British social realism, not international gloss, and Woman of Straw is a languidly paced, banal melodrama that was savaged by reviewers. One snarled, ‘what could be more archaic than the sight of James Bond himself … stalking glumly through the very type of old-fashioned thriller he usually mocks’, adding, ‘you can be certain that Mr. Connery did not look one bit more unhappy than yesterday’s audience at the Criterion, where the hapless British film crept into town as part of a “showcase” release’.15 Despite the somewhat lurid posters that shrieked ‘It’s So Easy to Set Fire to a Woman of Straw!’ alongside a drawing of Connery and Lollobrigida embracing passionately, Woman of Straw was largely ignored by the cinemagoing public. Clearly audiences wanted Connery to be more than a sexy clothes-horse and to play a cool hero, not a villain. Several reviewers thought Woman of Straw might have worked had it been directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which could well have increased Connery’s enthusiasm when he was offered the male lead in Marnie (1964). This was the opportunity to work with a major director, one who habitually used only top-flight American stars, and thus the chance to make a non-Bond

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film that would enhance Connery’s cultural as well as commercial status and announce him as a major star away from Bond. However, Connery insisted, through Hatton, on reading the script before committing himself.16 His action apparently ‘shocked Hollywood’ and when informed by an interviewer that not even Cary Grant made such a request, Connery remarked, ‘Cary’s big enough to be able to insist on changes after the film starts. But I can’t. So I must be happy with it before I begin.’ 17 Connery’s wariness was partly to avoid making the same mistake he had made with Woman of Straw, which he had accepted without scrutinising the script, but he was also exercising his own muscle as a sought-after star. Connery negotiated a $200,000 salary – over three times what he had been paid for From Russia with Love – $1,500 weekly expenses, a first-class round-trip air fare for his wife, nurse and baby son to accompany him to Los Angeles and, most importantly, that his role was equal to that of his co-star Tippi Hedren. Hitchcock only cavilled at Connery’s request for a particular stop date, and also top billing – which he was prepared to offer solely for the UK release.18 Connery’s tough bargaining was not simply an assertion of his worth. He knew he would be working for a powerful director who stamped his own signature onto each of his films and that he would be granted little if any latitude to exercise his own interpretation of the role. At the time Connery remarked that having been forewarned that Hitchcock ‘had no respect for actors … I found the opposite … he was wonderful to work with’.19 However, he later admitted to chafing at the constraints of working with a director who ‘had every frame of the movie in his head on the first day of shooting … There was nothing much to do with the script, it was cut and dried. He never started a picture without it being perfect. He didn’t make any changes.’ 20 Hitchcock’s direction was limited, Connery recalled, to insisting he keep his mouth shut while listening and introduce more pauses in his speeches; Hitchcock ‘tells you on the set what move he wants … but he never dwelt on the psychology of the character’.21 The character Connery was cast to play, Mark Rutland, has deep-seated psychological problems that would have challenged any actor to convey. As Robert Kapsis argues, Marnie was Hitchcock’s endeavour to create a film that focused on complex characterisation and psychological causation, part of his attempt to align himself with European art cinema and to be taken seriously as an artist. Kapsis contends that Hitchcock ‘conceived Marnie as primarily a character study (not simply a suspense thriller) that would satisfy the serious or intellectual critics who, he claimed, often had condemned his films for their mechanical plots and underdeveloped characters’.22 Thus although Hitchcock’s initial interest in adapting Winston Graham’s novel in 1962 may have been that it provided a major role – a woman averse to sexual intercourse who is also a compulsive thief – that

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3.1  ‘He never dwelt on the psychology of the character’: Alfred Hitchcock explaining the technicalities to Connery on the set of Marnie (1964)

could tempt Grace Kelly from her Monaco retreat, as the project developed he became increasingly absorbed by what he saw as the opportunity to create a male character of equal complexity. In contrast to the novel’s straightforward hero, who, having become attracted to Marnie, wishes to help her overcome her kleptomania and fear of men, Hitchcock’s first adapter, Joseph Stefano (the author of Psycho, 1960) introduced the motif of the male fetishist. This piqued Hitchcock’s interest, as he disclosed to François Truffaut: ‘He wanted to go to bed with a thief, that was the essence of his fascination and determination … He would have liked to have had sex with her right during a robbery, by the safe, like necrophilia. He’s damned unhealthy as a character.’ 23 To build up the role, Stefano eliminated the other major male characters: Mark’s sexual rival and the psychoanalyst Marnie visits. Tony Moral has provided a detailed history of Marnie’s protracted and fractious script development, all of which took place before Connery was cast.24 Connery was not in Hitchcock’s initial planning, Cary Grant was to

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have co-starred with Kelly.25 However, when the final script had been completed by Jay Presson Allen in July 1963 both she and Hitchcock were attracted by the prospect of signing the star who had created such an impact as James Bond, which had engaged Hitchcock’s interest since the release of Dr. No. Hitchcock told Look magazine that he wanted Connery ‘because the part requires a virile, aggressive man, with a lot of authority’.26 He would also have been aware that in hiring Connery he had an actor who had already become a ‘sardonic masculine symbol … trailing Bondish clouds of sexual arrogance’.27 Once the deal was concluded, Universal’s publicity department capitalised on Connery’s celebrity status as Bond in its press release on 3 October 1963, distributed to over 5,000 overseas newspapers; the fanfare was taken up by Look magazine and Hedda Hopper in her gossip column for the Los Angeles Times.28 In addition to welcome publicity, Hitchcock also knew he was hiring an accomplished actor. In contrast to Eon’s publicity, Marnie’s press pack emphasised Connery’s thespian credentials in a role that enabled ‘a far broader histrionic stage on which to display the skills he meticulously nurtured in British repertory and Shakespearean drama’, detailing his work at the Oxford Playhouse.29 Hitchcock was critical of the way in which the Bond films’ fantasy mode meant that audiences were unable to become involved with the characters.30 By contrast, Hitchcock contended, in his films, ‘the element of suspense comes out of the characters’.31 Hitchcock was thus getting good value for his outlay: an iconic figure of masculine sex appeal and an actor capable of coping with the demands of the role. My contention is that once Connery had been cast, Hitchcock realised that the ‘damned unhealthy’ Mark was the opportunity to dissect a Bond-like male, revealing the figure’s psychological insecurities, fetishism and overweening need to control women. This is consistent with the ways in which Hitchcock interrogated the persona of Cary Grant in Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946) and North by Northwest (1959), the difference being that it is the iconic figure of Bond Hitchcock is dissecting, not Connery’s star persona. It is the Bondian sexual assurance that dominates in Mark’s first encounter with Marnie. As he watches her being interviewed for a position in his publishing firm, Mark knows instantly she is the same woman who has robbed one of his clients and sits back to enjoy the performance. As Andrew Rissik comments, ‘Connery’s fixed, lascivious stare conveys amusement, disbelief, fascination and a kind of quite open callous lust in a series of virtually imperceptible gear changes behind that sardonic expression.’ 32 Those minute but carefully calculated gradations are evidence of how deeply Connery has understood the power of his own highly charged presence on which Hitchcock was placing emphasis. As Truffaut commented, ‘Only by watching [Connery’s] face very closely can one sense your intention to lead

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the script into a less conventional direction.’ 33 Mark’s fascination and the sexual stimulation afforded by pursuing a thief offered him an opportunity to exercise the sharp intelligence of someone who is a modernising professional capable of restoring the fortunes of the family publishing firm. Like Bond, Mark participates in the mores of upper-class society but is also clearly separate from it, unlike his father, the traditional Philadelphia gentleman, content with the patrician rituals of hunting and taking tea.34 Mark’s business success meant very little: ‘Nothing ever happens to a family that traditionally marries an heiress every other generation.’ Hence his need for a really difficult challenge and one that piques his interest as a zoologist: Mark wants not simply to seduce and manipulate Marnie, but have her trust him, like the jaguarundi, another enigmatic and beautiful predator he tamed on one of his zoological expeditions to South America. However, as their relationship develops, Mark becomes less certain of his feelings and it is the recursive complexity of Mark’s motivations that offers Connery, as the film unfolds, the space to explore emotions outside the range of the Bond persona. In the long scene that follows his success in tracking her down after she has robbed his firm, his emotions fluctuate. Mark’s immediate reaction is annoyance and aggression: ‘I’m fighting a powerful impulse to beat the hell out of you.’ However, to her charge, ‘So all the time you’ve been trying to trip me up, trap me’, he replies tentatively, ‘I’m not sure anymore. I think I was just curious at first. And then things got out of control and I … liked you.’ Connery’s deliberate hesitation, his less guarded expression and the lightening of the timbre of his voice convey beautifully the genuine struggle of this arrogant alpha male to be emotionally honest and to admit to unanticipated feelings he cannot fully control. This honesty has strict limits. To her heartfelt plea, ‘Oh Mark, if you love me, you’ll let me go’, Connery stiffens, closing his face into the Bondian mask and half-smile, reverting to the smooth enunciation of the self-satisfied patrician: ‘I can’t let you go Marnie. Somebody’s got to take care of you and help you. I just can’t let you loose. If I let you go, I’m criminally and morally responsible. Somebody’s got to take legal responsibility for you Marnie. And it narrows down to me or the police, old girl.’ Her apparent ingratitude and refusal to accept him as her saviour – ‘You don’t love me. I’m just something you’ve caught, some kind of animal you’ve trapped’ – provokes him further into a disturbing mixture of elation and emotional aggression coupled with the adamantine certainty of his class: ‘That’s right, you are. And I’ve caught something really wild this time, haven’t I? I’ve tracked you and caught you, and by God I’m going to keep you.’ Connery’s ability to convey these emotional shifts and to hold the audience’s attention in a visually dull scene – they are driving in his car – demonstrates his increasing confidence and range as a screen actor, one capable of conveying

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emotional depth and ambiguous motivations. As Robin Wood argues, although Mark genuinely wants Marnie to be ‘cured’, it is through his own ministrations, therefore his love is intertwined with the need to possess, control and even create the object of his desire.35 Their relationship comes to a head on the honeymoon cruise to the South Seas. Part of the frisson of the film is the changing power balance in their relationship and the strength of Marnie’s resistance to Mark’s overweening desire for control. When he confronts her with his new-found conviction of the curatorial power of psychological analysis, she counters, ‘I’m sick. Well take a look at yourself, old dear … You’ve got a pathological fix on a woman who’s not only an admitted criminal but one who screams at you if you come near her.’ Part of the tension in their sparring, as Hitchcock appreciated, was that Connery’s presence carries with it the threat of violence, an audience’s sense that at any moment the icy self-control may snap. When she yet again refuses to accede to his desires, he breaks, strips off her nightdress and takes possession. However, the handling of the scene is multifaceted in keeping with the complexity of the characterisation. At the sight of her nakedness, Mark’s face has a look of genuine shock. Apologising, he places his dressing gown carefully round Marnie in a gesture of gentle concern. Hitchcock’s use of an overhead angle suggests protectiveness and solicitude, while the switch to a low angle reveals the tenderness of the touch. However, in the very act of shielding her, Mark’s desire becomes overpowering. In extreme close-up, Hitchcock’s camera drills into the cold, impersonal stare of the male animal taking possession. As Robin Wood comments, ‘what we see is virtually a rape. To the man it is an expression of tenderness, solicitude, responsibility; to the woman, an experience so desolating that after it she attempts suicide. Our response depends on our being made to share the responses of both characters at once.’ 36 In a nuanced analysis, Rebecca Bailin argues that the scene is ‘doubly enunciated’, alternating between eliciting approval and disapproval of Mark’s actions.37 It was the difficulties of scripting this scene that created the conclusive rift between Hitchcock and his second screenwriter, Evan Hunter, who thought Mark, having in effect raped Marnie, would lose audience sympathy. His replacement, Presson Allen, who never considered the act to be one of rape, became convinced that, once Connery was cast, audiences could never hate such a desirable male.38 Nevertheless, it remains a difficult, deeply disturbing scene that distances Mark from the conventional hero. It compounds the problem identified by Joseph Stefano, who, although he acceded to Hitchcock’s wishes in compressing the novel’s three main characters into one, argued that in the process Mark became too complex and unsympathetic a character, having to be Marnie’s protector, analyst and moral guardian as well as her lover.39 In the scenes that follow her attempted suicide, Marnie

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becomes the principal focus of audience engagement and interest culminating in the final climactic encounter with her mother, which reveals the cause of Marnie’s ‘condition’. In that scene Mark is a bystander, hesitant, unsure how to behave and uncertain about their prospects for long-term happiness. The couple’s exchange at the film’s close – ‘Oh Mark, I don’t want to go to jail. I’d rather stay with you.’ ‘Had you, love?’ – is hardly a resounding declaration of the couple’s hopes for future settled happiness. It leaves viewers unsure, I suggest, whether Mark has been transformed by what he has learned; we could take her remark as simply preferring his cage to the law’s. One might also argue that the ending appears somewhat hasty, too eager to wrap things up, perhaps revealing the tension between a psychological study and the conventions of a thriller, but also the struggle for centrality between Marnie as the film’s titular subject and the rival complexity of Mark’s characterisation. In the most considered review, Ian Cameron registers these tensions but argues for an upbeat interpretation of the conclusion: [Marnie is a] film of such complexity that, after three viewings, I feel that I have hardly begun to understand it, but each time new layers reveal themselves. … Ostensibly an exploration of Marnie’s perversion, the film becomes increasingly involved with Mark’s. Like the James Stewart character in Vertigo, Mark realises the masturbatory dream of having a woman completely in his power … The question in the film is not why Marnie is a frigid kleptomaniac (that is answered halfway through) but why Mark wants to marry one. Hitchcock brings the audience to see this by his favourite method: making them identify and then showing them what they are identifying with. … At the end of the film he has helped her towards a cure, and, in a way, she has helped him by her new willingness to accept a normal relationship, which removes the focus for his perversion.40

Hitchcock recognised that Marnie was demanding for audiences and provided a trailer that he introduced in person. Here Hitchcock admits that Marnie is a ‘very difficult picture to classify … two interesting human specimens, a man and a woman. Mark, a thoughtful man, dark and forbidding. He can also be kind and considerate. He is also a troubled man.’ This was an attempt to prepare audiences – and also perhaps reviewers – for the subtlety and complexity of the male hero and the film’s unconventional nature, not so much thriller as a forensic psychological investigation.41 Despite these preparations, UK reviewers were baffled by Mark’s motives and felt cheated by the film’s pervasive sense of unease that denied them the satisfactions – the anticipated wit, humour and suspense – they expected from a Hitchcock film. There were numerous complaints that the film lacked the taut plot that had characterised Hitchcock’s romantic thrillers of the 1950s and that the Freudian elements were simplistic and old-fashioned. A

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representative example was the Daily Herald’s reviewer, Ann Pacey, who dismissed Marnie as an ‘over-long slice of pretty phoney psychology, extraordinarily old-fashioned in technique and mostly lacking the seat-edged tension and sly humour we have every right to expect’.42 Alexander Walker, recognising that Marnie was designed to ‘please the connoisseurs’, considered it too cruel to be popular, lacking a conventional romance: ‘What are you to do when the only love interest … is the gratification that Marnie gets opening a safe door and fondling the dollar bills?’ 43 Although Cameron’s review had recognised the importance of Mark’s character and the film’s real centre of interest, there was little praise, in his account or elsewhere, for Connery’s attempt to convey that character’s complexity and moral ambiguity, though Archer Winstein in the New York Post commented that Connery ‘adds the tiny touches of charm and humour that his masculine force needed to make him a permanently popular movie star’.44 This disappointing lack of recognition for his acting prowess was compounded by Marnie’s poor performance at the box-office, failing to make the top thirty films released that year in the United States, although it performed better in Europe, an indication that Marnie was more art house than mainstream.45 This lack of commercial success may well be evidence that audiences had problems with the characterisation, the inner tensions and contradictions Mark displays that made it difficult to see him as a hero. They may also not have wished to see Connery in such an ambiguous role and that the expectations generated by his Bond persona as a fantasy hero had been unfulfilled. Thus, although the role of Mark Rutland had offered Connery the chance to explore a complex character on screen, he had become part of Hitchcock’s cinematic biography, the director’s bid for cultural rather than commercial capital. Marnie’s subsequent critical rehabilitation has also focused on its status within Hitchcock’s oeuvre, not Connery’s. The interpretation here is offered as a counterpoint, arguing that Connery’s superbly controlled and intelligent performance deserves greater recognition in Marnie’s subsequent critical elevation.46

Breaking the Bond mould: The Hill and A Fine Madness The problem for Connery was that his casting in Woman of Straw and Marnie was predicated on his reputation and image as Bond. The opportunities these films offered to break decisively with the Bond persona were therefore limited; what Marnie at least provided was a complementary critique. In his next non-Bond film Connery was able to exercise far greater creative control. He had been interested in making The Hill (1965), based on Ray Rigby’s adaptation of his own unperformed play written with R.S. Allen,

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for some time.47 But Connery only became available before the filming of Thunderball when plans to film The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders with his then-wife Diane Cilento fell through.48 The Hill, set in a prison camp in the North African desert during the Second World War, explored the humiliations, degradation and various forms of practised sadism that are legitimated as military discipline, a theme that spoke to Connery’s deeply unhappy experiences as a naval rating. Connery used his role as Joe Roberts, incarcerated for striking his commanding officer, as an opportunity to depict a working-class character whose truculence and anti-Establishment instincts had deep roots in Connery’s background and class allegiances. The role offered the possibility of playing a character that was close to his own identity.49 Crop-haired and dressed in drab khaki, Roberts is forced to go through the sordid, demeaning routines of prison life in a film that foregrounded acting over spectacle, characterisation rather than star glamour. Conscious of what might appear to be an extreme attempt to shift his image, Connery commented: Some people may think I’m trying to run away from Bond by appearing in this movie. I’m not. I’m running to Sean Connery. The man I portray … climbs the hill as punishment. I climb it in the hope of trying to reach my acting ability. I don’t want to be only known as Sean Connery, the man who plays James Bond. I want to be known as Sean Connery, the actor.50

However, The Hill’s setting and subject matter made it a dubious commercial proposition that, paradoxically, relied on his star status: ‘It might not have been made at all except for Bond. It’s a marvellous movie with lots of good actors in it, but it’s the sort of film that might have been considered a non-commercial art-house property if my name were not on it.’ 51 With Connery on board, Kenneth Hyman, vice-president in charge of the European division of Seven Arts Productions, was able to persuade the parent company, MGM, to finance the film.52 The Hill had a modest budget, $1,400,000, almost a third of which was Connery’s salary, $420,000, a fee he considered commensurate with his star status and an important marker in any future negotiations with Eon Productions or other companies.53 However, once that marker had been established, Connery was prepared to accommodate himself to the arduous, physically demanding seven-week shoot the director, Sidney Lumet, considered necessary to generate the claustrophobic intensities of the drama, alongside his fellow actors. One extra, Richard Dunsmore, recalled that ‘Connery was completely unassuming and easy-going and interacted with us (usually bored) extras hanging about waiting to be called’.54 Coming from television, Lumet was used to working on films with lean budgets and tight shooting schedules. He had a reputation as someone whose hard-hitting films combined the depiction of social and

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moral issues with explorations of the recesses of characters’ motivations, and was also a highly collaborative director, sharing ideas with technical personnel, screenwriters and actors.55 An ex-actor, Lumet spent lengthy periods in pre-production rehearsals as the best way to elicit honest, grounded and convincing performances: ‘Good acting is really self-revelation and that’s a very painful, complicated and frightening process. And it takes time to get people free enough to do that.’ 56 Connery appreciated that time and space to craft his performance, commenting that The Hill was the first film he had made since signing on as Bond for which he had had adequate time to prepare, ‘to get all the ins and outs of what I was going to do worked out with the director and producer in advance, to find out if we were all on the same track’.57 He worked closely with Lumet throughout the production and supported his decision to film in a deliberately deglamourised style: ‘We even use a special sort of film that gives it a rough, documentary look. There are no little lights under your face to take away lines; in fact, we use natural lighting as much as possible.’ 58 The Hill is not a star vehicle but an ensemble drama. Roberts forms part of a variegated quintet of prisoners who embody different forms of insubordination: the egregious, overweight habitual offender Private Bartlett (Roy Kinnear), facing his ninth spell in jail; the neurotic, over-sensitive Private Stevens (Alfred Lynch), who went AWOL to get back to his wife; the AfroCaribbean Private King (Ossie Davis), arrested for stealing whisky; and Private McGrath (Jack Watson), a habitual brawler. All are subjected to the ‘discipline’ of the man-made hill that forms the camp’s centrepiece, their

3.2  ‘Sean Connery, the actor’: playing Sergeant-Major Roberts in The Hill (1965)

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rivalries and differences subordinated to the collective outrage caused by Stevens’s death at the hands of the sadomasochistic Staff Sergeant Williams (Ian Hendry). Although Williams does his best to break Roberts, the central conflict is between Roberts and RSM Wilson (Harry Andrews), who runs the camp in the absence of an effective commanding officer. Wilson’s twentyfive-year career has been based on the unquestioning belief that an army can only function through unthinking obedience to the rules enforced by harsh discipline. Unlike Williams, however, he is animated by a genuine belief that he can remould his prisoners – ‘the dregs, the dross, the filth of the gutter’ – into fighting men who are a ‘credit to the uniform’. Roberts is the particular object of Wilson’s attention because he is a ‘special’, part of the regular army, who showed the qualities that enabled him to be promoted to a non-commissioned officer but then reneged on them. (We learn later that Roberts defied an order he knew would result in the deaths of himself and the unit of men he was leading.) The climactic moment occurs after Roberts has been beaten up by two of Williams’s henchmen but is made to hobble out onto the parade ground by Wilson in a grotesque parody of army discipline. Filmed in tight close-up – their faces distorted by rage and hatred, emphasised by Lumet’s deliberate use of 18mm rather than 25mm lenses positioned low down59 – the two adversaries confront each other from their opposed positions: roberts: ‘Paid gunmen, that’s what we are.’ wilson: ‘Treason! You’re talking treason.’

To Wilson’s accusation, ‘What kind of soldier are you?’, Roberts is finally able to articulate the reasons for his attitude: ‘All I know is that I can’t do things that don’t make any sense to me anymore and you can. You can. You can live by the book. But it’s out of date. It’s stupid and out of date!’ During this scene, Connery uses deliberate pauses to convey Roberts’s effort to find the words that might express the passionate defiance of a man goaded into revolt by the weakness, corruption and stupidity of his superiors. His performance conveys Roberts’s struggle to shift from stubborn, immolated resentment to active dissent, described by Lumet as the change ‘from cop hater to rebel … What was a totally illogical and emotional act to him, is now repeated, only with thought and conscience because he now knows what he is doing … He is rebelling with thought this time.’ 60 What makes this extraordinary scene so memorable is the physical and emotional intensity generated by two accomplished actors who seem to be urging each other on to act without restraint yet without a shred of self-indulgence, absolutely subordinated to realising the conflict.61 The scene ends equally dramatically with a shock cut to a long shot that takes in the camp and the desert surrounding it, suggesting the futility

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of the struggle and its insignificance in the wider context of the war. The Hill – perhaps fatally for its box-office chances – is a study in futility. On the edge of triumph, with Wilson in retreat and Williams about to face disciplinary charges, King and McGrath beat up Williams in a misplaced act of comradeship. The film ends on a close-up of the pain-wracked Roberts sobbing in despair – ‘We won! We won!’ – as he sees their case against Williams disintegrating. Lumet changed the ending of the play in which the prisoners were victorious because ‘We know that in most areas the establishment really keeps control, and nobody is going to tell me that in an army, much less a prison, that isn’t going to happen … The ending was deliberately caustic.’ 62 The change of ending was presumably with Connery’s approval because he had embarked on a film that would prove his range as an actor rather than in anticipation of commercial returns: ‘Even if The Hill isn’t a success, does it matter? Some of the finest films ever made were not commercially successful. You don’t have to justify it.’ 63 The Hill was the first in a number of films that Connery made throughout his career for artistic reasons, whose values he espoused and which justified themselves through the satisfaction of their realisation, as he explained to Playboy’s readers: Even before being shown The Hill has succeeded for me, because I was concerned and fully involved in the making of it. The next stage is how it is exploited and received, and that I have absolutely no control over … But whatever happens to The Hill, it will not detract from what I think about it.64

With dialogue that is often difficult to follow even for British audiences – Hyman, respecting the film’s integrity, refused to sanction a dubbed version – and with a downbeat ending, The Hill was always unlikely to be a strong box-office proposition even with Connery’s presence. Although it did moderate business in the UK and in Europe, The Hill was not marketed actively by MGM in North America, where it garnered almost negligible audiences.65 Connery, involved in making Thunderball, was unable to play any part in its promotion.66 However, Connery’s hopes for The Hill’s ability to enhance his cultural capital were partially realised when it was chosen as the British entry at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival, sharing the award for Best Screenplay with France’s The 317th Platoon. Although it was Andrews’s superb performance as Wilson that received a BAFTA nomination, Connery would have been gratified by garnering almost unanimous praise from reviewers. One started his review ‘Anyone who thinks Sean Connery can’t act – and I admit I was one of them – should go and have their withers wrung by this devastating film and then apologise to Mr. C.’ He opined, ‘what tormented strength

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[Lumet] stimulates in Sean Connery. / It is a masterful portrayal of a caged and anguished human animal.’ 67 Another, considering ‘[p]ainful as it is to watch, this is a film to be glorified in’, admired Connery who, ‘with dark, sensitive eyes gazing steadily from his strong face, remind[s] us what a really splendid actor he is when allowed to escape from his stereotyped James Bond image’.68 A third judged that all the Bondian ‘sophistication has been stripped away, leaving [Connery] to build up the flesh of an entirely new characterisation on the bared bones’.69 A very different attempt to break the Bond shackles was A Fine Madness (1966), adapted by Elliott Baker from his well-received 1964 comic novel. Connery was attracted by the possibility of appearing in a comedy for the first time since On the Fiddle, one that was modern, brash and fast-moving with the opportunity to play another rebel figure, Samson Shillito, a workingclass New York East Side beat poet suffering from writer’s block, someone, Connery posited, ‘whose unorthodoxies society tries to suffocate. I thought it was worthwhile doing.’ 70 A Fine Madness is a curious mixture of sex comedy and 1960s counterculture.71 Shillito becomes embroiled in a series of farcical scenes whilst battling for the rights of the iconoclastic artist against an uncaring society, the prim conservatism of the women’s cultural group or the conformism of the middle-class psychiatrist (Patrick O’Neal) in his plush suburban sanatorium who attempts to cure him: ‘You protect what is … I envision what might be’, Shillito snarls. As commentators point out, A Fine Madness presents Shillito as both the opposite of Bond – and, dressed in tattered corduroys and frayed shirts, having traits of Connery himself – whilst at the same time possessing Bond’s irresistible attractiveness to women. Much time is devoted to his sexual encounters, including with the psychiatrist’s wife (Jean Seberg), to the consternation of his devoted and long-suffering wife, Rhoda (Joanne Woodward).72 Connery’s embodiment of this boorish, philandering and violently antisocial artist was enjoyable but broad-brush. A Fine Madness received a fairly warm reception in the States.73 The New York Times’s reviewer, giving the film ‘A for effort and a brash B for impudence’, thought Connery played Samson ‘well … with his shoulders slumped and that bonded dimple narrowed into a cynical crevasse’.74 However, British reviewers generally judged the film’s attempt to escape from Bond misjudged; one critic stated bluntly that Shillito ‘[n]ot only looks like a clod. He is a clod. And that means he isn’t funny. Or touching either.’ 75 The Times’s reviewer thought Connery was ‘not the ideal actor for the role: the phlegmatic quality which makes him such a good James Bond inhibits him from complete identification with Samson’s bull-in-a-china-shop view of life’.76 The Monthly Film Bulletin – which described A Fine Madness as ‘straddling a no-man’s land somewhere

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between the Nouvelle Vague and the crazy comedies of old Hollywood’ – thought that Connery ‘looks too bludgeonly for the creative thoughts he is credited with’.77

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Revenge on the Raj: Nine Tiger Man An insight into how Connery was perceived within Hollywood at this time and the kind of roles studios thought would be suitable is provided by an unrealised project, Twentieth Century-Fox’s intended adaptation of Lesley Blanch’s 1965 novel The Nine Tiger Man: A Tale of Low Behaviour in High Places, set in British India of the 1850s, to be directed by George Cukor. The production’s intended outcome can be traced through a scrutiny of Cukor’s papers that have never been used with regard to Connery’s career and which provide a rare archival source.78 Blanch’s novel is a sharply observed satire leavened by romance that centres round an exotic fantasy figure of limitless sexual potency, Rao Jagnabad, low-born but a maharaja’s adopted heir, handsome, a great hunter and highly sexually attractive, his jewel-encrusted body and peacock costumes adding to his eroticism. Having been humiliated when on a visit to England, Rao takes the opportunity, after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, to exact vengeance as he takes charge of two-dozen Englishwomen, marooned in the maharaja’s crumbling palace on a jungle-covered island in the middle of a lake: ‘He was systematically revenging himself and his race for many years of humiliation. He did not choose to make them grind corn, one of the Mutineers’ favourite methods of abasing the mem-sahibs. He had surer ways … [He] ruled as an absolute monarch in this kingdom of the senses.’ 79 The novel also provides two strong women’s roles: the Viscount’s daughter, Florence, with whom Rao falls in love and an ‘uninhibited’ chamber-maid, Rosie, who is the ultimate victor. Had Nine Tiger Man been made, it would have formed part of what Jeffrey Richards contends was a decisive shift in cinematic attitudes from the 1960s onwards in which depictions of the British empire changed from being ‘benevolent, wise and well-intentioned … [to] racist, snobbish, cruel and exploitative’.80 Cukor had directed Bhowani Junction (1956), which was mildly critical of British imperialism and which explored, in a rather anodyne way, miscegenation.81 The racist convention in which white British or European actors were expected to play Indian people still held during this period, an example being The Rains of Ranchipur that Fox had made in 1955 in which Richard Burton played a noble Indian doctor.82 According to unsigned notes in Cukor’s papers – probably by the film’s putative producer Gene Allen – Fox saw the role of Jagnabad as exploiting



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Connery’s image of sexual potency as Bond but also adding different dimensions, a part

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particularly well suited for Connery, but it has a much greater range than he has ever been called on to play. It will have tenderness, warmth, danger. It has a kind of pride and nobility because he is patriotic. It has a kind of impertinent sex appeal. The part has something very appealing – fresh, boyish, with defenses down. It has all this range to it.

In a revealing comment on what Fox considered to be Connery’s audience appeal, the author continues: Whereas the part is quite different from Bond, it will not disappoint his fans. I didn’t see THE HILL, but that was grim. The public doesn’t want to see him as a prisoner of war. In his next picture he played a poet in which I understand that he gave an extraordinary performance. But there was no contact with the audience. … They were disappointed because he showed none of the characteristics that made them like him.83

A Fox executive, Stuart Lyons, was the main negotiator with Hatton acting on Connery’s behalf; all Lyons’s communications to another executive, Owen McLean, are copied to Cukor, Allen and Fox’s head of production Richard Zanuck. Lyons reported that although Connery was ‘very interested in the project’, he refused to meet Cukor and Allen before he had read a full script.84 As with Hitchcock, Connery was unwilling to commit to a production, even with another high-status director, without the assurance that the script was satisfactory. At this point Zanuck stepped in directly, sending a cable to Hatton urging him to persuade Connery to consider appearing in ‘one of our biggest and most exciting pictures’ that contained a ‘part for Sean absolutely perfect’ (sic). Zanuck emphasises that not only has Terence Rattigan prepared the screenplay but that he considers it provides ‘the best leading man role he has ever written’. Zanuck adds that Cukor has ‘the greatest enthusiasm as we all do for Sean’, and that Shirley MacLaine will play one of the main women’s roles ‘and we will secure a comparable actress to play the other’.85 Negotiations dragged on and a telex from Lyons in February 1967 appraised the studio of Connery’s exacting demands: he had a maximum of eighteen available weeks and needed a definite date on which the production would be finished, wanted to be consulted about the casting of the major women’s roles, an adequate rehearsal period, a trip to India to ‘absorb atmosphere’, a living allowance of $1,500 per week and a salary of $1 million plus 10 per cent of the gross. Apparently Hatton conceded that Connery ‘has not received similar compensation before but claims he has an offer this amount [sic] for another picture’.86 McLean was outraged by these terms, arguing that the salary was $250,000 more than Fox had ever paid an actor and

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that it was impossible ‘to give a contractual stop date on a picture costing in excess of five million dollars’.87 At this point Fox withdrew its offer, hoping to go ahead with the secondchoice male lead, Albert Finney. Reflecting on what he called ‘l’affaire Connery’, Cukor describes a meeting he had in New York between himself, Connery and Hatton in December 1966, noting that Connery travelled at his own expense from Nassau as an indication of serious intent. Cukor found Connery ‘frank, warm and sensible. I could see facets of his personality that had never appeared in Bond. He was gay, endearing – qualities that could have been brought out – with skilful direction – that would have been very useful for the Rao, and most likely a pleasing revelation to himself.’ 88 Cukor agreed to revise the ending about which Connery had expressed misgivings, and states that terms were reached – ‘the best he’s ever had’ – and a production schedule set that suited Connery. Cukor undertook to have books sent to Connery so that he could undertake his customary background research.89 When the negotiations broke down subsequently following Connery’s increased demands detailed above, Cukor expressed surprise at Connery’s behaviour – ‘he has the reputation of being a straight shooter’. Cukor attributed this to Connery’s nervousness occasioned by his two previous box-office ‘disasters’ but reflected that ‘one would think that given a perfect part in a distinguished enterprise properly produced and directed would be important to him and a comfort’.90 In the absence of direct evidence one can only speculate about Connery’s reasons for turning down the role. It seems plausible that he would enjoy playing someone who becomes intent on giving the imperial English their comeuppance: one of the books he asked to be sent to him was Marx and Engels’s The First Indian War of Independence 1857–1859. Connery may have wondered about the box-office potential of a historical adventure film and had previously rejected Pass Beyond Kashmir; however, he would have recognised this was a prestige production and be sensible of Cukor’s continuing high reputation – he had just won an Oscar for My Fair Lady (1964) – and his ability to elicit strong performances from male as well as female stars.91 According to Cukor, in the New York meeting they seemed to have been in accord that Rao would be an acting challenge, one that would draw on different qualities and yet retain the potential to appeal to cinemagoers rather than thwart expectations in the way that The Hill and A Fine Madness had done. Did Connery overplay his hand in the increased salary demands – he was paid $750,000 for You Only Live Twice – or were they deliberately designed to enable Connery to escape his commitment by forcing Zanuck’s hand? Connery was keen to direct a play on Broadway – Ted Allen’s The Secret of the World – which may have increased his to reluctance to commit.92 There were also problems with Rattigan’s screenplay that Connery, of course,



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insisted on seeing.93 He may have wished for an extended break as filming You Only Live Twice lasted a staggering seven months until March 1967. Speculation aside, the abortive production provides insights into his star status and demonstrates that directors at least were thinking about how to modify or extend the Bond persona rather than, as Connery seemed intent on doing, overthrowing it altogether.

Attempting to maintain star status: Shalako, The Molly Maguires and The Anderson Tapes Whatever Connery’s motives for turning down Nine Tiger Man, his choice of non-Bond roles had been based on the security of his contract with Eon, however onerous that had become. After he had left the series following You Only Live Twice (1967) he became a freelance actor – discussed in detail in the next chapter – who had to earn a living and maintain his star status as well as try to forge an image that was distinct from Bond. The first attempt in these new conditions was Shalako (1968), billed as ‘Britain’s first excursion into making large-scale Westerns’, a package put together by the independent producer Euan Lloyd, who had been Cubby Broccoli’s personal assistant during his period at Warwick Films. Lloyd, finding that Connery was not considered good box-office by American studios except as Bond, put together the film’s finance by pre-selling a fantasy package of Connery and Brigitte Bardot – ‘the world’s sexiest man and woman’ – to thirty-six, mainly European, countries where there was much more enthusiasm.94 This, at the time, innovative strategy enabled Lloyd to raise a $7 million budget and offer Connery a $1.2 million salary together with 30 per cent of the profits.95 According to one account, Connery acted as the film’s co-producer to realise a picture he hoped ‘will bury Bond for good and all’.96 Shalako was based on a 1962 novel of the same title by the prolific and best-selling author Louis L’Amour, whose ‘vision of the western hero as infallible superman’ had appealed to Hollywood filmmakers in the 1950s, notably Hondo (1953), starring John Wayne.97 Connery was one of the very few British stars whose physique and strong masculine presence made him a plausible western hero and his enthusiasm for starring, in addition to the huge salary, may have been prompted by the prospect of making a series of films that could rival the ‘spaghetti’ westerns, beginning with A Fistful of Dollars (1964), that had made Clint Eastwood into a major star as the mysterious Man with No Name. L’Amour depicts his hero as a similarly enigmatic figure: ‘Lean as a famine wolf but wide and thick in the shoulder, the man called Shalako was a brooding man, a weary man, a man who

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trusted to no fate, no predicted destiny, nor any luck.’ 98 It was the character’s inscrutable taciturnity that Connery judged important and he resisted the screenwriters’ attempts to ‘give [Shalako] a lot of depth and background’ convinced his character should remain a ‘mysterious figure’.99 Eric Sykes, who played a minor role, recalled witnessing Connery going through the script on set and removing as much dialogue as possible.100 As usual, Connery made no concession to approximating an American accent, reasoning that there were ‘plenty of Scots immigrants in the West’.101 The story has a certain plausibility. Shalako, an experienced ex-army frontiersman knowledgeable about Indian ways, is drawn into protecting a party of European aristocrats, including Countess Irina (Bardot), visiting the Wild West in the 1880s to hunt game. However, although directed by the highly experienced Edward Dmytryk, Shalako is a dull and listless film whose action sequences never catch fire and the, much anticipated, frisson between Bardot and Connery never materialises. Roger Ebert commented, ‘the long-awaited meeting between [them] is a flop. They look yearningly at each other, and once he put his arms around her and they fall out of camera range, but otherwise no sparks are struck. Considering the resources they brought to their roles, we might have expected more.’ 102 In contrast to Eastwood’s mythic figure, Connery’s Shalako is stolidly prosaic, capable of tough action and a crack shot, but lacking mystery or Bond’s sardonic humour. He is also, as Christopher Bray points out, a reversion to an old-fashioned upright hero in a post-Vietnam era of revisionism for the western.103 The film attracted considerable interest and even two documentaries about its production – Gavin Millar’s Under Western Eyes, broadcast on BBC 2 on 15 June 1968 and Shalako Safari, narrated by Dmytryk, made by Dateline Film Productions. The Press Book, quoting one newspaper’s epithet, ‘Bond in Buckskin’, trumpeted, ‘Sean Connery is SHALAKO! SHALAKO means Action! Action means Bardot!’ The Daily Express’s reviewer thought Connery had ‘flashes of quiet strength on the screen that bring back memories of Gary Cooper’.104 However, Shalako was generally drubbed by reviewers: ‘Almost everything about Shalako is embarrassingly bad, so bad one is staggered by its uniform and unrelieved awfulness.’ 105 Bolstered by a succession of prestige premieres – in Munich, London, Glasgow and New York – Shalako was a modest commercial success, particularly in France where the Bardot cult was strongest, but its high production costs meant that the film failed to become profitable, thereby negating Connery’s percentage.106 Shalako did not trigger a succession of British-based European westerns or provide Connery with a viable alternative persona to Bond. The Molly Maguires (1970) was also a high-budget, prestigious production. Its director, Martin Ritt, had succeeded in convincing Robert Evans, the head of Paramount, that a historical drama about the conflict between

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management and labour set in the coal-mining belt of eastern Pennsylvania in the 1870s was worth an investment of $11 million. This enabled Ritt to offer Connery a salary of $1 million that placed him on a par with the top Hollywood stars.107 Correspondence in Ritt’s papers reveals that he had first approached Connery in late 1967 when Connery visited the set of Hombre in which his then-wife Diane Cilento co-starred with Paul Newman. Ritt wrote subsequently, ‘I feel there is a part in [The Molly Maguires] that would be marvellous for you.’ 108 With his usual circumspection, Connery replied, through his agent Hatton, ‘that it all depended on script and specifics’.109 The part on offer was Jack Kehoe, the leader of the Molly Maguires, one of several secret societies formed to contest British rule in Ireland – its name taken from a legendary Irish heroine who led a revolt of peasant farmers against rent collectors in the 1600s – that had been transplanted by the Irish who emigrated to work in the Pennsylvania coal mines. They used the sect as a cover for their rebellion against exploitation – low wages, atrocious working conditions, and high numbers of deaths and serious injuries – through acts of sabotage.110 Connery was also attracted to the part for reasons other than the salary. Ritt had forged a high reputation through a series of hard-hitting dramas such as Hud (1963) and Hombre that addressed political, historical and social issues and therefore the film had cultural prestige.111 His character’s determination to stand up for the working class and fight for social justice embodied the values that had informed Connery’s 1967 documentary The Bowler and the Bunnet about the Clydeside shipping industry discussed in Chapter 8, which had awakened his political consciousness. It was also the chance to explore his family roots as members of his family on his father’s side had worked in the American coal mines.112 It was perhaps this combination of factors that persuaded Connery to accept what Ritt had made clear was a ‘the second part in terms of size. Richard Harris will be playing the central role.’ 113 Harris plays Pinkerton Agency detective James McParlan, who worked undercover for two years to expose the miners’ leaders and served as chief prosecution witness at their trial in 1876–7. Screenwriter Walter Bernstein, who also co-produced with Ritt, was conscious that they wanted to make their villain sympathetic: We wanted to give [McParlan] the full benefit of his position, make him charming, courageous, daring, handsome, imaginative and enormously likable and put that in the service of something quite iniquitous. Not just make him the usual anti-hero who is really the hero. The difficulty has been how to keep it hard and truthful and unsentimental and yet in some kind of balance.114

Harris makes full use of this opportunity, fashioning McParlan as an empathetic character, confused and vulnerable as well as morally reprehensible,

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3.3  Connery as the unfathomable Jack Kehoe in The Molly Maguires (1970)

who is also struggling to make his way in a world that offers little: ‘I’m tired of looking up. I want to look down.’ In the scenes that depict his gradually unfolding love affair with Mary Raines (Samantha Eggar), McParlan has the space to express his hopes, dreams and desires. By contrast, Kehoe, the man of principle, is a brooding presence, dour and taciturn. Whereas Harris’s gestures and mannerisms as McParlan are expansive and energetic, as Kehoe Connery’s are kept deliberately minimal. Kehoe has the wary stillness and stiff gait of a man who knows he must be constantly watchful

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in order not to attract suspicion, animated by a simple, unambiguous and unbending creed: ‘There’s them on top and them below. Push up or push down. Who’s got more push? That’s all that counts.’ He has been scarred by the miners’ defeat in a failed strike – ‘They cracked the whip and we crawled’ – and knows that he cannot move on: ‘There’s nowhere else to go … There’s no choice. They’ve seen to that.’ Although Ritt’s choice of Connery was shrewd – he is one of the very few male actors who could project authority, conviction and power through his physical presence alone – in their desire to be fair to the informer, Connery is given very little material to work with. His relationship with his wife is barely sketched and the conflict between his deeply held Catholicism and his conviction that he must fight back against the bosses hardly explored, which leaves an audience to intuit his motivations. However, although there is an imbalance between the central male characters, Connery and Harris make good use of their scenes together to suggest a shared emotional need for a male comrade who is equal in intelligence, strength, courage and resourcefulness. The casting of two men who resemble each other in height, build and tough masculinity suggests that each is the mirror image of the other; Ritt often constructs tracking shots that show them paralleled visually.115 Their relationship is beautifully encapsulated in a brief scene in which they walk towards their dwellings after finishing a shift. Kehoe watches McParlan’s carefree, uninhibited exuberance as he takes part in the boys’ game of football, displaying an instinctive gregariousness that Kehoe cannot allow himself – when the ball comes to him, he merely boots it into the distance. As McParlan walks off, Kehoe tells his wife, who has witnessed the scene, ‘He’s bold. That’s not such a common sight these days, a bold man. He’s got a way with him.’ His wife, sensing immediately what has taken place – an instinctive, emotional bonding that overrides her husband’s long-held reserve and suspiciousness – replies, ‘That’s no reason to trust. Don’t get too fond of him, Jack.’ He casually dismisses the warning – ‘You wouldn’t trust the Pope himself’ – and in the process courts the disaster he has always feared. Their bonding is increased through the raids they conduct together and in the no-holds-barred football match, which showcases the muscular power of these highly physical actors to the admiring gaze of the womenfolk.116 It is deepened further following Kehoe’s outburst after the death of Mary’s father (Brendan Dillon), outraged at having witnessed the inaudible expiration of the man who taught him how to use explosives, defeated and subservient even in death. Temporarily unshackled, Kehoe goes on a rampage and, accompanied by McParlan, smashes the company store and redistributes the clothing and supplies before setting fire to it in an orgy of blissful destruction. In this superbly played encounter, each responds to the other’s gestures, culminating

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in Kehoe hugging McParlan in a rare gesture of spontaneous warmth and affection that underlines their symbolic brotherhood, visually heightened by being shot against the cleansing flames. Through the power of their well-matched acting, the male relationship – each embodies an antithetical view of how to achieve self-advancement in a new society – occupies the centre of the drama, not McParlan’s romance with Mary. Hence the final scene is not her rejection of him after he had betrayed the miners by testifying in court but a few days later when McParlan visits Kehoe in his condemned cell. Harris shifts around, uneasy, unsure, looking for a sign that some affection remains, investing the delivery of his lines with a genuine bewilderment: ‘Do you really think you could have won?’ Connery is still and solid, certain of his ground so much so that he is able to permit a warm, tender recollection that the rebels, temporarily, won McParlan over, that he enjoyed ‘pushing a little’ himself against the bosses, the lines delivered with the broad smile that has been so rarely glimpsed. Yet, as McParlan gratefully responds to what appears to be a resumption of their former intimacy, Kehoe delivers his judgement – ‘You think punishment will set you free. And that’s why you’ve come, looking for punishment’ – and springs at McParlan in a glimpse of that ‘tensile strength’ that was part of Connery’s power as an actor. Although clubbed to the ground by the guards, physically defeated and on the point of death, Kehoe has attained a decisive emotional and moral ascendency over the venal informer: ‘Are you free now? Have I set you free for a grand new life? … You’ll never be free. There’s no punishment this side of hell can free you from what you did.’ As a chastened and defeated McParlan shambles out past the gallows that will be used to hang the men the following day, the screen goes black. Paramount’s ‘Management Summary’ of preview audiences revealed that even ‘the young and highly educated’ who had ‘sympathy with the film’s social protest theme and appreciated The Molly Maguires’ honesty and realism’, thought it ‘fails to deliver on entertainment or excitement’; in addition, only Connery of the three leads had a ‘marquee value’.117 This compounded the studio’s uncertainty about how to market Ritt’s film – lengthy, complex and with a downbeat ending – with the result that it was released without proper promotion.118 When initial reviews proved lukewarm, the studio pulled the film and later re-released it as part of a double bill, causing Ebert to comment on America’s ‘cruelly arbitrary film distribution system’.119 Given these obstacles, it is unsurprising that The Molly Maguires was a box-office disaster, returning a mere $1.1 million, thus losing $9.9 million and gaining an unwelcome notoriety.120 This was a huge disappointment to Ritt, which he kept returning to in subsequent interviews. His diagnosis was that The Molly Maguires was too ambiguous ‘because the leading

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character, instead of being painted black or white, was painted grey, purposefully. For an audience – a movie audience – it was too complicated. They didn’t know who the hero of the film was. And many of them didn’t agree with what Sean Connery represented.’ 121 Connery’s retrospective judgement was that the film lacked humour: ‘It had a good script and a good cast. It was well-intentioned, and a good film, really. But it never caught fire. One reason was the fear that humour might intrude, whereas in actual fact it can enhance the situation.’ 122 Reflecting on Ritt’s and Bernstein’s own former blacklisting, Connery sensed that the filmmakers had been wary of getting ‘too close to the sympathies of the character I was playing because he might have been identified with un-American activities’.123 Despite its poor box-office performance, The Molly Maguires was another film in which Connery’s strengths as an actor were widely admired, although reviewers clearly discerned the film’s central weakness. Derek Malcolm judged that although the rebels’ issues and motivations are never clearly explained, Connery ‘surpasses himself as the hard, shy Irish Catholic who risks excommunication in his dogged fight against oppression’.124 Pauline Kael thought Connery had ‘admirable screen presence – grace as well as strength – [and] gives a sure and intelligently contrasting performance … even though it’s an almost unwritten role and we never discover what’s in his head or how he thinks his explosions will feed his family’.125 Time’s reviewer praised a performance which ‘proves that after years of James Bondage he is one of the most underrated stars, an actor of tightly controlled power and technical accomplishment’.126 Several critics picked up on the importance of the central male relationship. Tom Milne opined, ‘Beautifully played by Harris and Connery, the two men are really two facets of the same personality, and the odd abrasive friendship that springs up between them is totally convincing … the whole purpose of the film is to underline the moral ambivalence of both characters.’ 127 Thus reviewers anticipated Ritt’s retrospective judgement that the film’s emotional power is at odds with its ideological conception to present Kehoe as the hero whose struggle against exploitation – which in Ritt’s view led directly to the formation of subsequent labour organisations including the United Mine Workers of America union – would find its vindication and fulfilment in future generations.128 Connery knew that ‘nobody eats notices’ and that, especially as he was now a freelance actor, the scale of The Molly Maguires’ commercial failure meant that he needed a hit in order to sustain his reputation as a bankable star away from Bond. Hence his decision to star in what was a much more straightforwardly commercial proposition, The Anderson Tapes (1971), an adaptation of Lawrence Sanders’s best-selling novel marketed as ‘The Most Dazzling Crime Caper of the Year!’ 129 Lumet was an obvious choice to

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direct a film that emphasises its New York City locations, but despite the major studios’ conviction that Connery was only marketable as Bond, independent producer Robert M. Weitman considered Connery was ‘perfect’ for the main character, the serial criminal John ‘Duke’ Anderson.130 Anderson, released from prison after a ten-year stretch, decides to burgle the entire fashionable New York City apartment block where his girlfriend, Ingrid (Dyan Cannon), lives as the mistress of a rich businessman, whom she quickly throws over once reunited with Anderson’s irresistible sexual appeal; he chooses Labor Day when the usual vigilance would be lessened and assembles a motley crew of accomplices to execute the robbery. The Anderson Tapes is, in retrospect at least, a curious film, which hovers uneasily between a humorous, occasionally playful caper film, a fashionable sub-genre in the 1960s, and a more serious study of emerging fears about the pervasiveness of new forms of electronic surveillance in all walks of life.131 It also has an undercurrent of rebelliousness that may well have attracted Connery to the role. In the deliciously comic opening scene, Anderson, rousing himself from the inanity of a prison psychotherapy group, protests, ‘What is the stock market but legalised robbery?’ Responding enthusiastically to such observations, the Morning Star’s critic thought Connery had ‘an agreeable blend of weary intelligence, schoolboy adventurism and smouldering inner rage, [and] is blessed with a strong vein of social consciousness’.132 British reviewers were, in general, impressed by Connery’s attempts at a very American characterisation complete with accent and responded to his character’s lack of urbanity and style; George Melly enthused, ‘Sean Connery, un-toupéed and a bit out of condition, is excellent as Anderson.’ 133 American reviewers were even more positive. The New York Daily News reviewer considered that Anderson, ‘loaded with sex appeal’, was Connery’s best role since Goldfinger.134 In their conspectus of Connery’s films, Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa contend that Anderson was ‘one of the most charismatic roles of his career’ and argue that ‘[i]t is difficult to overstate’ the film’s significance for Connery because its success proved to a sceptical American industry ‘that the actor had box-office clout away from the world of Bond’.135 In the event this judgement was untested because of the announcement that Connery would return as Bond in Diamonds Are Forever.

‘The best thing I’ve ever done’: The Offence Starring in a sixth Bond film of course restored Connery’s market value and, as discussed in the previous chapter, part of the deal he exacted from David Picker was that UA would fund two films of his own choosing, provided the budgets were under $1 million. The Offence (1973) was intended

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to be the first of those and it is instructive that in the film over which Connery had most creative control he chose to play a character who is the antithesis of Bond. The Offence was an adaptation of a play, This Story of Yours, by John Hopkins, in which Connery would star as a mid-career police officer, a disillusioned veteran of twenty years on the force, ‘ten of them stuck at Detective-Sergeant’, going through a traumatic psychological breakdown as he confronts a suspected paedophile. Connery, unable to appear in the stage version at the Royal Court in December 1968 because of film commitments, had wanted to make a screen version of Hopkins’s play, having been deeply impressed by its exploration of ‘areas that people just don’t get into films as a rule: the sex and the drives that go on in the mind’.136 However, his previous attempts had come up against ‘reluctance from the higher echelons, as usual’.137 In order to make this film, Connery formed his own production company, Tantallon Films, with Hatton, who switched from agent to freelance producer, another independent producer, Dennis O’Dell, and Eon’s production manager, Stanley Sopel.138 Connery involved himself in all aspects of the production including choosing the cast, working with Hopkins on the screenplay and hiring Lumet to direct, with whom he had worked successfully on two previous occasions. Lumet had a deep respect for Connery’s acting capabilities, especially his willingness to take risks: ‘I felt there was almost no telling where he’d go.’ 139 Lumet spent three weeks of the film’s ten-week shooting schedule at Twickenham Studios in rehearsal so that the actors knew ‘precisely where they are in terms of the character and development and the relationship to the whole piece’.140 The central character, Detective-Sergeant Johnson, was an exacting role requiring the ability to convey a range of emotions and psychological depth as the character grapples with feelings he can neither understand nor control. The Offence became Connery’s opportunity to see how far he could go as an actor, testing his capacity to play the most demanding roles. Johnson is the most unattractive character Connery ever created, seedy, embittered and resentful, who behaves with a truculent, abrasive selfrighteousness, bullying his fellow officers and intimidating and upbraiding witnesses, whom he treats with contempt. In his ill-fitting suit under a cheap sheepskin coat, battered deerstalker rammed on his head, mouth curling under the heavy moustache, Johnson is a cynical middle-aged man whose life holds no meaning or satisfaction. Connery habitually adopts a hunched posture and uses jabbing gestures that are ugly and frightening, embodying a big, clumsy, aggressive man with a short fuse, whose size and strength have become a burden to him. Our introduction to Johnson comes in the film’s disorientating opening in which a blank white screen and the sounds of discordant music gradually dissolve to reveal a scene of chaos and confusion

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in a police station as figures rush, but in slow-motion as if in a dream, to an interrogation room at the centre of which Johnson, legs apart, fists balled at his sides as if ready for attack, is standing over the body of the suspected paedophile he has just severely beaten, intoning, ‘Oh my God. My God.’ The scene evokes a state of moral and ethical ambivalence in which Johnson is both the source of violence and the victim of forces within himself that he cannot control. Unlike the play’s conventional three-part structure, the rest of the film uses an extended flashback to explore the events that have led to this crisis. On one level, Johnson is a victim whose instability is the result of the horrors of police work, the memories of past cases whose outcome he was unable to alter or affect: ‘Lonely streets … silent, empty, people dying, no one … bloody dying … no one … Oh, I’ve seen it.’ As Johnson drives home having been suspended pending an investigation of his actions, Lumet uses film noir iconography – a blurred oneiric journey along rain-soaked, neon-lit streets – to offer a visual correlative to the thoughts that are tormenting Johnson. Through a series of shock cuts, Lumet provides glimpses of horrifying and deeply disturbing fragments of the violent, macabre and erotic images – victims’ dismembered and abused bodies – that fuel Johnson’s fevered imagination.141 However, Johnson’s attempts to deal with these traumatic events reveal his misogyny and aggression. In one distressing scene he berates and bullies his long-suffering wife, Maureen (Vivien Merchant), for being unattractive and unresponsive to his sexual needs, revealing his deep-seated hatred and fear of women. At one point, stretching his powerful body over Maureen’s as if about to violate or strangle her, Johnson imagines the paedophile ‘looking down on their bodies, white bodies, pressing down on them, forcing himself as she screams’. It is Johnson’s identification with the paedophile he is supposedly investigating that provides the most disturbing motif the film explores. As he participates in the hunt for the paedophile’s latest victim, Johnson breaks off from the main party as if guided by instinct for where the girl might be, which connects him, unnervingly, with her attacker. When he locates the victim, his reaction is a disturbing mixture of tenderness and relish in the power he has over her. Lingering too long and taken by surprise by the glare of the searchlights when the other policemen arrive, Johnson seems to be ‘caught in the act’, suggesting that the man they are hunting might be Johnson himself.142 Johnson’s uncertainty about his motivations and actions keeps resurfacing during his interrogation by the investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Cartwright (Trevor Howard), in which he returns obsessively to the moment in which he found the victim and re-enacts the crime, smashing his head on the desk crying, ‘Try to help me. Help me.’ As Adrian Schober discerns, Johnson unconsciously replaces

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3.4  Seedy, psychologically disturbed and out of control: Connery as DetectiveSergeant Johnson in The Offence (1973)

‘fact with pedophiliac fantasy. He imagines himself stroking [the victim’s] hair and face, while she smiles up at him ambiguously, combining youthful innocence with knowing sexuality.’ 143 These horrifying ambiguities act as preludes to the climactic encounter with the suspected paedophile, Baxter (Ian Bannen), in a glaringly lit interrogation room with its jumble of cheap furniture. Their lengthy encounter is characterised by the constantly shifting relationship between these two contrasting figures: the working-class policeman whose instinct is to use violence and pain to intimidate his opponent; and the well-bred, articulate, middle-class suspect who relies on superior intelligence to protect himself from physical assault. In the ensuing confrontation, each becomes the other’s confessor – Baxter about being bullied and his suppressed homoerotic encounters, Johnson the torment of his repressed paedophilia – each seeking a kind of absolution which the other denies. In an extraordinary moment, Johnson, his voice shaking, buries his head in Baxter’s chest as he cries out for release from the ‘[t]houghts in my head’. Baxter, sensing his opportunity, uses this moment to press home his advantage: ‘What a mess you must be. Nothing I have done can be half as bad as the thoughts in your head, things you want to do … Don’t beat me for thoughts in your head, things you want to do.’ It is Baxter’s accompanying derisive laughter that triggers the fatal assault. Throughout the interrogation scenes Lumet keeps the camera at a low angle

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to emphasise Connery’s bulk, which becomes terrifying as Johnson moves clumsily, overturning chairs and tables, towards the smaller man: ‘I’ll pull your head off your shoulders. I’ll break your legs in half.’ Reflecting back on what he has done, Johnson recognises a moment of terrible catharsis. Connery deliberately makes his delivery hesitant, yearning, repetitious as he tries to get to ‘something like the truth’ (the film’s working title): ‘Every single thing I’ve ever felt, wanted to feel … in one moment … hitting him. I had to hit him. What he could give me, sitting there letting me hit him. I wanted that.’ In killing Baxter, Johnson is attempting the futile task of eradicating those thoughts by slaying his dark self. The film ends where it began with a close-up of Johnson’s devastated face, refusing any easy resolution or closure, leaving open whether Baxter is guilty or the victim of Johnson’s paedophilic fantasies, which he may even have enacted. Connery considered his performance ‘the best thing I’ve ever done’.144 His judgement was echoed by Alexander Walker, who considered The Offence was ‘not an easy film to follow and for most people it may be too brutal and rawly inaccessible to take to heart’.145 David Robinson thought The Offence provided a ‘wonderful’ part in which Connery, ‘liberated for once from action roles, conveys the sense of a man wracked by a terrible unseen destruction going on within him’.146 Connery understood the difficulties The Offence would have in finding a cinemagoing audience: ‘I will be interested in how the public takes it. It’s painful … Some people may detest [my] character … The British have always been so anti-analysis in every sense of the word, but this film goes into analysis of why the detective became what he is.’ 147 Stephen Farber, entitling his review ‘If You Expect James Bond You’re in for a Shock’, commented that The Offence must be one of the most relentlessly bleak and dour movies ever released by a major studio … [It] makes no concessions to the audience or studio executives – no gags, sensational thrills, no romantic interest, no facile, convenient explanation for the horrors we are asked to contemplate. The film, in other words, has integrity – the hardest commodity to market these days.148

He noted that UA ‘seems already to have given up; the movie recently opened here without warning and closed just as suddenly two weeks later’.149 Whereas he had full control over its production, Connery had no control over The Offence’s exhibition and distribution. Eight months elapsed between its completion and release in January 1973. UA’s decision to give the film a premiere at the Leicester Square Odeon was strongly criticised by Connery, who felt it should have had a ‘small picture’ release at selected cinemas and built up an audience: ‘Cries and Whispers played in London at the Curzon, which caters for a certain kind of audience. So the film had a start – a foothold on its own kind of public … the Odeon Leicester Square … was



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just too big.’ 150 Lumet was similarly scathing about The Offence’s US release in May 1973:

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it played seven days in New York, and I don’t think UA spent $3,000 advertising it; they had no faith in the picture, and when it got marvellous reviews they decided they had to be right so they didn’t support it … they’re embarrassed at having been wrong, so in order to prove they’re right they’re just as happy to let it collapse commercially, to justify the way they opened it.151

Without proper promotion or distribution – it was not even shown in some European countries, notably France where it might have been expected to elicit interest – The Offence, irrespective of the demands it made of audiences, stood little chance of commercial success. It was obviously a film UA was prepared to dump and UA’s failure to promote the film a cynical exercise in intransigent corporate power. UA did not encounter similar issues with the second film it had agreed to finance, which was never produced. Connery wished to make a biopic about Sir Richard Burton, scripted by Hopkins, but this had to be abandoned when Connery realised that it could not be made for under $1 million.152 Burton was an interesting choice, a maverick scholar-adventurer, soldier, scientist, explorer, writer and undercover agent whose works and letters extensively criticised the colonial policies of the British empire. It would have provided a different role for Connery than the conventional action-adventurer, and Hopkins’s screenplay would undoubtedly have explored Burton’s unconventional sexual appetites and lifelong interest in erotic literature.153

Actor in search of a persona Harry Saltzman thought Connery ‘could be bigger than Clark Gable ever was if he switched to romantic he-man roles. But poor Sean is trying to be so unBondlike he doesn’t know what parts to take any more.’ 154 On one level Saltzman was correct, Connery’s choice of non-Bond roles after Marnie was dictated by their distance from Bond’s amoral glamour and he seems to have shied away from the offer of a ‘romantic he-man role’ by refusing Cukor’s overtures for Nine Tiger Man. His choices were a heterogeneous mixture, some strongly British – The Hill and The Offence – others frankly American, A Fine Madness and The Anderson Tapes, indicative of Connery’s transnational status. However, what Saltzman’s patronising comment failed to recognise was Connery’s determination to demonstrate his range and accomplishments as an actor, which Bond had stifled. In the two roles over which he had most creative control – The Hill and The Offence – he played characters that were antithetical to Bond. Both were adaptations of plays,

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drawing on his theatrical training and emphasising character interaction rather than plot, ensemble pieces in which Connery was not the star in the conventional sense but a character actor, submerging himself in roles that had depth and complexity in films whose subject matter was disturbing and challenging for audiences. They were not star-building roles but artistic films, stimulating to make and with their own integrity irrespective of their commercial prospects, the cinematic equivalent of returning to the stage through which his contemporaries Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole refreshed their craft.155 They provide an image of the actor Connery might have been and the roles he could have taken but for Bond.156 However, the fact that they were made at all was predicated on Connery playing Bond. And his deeper problem was that he had no persona outside that figure on which to build audience expectation and loyalty and create a different bond between himself and cinemagoers. In particular it seems that audiences were not prepared to accept Connery playing flawed, unsympathetic or even repellent characters. Andrew Rissik, reflecting on seeing Connery’s films of this period in cinemas, averred, ‘whatever the film-makers may have intended, audiences had really just been sitting there waiting for Connery to hit someone and say something funny as his victim flew head-first through a wall … this was what you paid money to see Connery do’.157 In his review of The Anderson Tapes for the Spectator, Tony Palmer judged that Connery does his best to escape that confounded image. He adopts a Yankee accent which only occasionally slips. He looks mean and has obviously never heard of a dry martini, shaken or stirred … One is forever waiting for ‘M’ to appear out of the skies and tell 007 that it will be all right.158

Connery experienced the dilemma faced by all major stars who become strongly associated with playing a particular type. In her analysis of another major 1960s star, Paul Newman, Christine Becker argues that although Newman fought the star system, he was bound by it because when he departed from his established image, his films were financial failures. Although Newman ‘could try to push the boundaries of the star system, his fanbase had the power at the box office to rein him back in’.159 The problem for Connery was even more acute. He was not a star as Sean Connery but as James Bond, hence the relentless search that Saltzman identified. Connery needed to square the circle, to find roles that would not only be satisfying acting challenges but box-office successes, to sustain his status as a major international star without playing Bond by creating a persona that was independent of Fleming’s iconic character. The search for this new persona is the subject of the next chapter, which explores in detail the challenges Connery faced as he became a fully freelance star in the 1970s.

4

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Freelance star, 1974–83

The actor’s relation to the public is that of an artist, but in relation to his employer, he is a productive labourer. (Karl Marx, 1863)1

Film stardom in the 1970s – freelance stars and the rise of the agent Because the ‘Bond phenomenon’ generated its own sub-industry, almost its own world, Connery had been insulated from the general ebbs and flows of the film industry through to the release of The Offence in 1973 financed by Bond money. After that, having, as he thought, turned his back on playing Bond, he faced the challenge of securing star roles on the open market but without having established a post-Bond persona. Thus, understanding Connery’s career during this period – 1974–83 – requires a broader perspective than the one adopted in the previous two chapters, contextualising his activities within the wider setting of the international film industry and the general nature of stardom in the ‘post-studio’ period. As a transnational star, Connery continued to make both British and American films but decided to distance himself physically from both industries. In 1974 he sold his Chelsea home and bought a villa in Marbella. This gave him, as he saw it, increased independence – he had never been part of the British acting fraternity and had no interest in joining the Bel Air Hollywood elite – and privacy, but it also boosted his earning power. Connery reasoned, ‘I didn’t take a long time mulling over it. It was really a series of events – the 98 per cent income tax I was paying and the possibility of making three films outside the UK, which meant I was not going to be here for 36 weeks of the year.’ 2 Several other major British stars – including Richard Burton, Michael Caine and Roger Moore – also relocated abroad at this time. The continued success of the Bond films had shielded Connery from an international film industry that was in recession. The American finance that had sustained British feature filmmaking in the 1960s was suddenly withdrawn, leaving an increasingly insular industry no longer producing films,

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with occasional exceptions such as the Bond series, that could contain a star of Connery’s magnitude.3 The Hollywood studios had cut back on British production following the catastrophic slump in profits; the majors experienced losses of at least $600 million between 1969 and 1971.4 Although the number of films made was reduced significantly, production costs rose relentlessly during the decade from an average of $1.97 million in 1972 to $11.34 in 1981.5 Escalating costs were partly the result of an exponential rise in marketing budgets as each film tried to find an audience.6 However, by the mid-1970s the industry re-stabilised around the blockbuster as the major studios became absorbed in multinational conglomerates.7 Being Bond had also delayed Connery’s exposure to the major change in the occupation of stardom, the shift from contracted to freelance labour. The ‘Paramount Decree’ of 1949, which ended Hollywood studios’ vertical integration, started a gradual process in which stars were no longer organised and managed by the studios under long-term contracts but became freelancers who worked, usually on a film-by-film basis, for various independent production companies. In the most detailed account of this shift, Denise Mann discusses the ways in which this ‘historic break’ in the organisation of stardom formed part of a broader set of changes in which the pre-war volume production with guaranteed distribution and exhibition was replaced by one-off ‘package productions’ in which studios negotiated deals with independent producers who assembled the above-the-line talent for each individual film using the whole industry rather than a single studio as the labour pool; by 1957, 71 per cent of all studio releases were independently produced.8 The ‘post-studio’ system offered enhanced opportunities and greater creative control to top-line stars, who often formed their own production companies. Although, as had happened in Connery’s case with Twentieth Century-Fox, studios continued to offer long-term contracts in the 1950s, by 1965 the era of contract stardom in Hollywood was over.9 However, as Mann argues, these changed conditions afforded stars a ‘highly circumscribed independence’ because the majors continued to provide production finance and distribution, which included control of films’ promotion and exploitation and the terms offered to exhibitors.10 And, even though the pressures to conform to a set type lessened once stars were no longer under exclusive contracts with a studio, Jeanine Basinger contends that audiences continued to expect stars to play certain types of role.11 As discussed in the previous chapter, the key challenge for Connery was to find public acceptance in non-Bond roles. In these changed conditions, Connery, like all stars, changed from being a cultural labourer to an entrepreneur of his own image, one who had to take charge of every aspect of his career.12 He had to navigate a reconfigured system in which the Hollywood majors became primarily financiers,

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distributors and promoters rather than producers, their leadership altered to a ‘mélange of agents, lawyers, bankers and business executives who saw filmmaking primarily as an investment strategy’.13 However, these new top executives had, if anything, more belief than their predecessors that stars were essential to a film’s commercial success and thus in their decision whether or not to greenlight a production, ‘it became an article of faith … that successful movies needed stars to provide a hedge against risk’.14 The key control mechanism was no longer the contract but ‘the deal’; deal-making replaced filmmaking as Hollywood’s principal activity.15 Each film became the outcome of long, often fractious, negotiations ‘to establish whether, and on what terms, and with whom, it would be made’.16 In these discussions, the pivotal figure was the agent, responsible for negotiating favourable production deals for their clients in what became an increasingly competitive marketplace.17 Agents filled the production vacuum left by the studios, becoming the new power brokers as primary suppliers of talent and story material in the form of an enticing package of a property (usually a bestselling novel or play), writer, director, producer and stars.18 In the process, agents’ status was transformed ‘from unmitigated scoundrel to sophisticated businessman’.19 The most successful, Lew Wasserman, took over a studio: Universal.20 As the volume of production declined, the success or failure of each individual film became more significant, no longer able to be crosscollateralised within a studio’s portfolio of productions. Thus, producers, stars and agents all came to recognise that it was the financial success of each film that guaranteed their ‘independence’.21 As freelancers, stars now had to ‘manage themselves as a business’, employing agents, managers, lawyers, publicists, security staff, script developers, writers and style guides, all of which had been paid for previously by the studios.22 Although, as noted, Connery was temperamentally reluctant to ‘manage himself as a business’ and refused to surround himself with an entourage of intermediaries, he recognised the heightened importance of having a commercially knowledgeable and well-connected agent. After Richard Hatton had moved into independent production after co-producing The Offence, Connery joined the agency run by Dennis Selinger, one of the most powerful agents working in Britain during this period, who represented Michael Caine, Roger Moore, David Niven, Peter Sellers and many other top-line stars. Selinger, known as the ‘Silver Fox’ for his shrewd dealings, was well respected and extremely active on his clients’ behalf. The A-list Hollywood stars also established their own production companies. Despite his success, Connery did not have the same power as the major Hollywood stars, such as Kirk Douglas or Burt Lancaster, whose Los Angeles-based production companies were much better placed to attract talent and finance and could take advantage of the favourable tax incentives that encouraged

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American entrepreneurial endeavour, but which were not available in Britain.23 Connery’s company, Tantallon Films, was part of an exceptional, one-off deal financed by the UA deal to entice Connery back to play Bond in Diamonds Are Forever. As a consequence, the failure to produce a second film meant the dissolution of Tantallon. The lack of a stable contract or a production company often foreshortened career planning. Connery, like many other freelance stars, had to accept roles that gave him an immediate opportunity rather than solid development.24 Connery found, again like the majority of stars, that it became difficult to preserve a sense of continuity to his career without even ‘the momentum which the studio publicity machine had provided’.25 The importance of agents will become evident in what follows, but Connery was always known as a self-willed star who tried consistently to maintain his independence in choosing roles and whose motivations were rarely simply commercial. During this period Connery persisted in trying to develop and test himself as an actor, to take roles that were challenging, and to appear in films that piqued his interest and appealed to his values, or ones that reflected his desire to work with talented directors whom he admired. He continued to be willing to take creative risks by accepting parts more selfprotective actors would have turned down. Connery commented at the time that ‘the more diverse the parts you play, the more stimulating it is and, in turn, the wider the experience, so there’s even more you can play’.26 As one biographer notes, Connery was attracted to films with well-written scripts but which also pose moral or ethical questions in which ‘it’s not so much what’s said that matters as what’s revealed’.27 His choices during this period therefore often represent a strong continuity with the non-Bond films of the previous ‘decade’. Opportunities to play interesting roles became available to Connery, despite the economic constraints described above, because of the impact of the cultural changes that produced what is usually referred to as the ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ (1967–75), a period which was strongly marked by disillusionment with American values in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate.28 In his seminal A Cinema of Loneliness, Robert Kolker characterises this as a period of neo-modernist experimentation at an aesthetic and thematic level in which conventional genres were rethought.29 Robert Ray identifies the production of numerous ironic, satiric and iconoclastic films that espoused a ‘growing self-consciousness about received myths’, a deep-rooted distrust of institutions and a ‘growing discrepancy between reality and the role that myth assumed’.30 Directors were given the space to explore these issues because, as John Boorman observed, ‘There was a complete loss of nerve by the American studios at this point. They were so confused and uncertain as to what to do, they were quite willing to cede power to the directors.’ 31

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In what follows I discuss in detail the ways in which Connery adjusted to the demands of being a freelance star, intertwined with detailed scrutiny of his performances through which one can assess his development as an actor. The initial section discusses the films Connery made in the first half of the decade with four auteur directors working on quite personal projects who managed to get their ambitious films funded during a period in which the corporate power of the studios had weakened. The second section examines his work on more corporate, producer-led projects after the studios began to exert greater control, a period during which Selinger’s influence was stronger. This division is not absolute but expresses a significant change. The third main section discusses Connery’s reason for changing agents – to Michael Ovitz and the Creative Artists Agency – and why, despite all his efforts to escape Bondage, he decided to return as 007 in the appropriately named Never Say Never Again. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the consequences of that decision.

The mythic hero It was Boorman, a British director with a reputation for making thoughtprovoking and often highly unusual films, who provided Connery’s first opportunity to play a mythic hero in Zardoz (1974). Although Twentieth Century-Fox did not interfere with Boorman in the making of this dystopian fantasy in which he was able to exercise absolute creative control as writerdirector-producer, nevertheless, as with Connery and The Offence, Fox insisted on a comparably tight budget of $1.57 million.32 Burt Reynolds, one of the stars of Boorman’s previous film, Deliverance (1972), was to have played the central character but became incapacitated through illness. Fox asked Boorman to consider Richard Harris because they thought Connery was ‘too closely associated with 007 to play other roles’.33 However, Boorman held out for Connery precisely because, as he commented at the time, he wanted to incorporate the ‘James Bond myth figure … in another kind of myth … [one who], in achieving his objective, destroys what he was’.34 Connery made a very quick decision to star as the central character, Zed, for a tiny salary of $100,000, because of Zardoz’s focus on social and cultural issues rather than ‘space ships, rockets and all that … The ways different levels and types evolve in the script is intriguing and refreshing.’ 35 In accepting the role, Connery was also prepared not only to sport a braided ponytail and thick moustache but to wear an extraordinary outfit: ammunition belt crossed over his naked torso, thigh-length boots and short red pants. Boorman marvelled at the ‘risk and daring’ of a man prepared to ‘spend eight weeks in a scarlet diaper’ in an arctic Irish spring.36 He commented,

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‘There are very few actors who could have worn that costume. Sean has this amazing presence, amazing body. He’s such a source of power.’ 37 Zardoz, set in 2293, depicts a sealed technological commune, the Vortex, whose members, the Eternals, have discovered the secret of eternal life. The underclass Brutals, survivors of a devastated world, are forced to grow food for the Eternals by an elite group of hunters, the Exterminators, at the behest of Zardoz, a giant floating stone head, which supplies them with guns in exchange for grain. Zed, leader of the Exterminators, succeeds in penetrating the Vortex, without realising he has been selectively bred by a renegade Eternal, Frayn, in order to break open this enclosed, sterile, selfperpetuating world, bringing the violence, sexual potency and death that can lead to regeneration. As Zed, Connery exudes Bond’s insolent virility as he bounds and slides around the Wicklow Hills near Boorman’s house, where Zardoz was filmed, with his characteristic sensual grace, or stands brazenly beside Consuella (Charlotte Rampling), the most aloof and hostile of the Eternals, as she lectures about the erectile properties of the penis. Initially, Zed is Bond reduced to his basic elements, violence and the sexual urge. But, like all Boorman’s heroes, he is a seeker of truth, and in the process of destroying the Vortex recreates himself, becoming ‘the new Zed – a man filled with knowledge, who held compassion and disgust at killing’.38 Connery’s performance combines Zed’s potent physical presence with a capacity for enlightenment and understanding, conveyed beautifully in the scene where, having just entered the Vortex, he moves around Frayn’s attic wordlessly, examining each object. Deliberately not cutting to the objects themselves, Boorman frames Connery in medium shot as his mobile expression registers curiosity, wonder, perplexity, amusement, disbelief, wariness and uncertainty as Zed probes the secret of the Eternals’ power.

4.1  ‘A fertility god with brains’: Connery as Zed in Zardoz (1974)

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It is difficult to imagine Reynolds being able to convey Zed’s sceptical intelligence as well as his sexual potency; Boorman mused, ‘I lost the Jack and pulled out the King.’ 39 He reflected that not only did Connery’s assured masculine power give him the ‘confidence to expose his poetic, feminine side’ – which had also been evident in his performance in The Bacchae – but the role spoke to the mysticism inherent in his Celtic heritage.40 Boorman judged that Connery’s immediate empathy for the part – ‘from the first moment he read the script’ – was because ‘something in his own Celtic nature perhaps helped him share my imaginative wavelength’.41 Boorman thought Connery’s performance ‘was a revelation. He’s half Irish and half Scottish – there’s something mystical about him which was just waiting to be brought to the surface.’ 42 For Boorman, liberating this ‘mystical’ quality enabled Connery to embody a post-Bond myth figure, symbolised by the shattering of his old self and his recreation as a man who has recognised his nurturing side. The final scene shows his union with Consuella and the restoration of the natural processes of death and new life. Their son grows and then departs as their bodies age, decaying into dust and finally a trace on a rock. Zardoz, a densely complex film overloaded with concepts and allusions that are only available after several viewings, taxed reviewers, most of whose comments were quite negative, finding the film more confusing than exciting. Several feminist critics reacted strongly against Boorman’s depiction of phallic potency as the source of creativity and liberation.43 Judgements about Connery’s performance were also mixed. One of the more sympathetic thought Connery plays the film’s ‘paradoxical protagonist’ with a ‘ferociously concentrated energy which imposes the character as both a physical and moral force and does much to dispel one’s doubts about the apparent loose ends in the philosophical tapestry’.44 Zardoz was difficult to promote and had a limited release but managed to cover its modest costs, returning $1.8 million in North American rentals.45 The importance of Zardoz in connecting Connery with what Boorman advances was his mystical, Celtic heritage is difficult to judge or to prove. However, in retrospect, without imputing a conscious strategy on Connery’s part or Selinger’s, playing Zed presaged a series of three films, independently negotiated but made in rapid succession, in which Connery had further opportunities to explore the mythic hero. These films, like Zardoz, critique the mythic hero, exemplifying Ray’s sense of a ‘growing self-consciousness about received myths’ that was characteristic of this period. The first of the three was The Wind and the Lion (1975), written and directed by John Milius, one of the ‘movie brats’, a new generation of writer-directors who came through film school and had a major influence on Hollywood filmmaking in this period.46 Having had a major success

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with Dillinger (1973), Milius was given a substantial budget of $14 million by United Artists to create what he called an ‘an old-time boy’s adventure story’, very romantic and ‘[v]ery beautiful to look at, as beautiful as possible’.47 It was modelled on David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), replicating its spectacular sweeping vistas using several of the film’s locations and even consulting with Lean’s script supervisor, Barbara Cole.48 Although the film is loosely based on an actual incident – the abduction of an American citizen Ion Perdicaris and his stepson, by a Berber chieftain, Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, in Tangiers in 1904 – Milius rearranges events and replaces a sixty-year-old Greek-American businessman with Eden Pedecaris, a young mother, and her two children, in order to create a possible romance between captive and abductor. Milius was certain that Connery should play El Raisuli even though he was not, ethnically, an obvious choice: ‘Anthony Quinn was too old and Omar Sharif didn’t have the gravitas … This is the only man who feels like he has the power of the Raisuli.’ 49 Milius based his depiction of El Raisuli on Rosita Forbes’s 1924 biography The Sultan of the Mountains, which presents a complex figure, a mixture of naive, overweening self-belief and sceptical intelligence. Having read the script, Connery professed his enthusiasm to play an intriguingly ambivalent character: ‘Whether he was a moral man or not is difficult to judge. However, he’s been written into this picture as a well-rounded, full-fledged man who lived by the Islamic code – and I find that stimulating.’ 50 Milius structures the narrative through a series of deft parallels to portray a ‘unique relationship between two men who never actually met, but intuitively knew each other well’, El Raisuli and the American President Theodore Roosevelt.51 Each represents an antithetical embodiment of epic heroism, their actions dictated by a self-conscious cultivation of their own mythical status as leaders of their people obeying an unalterable historical destiny. Roosevelt assiduously promotes his image as the American frontiersman, imbued with the rugged, untamed energy of the Wild West;52 El Raisuli resplendently incarnates the ancestral qualities of the nomadic Berber chieftain, riding on horseback to purge his lands of the hated foreigner. For the first time since Dr. No, Connery is provided with a glamorous star introduction. After El Raisuli’s warriors have swept through the Pedecaris residence smashing all before them and killing her guest and servants, Eden Pedecaris (Candice Bergen) is pushed forward into the presence of a blackgarbed man. As he stops contemplating a flower, Connery turns slowly and, in close-up, removes the lower part of his keffiyeh to reveal his face, now swathed in a long beard, staring quizzically at his captive. To convey El Raisuli’s self-conscious sense of destiny, Connery enunciates his sententious utterances slowly and deliberately, acknowledging their importance for his character but also subtly deflating their pomposity: ‘I am Mulai Ahmed

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4.2  Connery as El Raisuli, the saviour of his people, in The Wind and the Lion (1975)

Mohammed Raisuli the Magnificent, Sheriff of the Rifian Berbers. I am the true defender of the faithful and the blood of the Prophet runs in me and I am but a servant of his will.’ 53 He is stimulated, intrigued and puzzled by Eden – a modern, feisty, independent American woman who refuses to be deferential. Their bantering relationship, as one reviewer pointed out, adds ‘a mischievous sexuality to his strictly platonic encounters’.54 It becomes a sublimated but nevertheless highly erotic relationship in which, as Kathleen Murphy comments perceptively, El Raisuli seduces Eden ‘by way of her imagination not her flesh’.55

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Connery’s Raisuli combines mature wisdom with exceptional prowess as a warrior. In a thrilling sequence, he rides out singlehandedly to rescue Eden and her children from the clutches of the brigands to whom she has been sold. Depicted in Leanesque long shot on the horizon, El Raisuli charges down the slope to dispatch his five adversaries, beheading each with a single sword stroke. Gathering Eden and her children onto his horse, he turns towards her, his face wreathed in its most winning smile: ‘Mrs Pedecaris, you are a heap of trouble.’ This scene embodies the essence of Connery’s superbly free-flowing performance, full of flourishes, broad smiles and expansive gestures that help create a charismatic but complex figure, a mixture of savagery and cultivation, boyish enthusiasm and dry wit, pomposity and drollery, yet always seeking to understand his place in a rapidly altering world where his values are under threat: ‘What has become of honour and respect? Everything’s changing, drifting away on the wind.’ Connery plays the role without condescension, respecting his character’s investment in these values. Milius commented that his ‘old-time adventure story’ was ‘seen from the boy’s point of view’, which enhances its mythic qualities.56 Immediately after being captured, Eden’s son William (Simon Harrison), swathing himself in a Berber headdress, comments, ‘He has the way about him, doesn’t he? He sure has the way.’ As he falls asleep having been rescued by the American troops, William fantasises about El Raisuli and his exploits; near the film’s conclusion, in what Derek Elley calls a ‘heart-stopping moment’ that seems to be magically protracted, El Raisuli ‘is transfigured before a child’s eyes from history into myth as he sweeps past on his horse to snatch a rifle from the boy’s hands’.57 Acknowledging the irresistible power of American militarism, El Raisuli has been content to give up his captives as part of a noble gesture and, in another heart-stopping moment, makes his farewell to Eden with an irresistibly expansive smile that reduces her to tears: ‘I’ll see you again Mrs Pedecaris when we are both like golden clouds on the wind.’ El Raisuli’s gesture incarnates the myth of a fast-vanishing heroism, as futile as it is magnificent, made by a typically Miliusian hero who has no place in the modern, industrialised world.58 Most reviewers expressed their enthusiasm for both the film and Connery’s charismatic performance, despite occasional facetious comments about this ‘sheik with a Scottish accent’. One thought the film was made not in reverence for old movies but rather from a romantic distortion of them. Everything is outsized, scaled even larger … soldiers are braver, sheiks more dashing, the heroine more spiritual and loving … All the characters are creatures of the best reveries of childhood … It has been a long time since Hollywood has produced an adventure as sumptuous as The Wind and the Lion or a fantasy as rich … [Connery] who has become a superb film actor, makes a dashing, funny Raisuli.59

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Derek Malcolm admired the way in which Connery convincingly portrayed ‘a man of dignity as well as audacity’ in this ‘good old story-book tale brought to life with energy and old-fashioned gusto … an unselfconscious sweep and conviction’, which he considered was an attempt to win back the family audience.60 Although Milius is often characterised as a right-wing director, his film is equivocal about American imperialism; as he commented, ‘You can take the [film’s] politics anyway you want, for or against the United States.’ 61 This ideological agnosticism may have been one reason for the film’s considerable box-office success – $9.2 million in rentals – enabling viewers of different political or cultural persuasions to accept the film as an entertaining fantasy.62 El Raisuli was a liberating role for Connery, an intelligent ‘romantic he man’ part that, as Andrew Rissik comments, ‘gave Connery back to his audience. This new grizzled hero was a man you could cheer.’ 63 Its popularity with audiences suggests that he had found an appealing heroic figure who was not James Bond, and a more mature hero who combines wisdom with muscle. The Man Who Would Be King (1975) offered Connery the opportunity to play a figure who becomes mythic through the power of his own delusions. The film was based on Rudyard Kipling’s famous short story, a devastating allegory of the greed and violence that underpin imperialism from the perspective of what the unnamed narrator calls the ‘politics of Loaferdom, that sees things from the underside where the lath and plaster are not smoothed off’.64 J.M. Barrie called Kipling’s story ‘the most audacious thing in fiction’.65 For the film’s director, John Huston, it was ‘one of the greatest adventure stories ever written. It has excitement, color, spectacle, and humor. It also has some spiritual meaning, which becomes clear toward the end of the story.’ 66 Huston had first considered filming this story in 1952 with Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable playing the central leads. Further screenplays by different authors and various changes of stars continued over twenty years until Huston decided, at Paul Newman’s behest, to cast British actors and approached Connery and Michael Caine.67 Huston had raised the $8.5 million finances, from Columbia for the European rights, Allied Artists for the North American and the rest from Canadian tax shelters.68 Caine and Connery each received a $250,000 fee plus 5 per cent of the box-office gross.69 Connery’s salary shows how far his market price had fallen since the Bond heyday but he was attracted by the prospect of working with a prestigious director and a project he thought had ‘a superb script … pleasurable dialogue … And there’s the humour, scale and size.’ 70 Selinger encouraged Connery to accept the role, convinced that the film had ‘real substance’ that could give his flagging career ‘one hell of a spurt’.71 The Man Who Would Be King is the story of two ‘loafers’, Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, former gunnery sergeants cashiered for smuggling, swindling and receiving stolen goods, now drifting around the

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sub-continent as conmen, who hatch a daring if foolhardy plan to conquer the remote kingdom of Kafiristan, which they hope to rule by exploiting the internecine rivalries of the warring tribes. Although Carnehan and Dravot’s actions place them outside the pale of Anglo-Indian society, they are part of an alternative society – the Masonic brotherhood – that has strict rules for its adherents. Part of the story’s attraction for Huston was its portrayal of ‘the warm friendship between two men – two tough and likeable rogues whose loyalty is to each other and their own view of integrity’.72 Connery recalled that Huston did not offer much in the way of direction but supplied the essential insight that Carnehan and Dravot were two halves of the same person, who, together, could accomplish anything.73 This enabled each actor to work to his own performative strengths as the foil to the other. Caine plays Carnehan as a wary Cockney wiseacre, quick-witted and sceptical, always looking to exploit a situation, a more cerebral than physical presence, his gestures compact and economical. Connery’s Dravot is more free-flowing, expansive and volatile, but also slower and more ruminative, his mind working hard not to falter or fail, his brow contorting ‘in slow, deliberate concentration, his whole body revealing the effort involved in taking in one of Caine’s smarter ideas’.74 Huston recalled: Many of the scenes were between just the two of them, and they rehearsed together at night. Together they worked up each scene so well beforehand that all I had to decide was how best to shoot it. It was like watching a polished vaudeville act – everything on cue, and perfect timing.75

However, their actions are more than a technically accomplished double act. Caine recalled that they improvised dialogue and added to the humour in order to inhabit the characters more intimately, making their trust in and loyalty to each other come through as strongly as possible and, especially, bringing out the class-consciousness that is mostly absent from Kipling’s story.76 The pair created the whole sequence in which, hauled up in front of the pompous District Commissioner (Jack May), they execute a deft series of exaggerated military drills before articulating their contempt for the life that awaits the lower classes should they be deported back to Britain: carnehan: ‘Home to what? A porter’s uniform outside a restaurant and sixpenny tips from belching civilians for closing cab doors on their blowzy women?’ dravot: ‘Not for us, thank you. Not after watching Afghans come howling down out of the hills and taking battlefield command when all the officers copped it.’ carnehan: ‘Well said brother Dravot … Detriments you call us. Detriments! Well I remind you that it was detriments like us that made this bloody Empire and the Izzat of the Raj. Hats on.’

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In addition to being a delightful comic double act, this scene encapsulates one of the delicious ironies that pervade The Man Who Would Be King: Carnehan and Dravot see themselves as embodying an older, more heroic and risk-taking martial era of empire building, as opposed to its ossification into a rule-bound bureaucracy.77 It was this inwardness with the social and cultural milieu from which these characters arise that led Huston to aver, ‘I believe Connery and Caine gave better performances than either Bogart or Gable could have, because they are the real thing. They are those characters.’ 78 It is this, twisted, sense of imperial destiny that fuels the pair’s desire to conquer remote Kafiristan, their resourcefulness demonstrated by their arduous, hazardous and occasionally miraculous journey, which lends their sordid actions an epic sweep and grandeur. In another of Kipling’s subversive ironies, Carnehan and Dravot conquer the warring tribes through imposing the proven drills and tactics employed by the British Army. Parodying the heroic military leader, Dravot, sitting bolt upright on his horse, chest out, addresses his troops with mock dignity: ‘Now listen to me you benighted muckers. We’re going to teach you soldiering, the world’s oldest profession. When we’re done with you, you’ll be able to stand up and slaughter your enemies like gentlemen.’ However, their conquest is transformed when Dravot is mistaken for a god after he appears unscathed having been struck by an arrow (which lodged in his ammunition belt). When Dravot is taken to the ancient capital of Sikandergul, the high priest finds confirmation in the Masonic symbol Dravot is wearing – given to him by Kipling (Christopher Plummer) as a brother Mason at the outset of their journey – and installs Dravot as the ‘second Sekunder’, Alexander the Great, the god-king who was himself an ardent self-mythologiser, always trying to create the terms through which his fame would be celebrated.79 Carnehan greets this delusion with his customary earthy scepticism – ‘He can break wind at both ends simultaneous, which I’m willing to bet is more than any god could do’ – advising Dravot they should escape with the treasure they have been offered at the earliest opportunity. However, their partnership temporarily dissolves as Dravot, imbued with the hubris of all imperialists, reconceives his role as not conquering but civilising, a moral mission to bring these ‘benighted’ territories into the great community of nations.80 Connery beautifully evokes Dravot’s gradual awakening to what he understands as his destiny: ‘more than chance has been at work here’, he confides to the bemused Carnehan. Dressed in Sekunder’s imperial robes, Dravot holds court, dispensing judgments with unselfconscious pomposity as he attempts to rule his new kingdom with dignity, tempering justice with mercy. He explains the burdens of office to Carnehan with his customary careful deliberation, his expression a mixture of regal condescension and genuine desire that his friend understand the grandeur of his conception:

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4.3  The role for which Connery thought he should have been given an Oscar: as Daniel Dravot, facing death, in The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

They call me his son and I am, in spirit anyway. It’s a huge responsibility. The bridge we’re building – it’s only the first of many that will tie the country together. A nation I will make of it with an anthem and a flag … and when I’ve accomplished what I’ve set out to do, I’ll stand one day before the Queen. Not kneel, mind you, but stand, like an equal. Oh, it’s big. It’s big, I tell you!

In a further fracturing of their friendship, Dravot reneges on their contract to forswear women because of his conviction that he must found a dynasty. His bride (Shakira Caine), fearful that she will go up in flames if she mates with a god, bites his face, the drawn blood proving Dravot is all-too human. Captured by the enraged priesthood, the comrades reaffirm their friendship, which makes them whole again and able to face anything, even death. Convinced he must meet his fate with a befitting majesty, Dravot walks slowly, crowned head held high, across the rope bridge, commanding his erstwhile subjects – ‘Cut you buggers! Cut!’ – as he sings Reginald Heber’s famous hymn ‘The Son of God goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain’, lending this fallible, vulgar character tragic proportions. The crippled Carnehan recounts to the incredulous Kipling how Dravot fell 20,000 feet to his death and his own miraculous survival from torture and crucifixion, before leaving Dravot’s crowned skull on the table, thereby completing their transformation into myth and legend. Most reviewers enthused about The Man Who Would Be King and its twin leads in a return to ‘old-fashioned, full-blooded adventure story without a trace of condescension or nostalgic chic’ and considered ‘the contrast between the ebullient cockney sarcasm of Caine and Connery’s rough-hewn self-importance is consistently effective’.81 One thought the ‘ending has an element of Greek tragedy … that elevates this remarkable film’.82 It was



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Connery’s performance that elicited the most fulsome praise, the most eloquent being Pauline Kael, who considered Connery was

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a far better Danny than Gable would ever have been. Gable never had this warmth, and never gave himself over to the role the way Connery does … Connery’s Danny has a beatific, innocent joy in his crazy goal even when half frozen en route; few actors are as unselfconsciously silly as Connery is willing to be – as he enjoys being. Danny’s fatuity is sumptuous as he throws himself into his first, half-embarrassed lofty gestures.83

The Man Who Would Be King perhaps embodied for Connery the critique of the English as an imperial race that had been frustrated by the aborted projects – Nine Tiger Man and the film about Sir Richard Burton – discussed in the previous chapter. Jeffrey Richards considers The Man Who Would Be King much the best of the ‘late’ empire films that were critical of imperialism: ‘With its flawed heroes and pervading sense of irony balancing the excitement, action and salty humour of the classic adventure format, The Man Who Would Be King is perhaps the most convincing presentation of imperial heroes for a post-imperial age that the cinema has yet produced.’ 84 Actively promoted by Allied Artists, albeit as an anodyne ‘Adventure in all its glory!’, The Man Who Would Be King had a royal charity premiere on 18 December 1975, but its overall box-office returns were middling, not mentioned in Variety’s list of ‘top earners’.85 However, Caine and Connery subsequently filed a lawsuit against Allied Artists contending they had been cheated out of their fair percentage of the gross – which by September 1977 amounted to $8,207,998 – and that each was owed $106,146 in additional payments.86 Connery thought he was entitled to the money, but his actions were also designed to take a stand, as he explained in interview, about accounting abuses and dubious business practices in the film industry. Allied Artists filed a countersuit of $21.5 million alleging defamation alongside $10 million in punitive damages for both actors.87 When the case was settled out of court five months later, Variety reported, ‘It’s reliably understood that the actors received a substantial portion of the sums they claimed.’ 88 This was an important victory for Connery and had reverberations throughout the rest of this period in which other actors joined his campaign to get their just rewards from their cultural labour by taking out their own lawsuits against the ‘creative’ economic practices of the studios.89 The marketability of Connery as a myth figure was demonstrated when he was chosen to play what is one of the most potent mythic figures in Western culture, Robin Hood.90 Robin and Marian (1976) was based on James Goldman’s screenplay that, in contradistinction to the youthful, exuberant Robin Hood of popular mythology – as incarnated on screen by Douglas Fairbanks (1922) and Errol Flynn (1938) – depicts an ageing,

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disillusioned figure, worn out by fighting twenty years in the Crusades. Goldman argued that such a conception was necessary in order to present an image of heroism in a sceptical age when anti-heroes have become the norm, depicting people who ‘stand locked together by their dreams and passions in a drama they create, yet at the same time can’t control, all living out the legend of their lives’.91 Its director, Richard Lester, recollected that finances, from Columbia Pictures, only became forthcoming once the casting of Audrey Hepburn – making a return to the screen after an eight-year absence – as Maid Marian and Connery as Robin Hood had been secured.92 Connery was attracted by playing an ageing Robin Hood in a film that was ‘an examination of that legend’, especially as this was the first screen version that presents Robin as unequivocally a peasant.93 Connery was also offered a salary of $1 million for the role.94 Lester considered that Connery’s casting ‘changed the feel of the piece enormously. I think Sean can play strong innocence better than anybody I know. Not stupidity, but a sense of a man who is genuinely innocent.’ 95 He discussed the script closely with Connery, trimming the redundancies and floridities of Goldman’s script, sharpening some of the dialogue and, in conformity to Connery’s views on acting, making physical actions eloquent wherever possible. To watch Robin and Marian alongside Goldman’s published screenplay is to appreciate the intelligence with which the script has been pared down and honed whilst preserving Goldman’s conception of an ageing hero trapped in his own myth. During filming, Lester had three cameras shooting simultaneously because he disliked multiple takes and ‘neatness’, which he thought ‘preserved freshness and creative tension’.96 Connery responded positively to this method, which he felt sharpened his performance: ‘There’s a sense of emotional compression when you work this way. It allows an actor to improvise.’ 97 Lester tempers the romanticism of Goldman’s screenplay by grounding the story in a depiction of the Middle Ages as brutal and barbaric. Robin and Marian begins with an extended prologue in a bare, parched landscape, portraying Richard the Lionheart (Richard Harris) not as the hero of popular legend but as corrupt and capricious, profoundly disenchanted by an enterprise that has turned sour – ‘We led 300,000 men to the Holy Land and came back on one boat. Not at all what we intended’ – and yet trapped by ‘the legend of his life’. Although Robin understands what Richard has become and refuses to obey his orders to sack the nearby castle – ‘I won’t slaughter children for a piece of gold that never was’ – as he confides to Little John (Nicol Williamson), ‘I took him for a great king. There we were in Sherwood robbing abbots, giving pennies to the poor. Didn’t seem much compared to rescuing the Holy Land.’ Despite the fact that Robin’s loyalty to his king and the cause has been emptied of meaning, in a trope typical of

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the film, he remains to cradle the king in his arms as he lies dying from a freak wound. Although their return to Sherwood Forest seems like a release – the music swells as Lester jump cuts to a verdant English landscape – Robin and Little John remain confused about the meaning and purpose of their lives. Robin learns from Will Scarlett (Denholm Elliott) and Friar Tuck (Ronnie Barker) that he has become a hero to the poor and oppressed for deeds never performed. However, trapped in his own legend, Robin is drawn inexorably into battling his old adversary, the Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw), an urbane, cultivated man, far more intelligent than his opponent, but also unable to conceive of any other course of action than making a series of seemingly preordained moves that lead inexorably to a final reckoning. Robin’s first act of defiance is to free Marian, now the Abbess at Kirkly, from imprisonment by the Sheriff on the orders of the despotic King John. Although the act has a romantic basis, the accent falls not on the deft execution of a daring deed, but on the immense effort it takes. Connery’s Robin, balding, slightly flabby, moves with the stiff-limbed, creaking gait of an ageing warrior for whom action is a difficult, tiring act of will commanding an increasingly unresponsive body. Goldman’s script describes how, rousing himself after a night back in the forest, Robin jogs on the spot to get the blood flowing again. Encouraged to improvise, with typical inventiveness Connery adds the expressive gestures of cleaning his teeth with a twig and hitching up his smock to urinate before suddenly remembering the rescued Marian is sleeping nearby and he should show respect. It is also through these small but telling gestures that Connery imbues his character with that ‘strong innocence’ that Lester saw as his great strength. Marian is also disillusioned and uncertain whether she wishes to be ‘rescued’. However, after some initial sparring, the central scenes open out into a compassionate exploration of their reignited passion in which each struggles to come to terms with lost youth, blighted hopes and the realities of a renewed, late-blossoming love. The directness and honesty of this encounter is beautifully conveyed, each star investing their spare dialogue with levels of meaning that draw on audiences’ knowledge of their previous roles. One commentator opined: Connery and Hepburn seem more fascinating than they ever were before because the youthful larger-than-life fires that burn within them contrast so mightily with the aging flesh of their bodies and the growing weariness of the worlds they inhabit. The process of growing old adds layers of mystery and splendour to their beauty.98

Connery is often at his most expressive in reaction, his face a picture of bemused puzzlement and confusion. After he recalls the horrors of the

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massacre at Acre and Marian asks him why he did not come home, he replies softly, ‘He was my king’, the hint of a question at the end of the line enquiring if this attitude makes sense. To her question why he never wrote to her, he replies disarmingly, ‘I don’t know how.’ When she probes for information about the women he has known on the Crusades, he starts to form a reply, then hesitates before blurting out, ‘But they all looked like you.’ His expression, which she can’t see, is at first pleased with what he thinks is a shrewd evasion turned into a compliment, which rapidly transforms into one of slightly furtive uncertainty, desperate not to have given offence. When he tells Marian, ‘You’re so beautiful’, Connery invests the line ‘with a soft simplicity that gives it the quality of a valedictory caress’.99 As Gordon Gow comments, ‘Robin obliterates for himself the tokens of time that are everywhere apparent except in his own eyes, which repeatedly shine with the excited wishfulness of a small boy’, one still eager to pursue the myth of adventure.100 This was Connery’s first opportunity to explore a character who can express the need for a woman’s love, trust and companionship, acting opposite a female star of equal stature, enabling him to be vulnerable, anxiously trusting, uncertain of his gestures, and unselfconsciously appreciative of her loyalty and loveliness. Theirs is a love hedged in by a sense of impending death. Although Marian is opposed to Robin fighting the Sheriff, she is powerless to prevent it. The outcome, settled by personal combat, becomes memorable for the physical exertion it entails from these creaking warriors who almost topple in exhaustion after each blow. Victorious but grievously wounded, Robin continues to dream of fulfilling his role as the hero of legend: ‘You’ll tend me until I’m well again, and then, great battles. We’ll have a life to sing about.’ 101 Understanding that Robin can only be released from his delusions by death, Marian poisons them both. In gradually coming to accept her logic, Connery ‘mutely reacts with an extraordinary fluctuation of expression that ranges from confused anger to final grateful acceptance’.102 Her action enables Robin to have the romantic expiration he craves: the final arrow he shoots to mark the spot where they should be buried soars off into the distance signifying their transfiguration into myth. Critics’ reaction to Robin and Marian was almost uniformly enthusiastic. Andrew Sarris, praising the ‘brilliant conviction of this twilight tale’ and Connery’s ‘expressive anguish’, noted the smattering of applause at the end of the film’s premiere: ‘I thought it was richly deserved for one of the most affecting moviegoing experiences of recent years … a lament over our lost heroes.’ 103 Roger Ebert enthused, ‘Connery and Hepburn seem to have arrived at a tacit understanding between themselves about their characters. They glow. They really do seem in love. And they project as marvellously complex, fond, tender people; the passage of 20 years has given them grace

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4.4  An ageing, disillusioned Robin Hood: Connery with Audrey Hepburn in Robin and Marian (1976)

and wisdom.’ 104 Another thought their acting was the ‘work of people who have come to terms with themselves and their talents’ and in Connery’s performance, ‘a tenderness of a kind this actor hasn’t revealed in years’.105 The Spectator’s critic responded to the rough-edged quality of Lester’s film in which the action was presented ‘as if it were being lived; rather than in the genre of the epic where the action is remote and being performed … by far the most impressive new film I have seen this year’.106 If critics responded to Connery’s inhabiting a ‘living’, flawed and fallible rather than generic character, it was precisely this realism that created problems for audiences. Robin was not a hero you could ‘cheer’. Robin and Marian, despite its central romance, lacked the expansive sweep and exciting action scenes that underpinned The Wind and the Lion or The Man Who Would Be King subversions of the heroic ideal; its critique of myth was overt rather than implied. In mounting the production, there had been a tension between Lester, who wanted a small-scale film that probed the Robin Hood myth, and Columbia’s producer, Ray Stark, who wanted an expansive treatment.107 Although Lester imposed his conception on the film

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itself, Stark, faced with a complex tale about ageing and mortality, decided to market Robin and Marian as a love story. The theatrical trailer intones, ‘This is the return of the spectacle and the glory of another age … Above all Robin and Marian is the return of romance. For Robin and Marian, love is the greatest adventure of all.’ Lester thought promoting the film in this way gave audiences the wrong expectations and damaged the film’s commercial chances, as did the changed title – Lester had wanted The Death of Robin Hood – and what he saw as John Barry’s inappropriately lush musical score.108 Although Connery also criticised the studio’s promotion and made strenuous efforts to support Robin and Marian, appearing onstage with Hepburn at the Radio City Music Hall premiere on 8 April 1976, he recognised its challenge for audiences in depicting an ‘over the top’ hero who was ‘not really that intelligent … It showed so many flaws, as it were, that perhaps the public doesn’t want to see that side of somebody who is considered a hero.’ 109 He thought its ‘anti-mythic’ treatment was especially damaging to its chances of acceptance by the American public, which considered that ‘the good guy should never be in a state of deterioration’, and that it was ‘more European’ to take apart a myth ‘and see how it was realized in the first place’.110 However, Robin and Marian took a respectable $8 million at the US domestic box-office.111

Star for hire This triptych of mythic films was important for Connery’s stardom in several ways. Following in rapid succession, they had a cumulative weight that exceeded their box-office performance. They established Connery as an accomplished actor who could play roles that were very different from James Bond, and substantially redefined his screen presence and star image in roles that enabled him to retain his core resources: strength, charisma and humour. As reviewers noted, Connery seems to relax into these parts in a free-flowing surrender to their demands, however foolish or stupid they required him to be. They consistently responded to the subtlety and intelligence with which he created each of these, very different, characters. Apropos The Man Who Would Be King, Margaret Hinxman enthused about an actor who ‘continues to be amazing. With every film he grows in stature, discarding all vestiges of James Bond – which never sat too easily with him – to become a truly fine character actor’.112 Robin and Marian in particular secured Connery’s critical status as a gifted character actor rather than simply as an action-adventure star. These were also films that established Connery’s distinctiveness, his difference from American stars and his particular position within an overcrowded marketplace. As Andrew Rissik notes apropos

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The Wind and the Lion, ‘Milius was intelligent enough to use the Britishness of what Connery represented as a kind of international language for epic and romance.’ 113 Whatever the box-office returns, they were films that Connery enjoyed making, whose subject matter he responded to and believed in, and which he was proud to have made. However, all four films were part of a director-led Hollywood Renaissance that was losing impetus by the mid-1970s as the industry reorganised and the studios began to regain the power and control they had temporarily ceded to directors. This increased the pressure on stars to play safe and take roles that had more secure prospects of commercial success. The modest returns of the mythic films were not enough to sustain Connery’s star ranking; after Diamonds Are Forever he did not appear again in the Quigley poll of Top Ten Money-Making Stars until 1989; the salaries he was offered reflect that loss of status. As has been argued, Connery was anxious to maintain his bankability because this also afforded him choice of role and the possibility of exercising a measure of creative control. Connery’s new agent, Dennis Selinger, appreciated the money–status nexus: ‘Like a lot of people who start from nothing, the money is important because of the status it gave him … he was frightened of losing that status. Like a lot of actors, he needs applause. For film actors, money is applause.’ 114 Although this is a reductive judgement – it takes no account of Connery’s aspirations as an actor – Selinger understood his client’s need to maintain his position and devised a simple strategy: ‘If one wants to make international impact the surest system is to make as many films as possible. I told Sean, if one can do four or five movies a year one is bound to hit and then one can up your price and keep you on top.’ 115 Selinger admitted, ‘I don’t think Sean would ever do anything he didn’t want to do, but by the same token he is bright enough to take important advice when it is given.’ 116 The first role Connery took under Selinger’s guidance was playing Colonel Nils Tahlvik, the Scandinavian Head of Security, in Ransom (1974), a medium-budget film made by Lion International. Connery’s performance as a tough loner whose principles will not allow him to accede to the requests of a terrorist group that has kidnapped the British ambassador to Norway was nothing more than competent. Reviewers were surprised to see Connery appearing in such a pedestrian film, which played in only the bottom half of double bills when released in the US. Murder on the Orient Express (1974) was more commensurate with his status, another British film but in this case EMI’s lavish attempt to create a glamorous Hollywood-style star vehicle adapted from Agatha Christie’s celebrated murder-mystery directed by Sidney Lumet.117 Connery thought Murder on the Orient Express was ‘a chance to join an incredible cast … It’s all very stylish in the vein of the Bond films.’ 118 Playing Colonel Arbuthnot, a retired army officer pursuing

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an affair with Mary Debenham (Vanessa Redgrave), Connery takes his allotted place in this glittering assortment of stars, including Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, Richard Widmark, Michael York, and Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot. Murder on the Orient Express grossed over £200 million worldwide, making it, at that time, the most financially successful British film ever produced.119 This helped to reconfirm Connery’s international star status. However, the films Connery made after his mythic ‘trilogy’ demonstrate the limitations of Selinger’s strategy. The Next Man (1976) was instigated by a highly successful independent producer, Martin Bregman, who chose Connery ‘because he’s a marvellous actor who has style and huge presence on screen, a bigger than life glamour. And he is an artist.’ 120 Bregman came with an enthusiastic recommendation from Sidney Lumet with whom he had made Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Connery would have been attracted to a role with a strong moral message. He plays a principled idealist, Khalil Abdul-Muhsen, the Saudi Arabian Minister of State, who advocates a partnership with the Israelis to produce petroleum to be distributed free to Third World nations: ‘We stand at the crossroads of human history’, Khalil proclaims, in one of several rather unconvincing speeches he makes to the United Nations assembly. Khalil survives several assassination attempts, only to be shot by a female assassin, Nicole (Cornelia Sharpe), with whom he has fallen in love. The US box-office returns for this confusing and disjointed thriller were so poor that it was one of only two Connery films not given a theatrical release in the UK.121 The planned follow-up with Bregman, The Devil Drives, a resurrection of the project to make a biopic of Sir Richard Burton, was shelved.122 Equally lacklustre was Meteor (1979) in which Connery starred as an irascible, emotionally troubled professor in charge of deploying secret US nuclear missiles positioned in space to combat the impending catastrophe. A last-ditch, somewhat desperate attempt to capitalise on the disaster film, one of the most successful genres in the 1970s, this dreary film, with its amateurish special effects, was only notable as a box-office disaster. Connery received a salary of $1 million, restoring him to Bond levels, but which was well below the $4–5 million that the top Hollywood stars such as Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford now commanded.123 Connery’s role in Meteor could have been played by any number of competent leading men, but his role in The First Great Train Robbery (1978), a stylish period caper film adapted by Michael Crichton from his bestselling novel, was written with Connery in mind.124 The story is a romanticised retelling of the exploits of Edward Pierce, a gentleman thief who masterminded the first robbery of a moving train, a gold consignment meant for troops fighting in the Crimean War in 1855. The part was substantially rewritten at Connery’s insistence and the production shifted to Ireland to circumvent tax issues.125 Connery

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gives a suave tongue-in-cheek performance, insouciant and sexually assured à la Bond, but this rather leisurely film becomes mired in plot contrivances rather than enabling him to develop or deepen his performance. These weaknesses probably explain its modest US domestic box-office returns of under $5 million, although Connery remained mystified by the film’s commercial failure: ‘It started out fine. And I worked hard to promote it. But then it just sank out of sight. It’s hard to know why.’ 126 The hit and miss nature of these films was accounted for in Selinger’s business model, but unlike the earlier mythic roles, none of these films provided Connery the opportunity to extend or develop his range as an actor nor to develop what was potentially a viable post-Bond persona. A similar criticism might be levelled at two further films, A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Cuba (1979), but they were films in which Connery had far more emotional and intellectual investment. A Bridge Too Far, based on the book by Cornelius Ryan that had been an immediate success when published in 1974, was the last in a cycle of high-budget Second World War films prevalent in the late 1960s and 1970s that had a more sceptical attitude to the war than films before that period.127 A Bridge Too Far tells the story of Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ attempt, in September 1944, to shorten the war by capturing a series of bridges in the Netherlands that would enable British and American troops to push through into Germany’s industrial heartland and on to Berlin. The Allies failed to take the key objective, the bridge at Arnhem, and when the operation was abandoned, 2,163 British troops had to be rescued and there were more than 13,226 British and 3,550 American casualties. Making the film was a ‘labour of love’ for producer Joseph E. Levine, who, in a departure from his usual practices, was closely involved in its production and provided a sizeable portion of the film’s $25 million budget from his own resources.128 Other funding came from pre-selling distribution rights after production had started, with Levine using the bait of casting fourteen top-drawer stars in the major roles. Although this could be construed as glamorising the war, it was defended by the film’s director, Richard Attenborough, who argued, ‘The second [the stars] appear they have to create a huge impression. Their characterisation, their personality, their activity has got to be immediately understood by the audience.’ 129 Levine recalled that Attenborough was ‘adamant on one piece of casting. He needed Sean Connery to play Major General Urquhart’, the British commander of the 1st Airborne Division.130 Attenborough stated that Connery’s ‘presence in it made a tremendous difference to the quality and standard of actors who, once he had agreed, agreed to play the movie’.131 Although Connery was initially sceptical, he convinced himself that it was important to remind audiences of the significance of the operation ‘regardless

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of what errors were made’ and that the project was not intended to glamorise events but ‘be an anti-war film with terrific explanation, I’m glad now that I did it’.132 The first star to sign on, Connery was to be paid a fee of $250,000, the same as that of Dirk Bogarde, who plays the mission commander General Browning, and slightly higher than Laurence Olivier’s $200,000 as a Dutch civilian, Dr Jan Spaander.133 The British stars were recruited before Levine and Attenborough went to Hollywood on what screenwriter James Goldman called ‘The Raid’ to procure the big American stars.134 When Connery discovered the scale of their salaries – James Caan, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman and Ryan O’Neal were all being paid $1 million; Robert Redford, whose clout in the Japanese market made him prime bait, $2 million – he protested long and loudly to Levine.135 Despite Levine’s typically forthright reply – ‘It’s not my fault you’ve got a fucking lousy agent’ – he agreed to raise Connery’s salary to $750,000, far more than any other British actor – indicating his importance to the film.136 Urquhart occupies more screen time than any of the other stars and his part in the operation is one of the principal binding threads through an overloaded and often somewhat confusing narrative. As Connery phrased it, Urquhart went ‘down through the spine of the story, having to get to Arnhem where the tragedy was probably the greatest’.137 Connery prepared for the role with his customary seriousness and his wide reading convinced him that ‘army officers of that calibre have a marvellous straightness about them, in terms of dialogue’.138 He therefore communicates with his men with a no-nonsense, self-effacing authority that commands respect. Urquhart maintains a quiet dignity, which, his body language suggests, is only preserved by reining in his indignation at the protracted series of blunders that undermine his mission. In contrast to the over-the-top scene-chewing of several of the American stars, and also some of the British ones including Edward Fox and Michael Caine, Connery quietly submerges himself in his role, giving a consistently convincing, understated and thoughtful performance of the thoroughbred military professional who, as the son of a Scottish dentist, is somewhat detached from the patrician English officer class, a point developed in Chapter 8’s discussion of the importance of Connery’s Scottishness. Urquhart’s steadfast integrity is the key to the film’s powerful denouement. Battle weary and still dressed in combat fatigues, Urquhart returns to headquarters. He dismounts gingerly from his jeep feeling all the aches of fighting, gazing speechlessly at the manicured lawn and the untouched beauty of the chateau. Ushered into the grand room that serves as Browning’s office, Urquhart’s eyes scan the paintings on the walls, taking in silently the ordered, untroubled comfort of the scene, in contrast to the carnage he has just been through. He props himself on the shelf of the ornate mantelpiece to wait for Browning’s arrival, too distracted even to reply to the orderly’s

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4.5  ‘Down through the spine of the story’: Connery as Major General Urquhart in A Bridge Too Far (1977)

question as to whether he wishes to change his clothes. Thus, simply through his movements and use of space – the key Malmgrenian precepts – Connery suggests the chasm between the experience of the frontline combatants and high command. At this point Browning, enters, on his dignity, moving uneasily across the space, fidgeting with the plans on his huge mahogany desk before sitting stiffly upright in his chair: browning: ‘Hello, Roy. How are you?’ urquhart: ‘I’m not sure that I’ll know for a while. But I’m sorry for the way it worked out.’ browning: ‘You did all you could.’ Shot in close-up, Urquhart leans forward from the mantelpiece towards the desk and pauses before replying, urquhart: ‘Yes, but did everyone else?’ browning: ‘They’ve got a bed for you upstairs if you want.’ urquhart: ‘I took 10,000 men into Arnhem. I’ve come back with less than two. I don’t feel much like sleeping.’

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browning: ‘Quite. … I’ve just been on to Monty. He’s very proud and pleased.’ urquhart: ‘Pleased?’ browning: ‘Of course. Market Garden was ninety per cent successful.’ urquhart: ‘But what do you think?’ browning: ‘Well, as you know, I’ve always thought we tried to go a bridge too far.’

The exchange ends on a close-up of Connery, his face suffused with suppressed anger, the soul-searching stare coupled with bewilderment, his small, halfclearing of the throat suggesting a deep sense of the wasted lives and the catalogue of avoidable failures. It is difficult to think of another actor who could express moral indignation with such force, his easy naturalism in delivery contrasting with the languid, yet guarded patrician tones with which Bogarde, in an equally well-crafted performance, conveys the mind-set of the English officer class.139 A Bridge Too Far became more renowned for the contentious issues that surrounded its portrayal of events, in particular the figure of General Browning, than for the film itself.140 Nevertheless, it was popular in the UK – the fifth most successful film released in 1977.141 However, returns were modest – $21 million – in the crucial North American market, which Attenborough thought was attributable to a reluctance to ‘remember defeat at this time because of Vietnam’.142 Several British reviewers were critical of the film, but they recognised it offered British actors greater opportunities than their American counterparts, whose ‘episodes of derring-do … [which] for all their verified factual basis, ring embarrassingly false’.143 Alexander Walker’s review singled out Connery’s performance for special praise, commenting, ‘he seems to know what war is about. He convinces you, with every cocking of his eyebrow, every weird whoop of encouragement, that he could actually inspire men to battle.’ 144 Urquhart is not one of Connery’s best-remembered roles, never included in any career conspectus, but I consider it to be one of his finest performances in another genre in which characterisation is habitually subordinated to action and spectacle. Because Lester enjoyed working with Connery on Robin and Marian, he asked screenwriter Charles Wood to write a major role for Connery in a production that was already under way: Cuba (1979), set in 1959 during the final days of the Batista regime with the country on the cusp of revolution.145 Connery plays Major Robert Dapes, hired by General Bello (Martin Balsam) to organise the government forces against Castro’s insurgents. Although a mercenary, his actions frowned upon by the British government, Dapes considers himself a man of principle and integrity, telling Bello solemnly, ‘You will only defeat someone like Castro if you are right.’ However, his moral bearings are overthrown when he realises that an elected, ‘legitimate’ government can be far more corrupt and venal than

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the ‘terrorists’ he has been paid to fight. As the action unfolds, his code of soldiering is exposed as increasingly incongruous; hopelessly adrift, his attempts at action futile and self-defeating. He confides to Captain Ramirez (Héctor Elizondo), his assigned aide, ‘You know soldiering has changed. It’s not as clean as it was. It’s an honourable profession or was.’ When Ramirez tells him, ‘I think you’ve come too late’, Dapes replies, ‘I was afraid of that.’ As Neil Sinyard argues, throughout the film Connery’s subtle performance conveys ‘a beautiful sense of integrity baffled by events’.146 Dapes’s outmoded conception of soldiering is mirrored in his antiquated attitude to women. He cannot accept them fighting as Fidelistas, nor can he understand the attitude of Alexandra (Brooke Adams), the woman he knew fifteen years before when he was a British soldier in North Africa. Alexandra has become an independent woman, one of Cuba’s ruling elite, with a taste for power, authority and money she is reluctant to forsake. For Dapes, their sleeping together is an unequivocal statement that she will leave her husband and go with him. For Alexandra, the decision was her choice and not the sign of a lasting commitment. Her revelation that she was only fifteen when they first met is a further blow to Dapes’s chivalrous romanticism. When he leaves alongside the exiled ruling caste, she remains as part of the new Cuba that will attempt to control its own destiny. In many ways Cuba depicts a version of James Bond – Dapes is even presented with a Beretta by Bello – projected into a genuine historical context where he has become confused and redundant, ill-equipped to understand the ideological or emotional complexities of the situation in which he finds himself. One reviewer thought it ‘a sad, brutal anecdote about what might have happened to Bond if he had lived to be pensioned off’.147 The film’s opening gives Connery the star build-up – shot in close-up as he arrives by plane, rolling a whisky glass across his forehead as he studies the military dossier he has been sent. Connery looks extremely handsome as Dapes, complete with hairpiece, Ronald Colman moustache, immaculate tan business suit and trim fedora. As Rissik observes, he ‘looks exactly like what he really is: a displaced film star, robbed of his gloss and brought up short by history and political change’.148 Unfortunately what might have been a dissection of the Bond image à la Marnie is at odds with Lester’s original conception to document a successful revolution. As he recognised, but only in retrospect, once Connery had been cast, Cuba needed to become another sort of film, ‘a love story, or an adventure story, or a post-Bond story’.149 Not only did Connery’s star presence derail the attempt to engage audiences in the drama of the Cuban revolution, it also created huge pressure to have a script ready for when he was available.150 The love scenes, in particular, feel underwritten and the ending, one of four that was shot, as several reviewers noted, looks like a parody of Casablanca and led

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to a clash between star and director.151 In retrospect Connery was very critical of the film and of Lester, observing, ‘I postponed the shooting twice as the script wasn’t ready, then we had to start because we were running out of weather in Spain. I didn’t think the script was ever ready. So it became a case of patchwork. In my opinion, Lester hadn’t done his homework.’ 152 Despite some admiring remarks about Connery’s performance, most critics were savagely dismissive of Cuba, an ‘unconvincing mish-mash’ being a representative judgement.153 The film’s box-office returns were also disappointing, with US rentals of only $5.6 million.154 Cuba is an object lesson in the tensions between star glamour and the relative anonymity required by documentary realism. It is neither a successful reworking of the figure of Bond nor an incisive account of the Cuban revolution but a fatally flawed film, pulling in opposite directions. And, as with Robin and Marian, audiences were not prepared to accept Connery as a loser.

Switching agents: Michael Ovitz and the Creative Artists Agency The failure of Cuba meant Connery had not appeared in even a modest box-office hit as the major star since The Man Who Would Be King in 1975. He became increasingly conscious that, by the end of the 1970s, his career was in the doldrums: ‘At the time it wasn’t that easy to sell me. They weren’t exactly breaking the door down for my services.’ 155 What A Bridge Too Far had demonstrated was that Connery was no longer amongst the roster of the half dozen stars – Clint Eastwood, Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson and Robert Redford – who could command salaries of $1–2 million because they were considered to guarantee box-office success at home and abroad and who could secure financing and distribution of a high-budget film on the strength of their name.156 Blaming Selinger for failing to negotiate an adequate salary for his role in Attenborough’s film, Connery decided to change agents, signing with Michael Ovitz, head of the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), in January 1979. CAA, founded in January 1975, had yet to establish itself as a film as opposed to television agency and so Connery’s choice was bold and, as it turned out, prescient as CAA became increasingly successful during the 1980s. Connery recalled being persuaded by Ovitz’s candour and his business model: ‘he wasn’t making any great, monumental claims … He foresaw the idea of packaging … Nobody else talked quite that way to me. They all talked about how good they had done in the past.’ 157 Although Ovitz did not invent the ‘package deal’, he became synonymous with its implementation as a routine part of agency business. Previous agency practice had been to acquire clients and then look for a suitable script, but as literary as well as talent agents,

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handling authors, books and manuscripts. CAA reversed this process by finding a script and then pooling the agency’s talent into a package, which gave CAA tremendous bargaining power with the studios.158 Connery was completely in accord with CAA’s overarching strategy to shift the balance of power in Hollywood by making the creative talent more equal to the people running the business, what Connery had referred to contemptuously as the ‘new aristocracy of lawyers and accountants’.159 Because Connery was the first major film star to sign for CAA, he always ‘retained a special place’ amongst Ovitz’s clients, assured of his personal attention.160 Connery also claimed that he was paid directly by the studios and only afterwards paid CAA its 10 per cent, the only actor to have secured that arrangement.161 In his autobiography, Ovitz contended that he considered Connery’s career had faltered because his constant need to work meant agreeing to projects in which ‘the script or the director or the costars were beneath him – often all three’.162 Consequently the advice Ovitz gave was to choose more prestigious projects ‘to have exposure to a range of possible scripts and to have them developed into packages with him as the star. I also said he needed to work with better directors and that we’d get him those introductions and those jobs.’ 163 The immediate strategy Ovitz deployed to pull Connery’s career ‘back from the brink’, as he saw it, was to find a pair of modestly budgeted ‘low-risk science fiction films’.164 The first was Outland (1981), part of a cycle of dystopian science fiction films that spanned the decade.165 Connery plays William T. O’Niel, a marshal fighting for justice against corporate greed and corruption in a mining community on Io, Jupiter’s third moon, ‘a man on his own particular odyssey – alone against the system’, as he described it.166 In this case he worked closely with writer-director Peter Hyams on the film’s casting and script, ‘supply[ing] some ideas, changes in dialogue and perhaps any humour that’s missing’.167 To guard against being ‘dwarfed by the hardware … or the [special] effects’, Connery insisted O’Niel become a somewhat flawed figure, judging that Hyams’s screenplay had made the character ‘too black-and-white. Too … certain. Therefore not quite as truthful as I would have liked … [he] was suddenly able to handle the whole problem. I wanted more kinda doubt in the part.’ 168 Hyams responded to these interventions, considering Connery to be ‘an extraordinary actor, and he has that rare quality, his emotions seem very close to the surface of his skin. You have the impression, when you photograph him, that you can truly sense what he’s feeling. He has a very powerful image on screen, and he’s a tremendous craftsman.’ 169 Pauline Kael enthused, ‘Connery isn’t afraid to open himself to the camera – he lets you read every shade of feeling that O’Niel hides from the other characters. He gives the movie the illusion of a central human presence. (Without him it would be

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junk metal).’ 170 Richard Corliss thought he was ‘perhaps the one genuine romantic hero in the movies now. He is strong; he is soft. He can be hurt physically, and take it; he can be hurt emotionally and show it. Outland gives Connery every chance to strut and smolder and send him off on one splendid chase sequence. The rest is strained silliness.’ 171 However, Connery’s ability to express subtle depths of emotions comes though most clearly in the brief scenes in which O’Niel has to come to terms with his isolation after his wife decides that she can no longer stay with him and departs with their son. Their relationship is barely developed; Connery’s most intimate scenes come when he teams up with the hard-bitten doctor (Frances Sternhagen), his only ally against the corporation’s hit-men. Connery made strenuous efforts to promote the film, attending the seventh science fiction film festival at Deauville, which opened with Outland in the first retrospective accorded to a non-American star. However, Warner Bros. failed to promote the film because they considered Connery ‘box-office poison’.172 This was a clear indication of the struggle that Connery faced to rehabilitate his career and the limitations of CAA’s power; Ovitz could help persuade the director to cast Connery, but he was not able to influence the way Outland was promoted by the studio. Ian Bannen recalled that Connery ‘was, I think, much disappointed by Outland. He’d seen the recent trend in cinema, seen the Star Wars eruption, and thought that space-age Outland would make a fortune.’ 173 However, in making his character flawed rather than heroic, Connery was not acting in his own best commercial interests. Outland lacks much Bond-style action and, despite script adjustments, little of the trademark humour. The subtlety and nuance of Connery’s performance makes Outland more melodrama than fantasy, entirely without the mythic resonance of High Noon, the film with which Outland was frequently compared. Terence Young thought it lacked the ‘vital elation that heroism and adventure need’.174 Ovitz’s description of Wrong Is Right, writer-director Richard Brooks’s scathing exposé of the venality of international politics, as science fiction was somewhat simplistic even if the film begins with an image of the new orbiting satellites that betoken the ubiquitous power of global media, which Connery thought a ‘terrific subject’.175 Connery plays crusading American television news reporter Patrick Hale. Ovitz brokered the role and Brooks was able to secure a sizeable budget, having cast an ‘international star, someone known all over the world. Someone who is the very appearance of a superstar.’ 176 However, Connery again worked extensively on the script with Brooks to reshape what he thought was an over-long and rambling adaptation of Charles McCarry’s novel The Better Angels (1979). Despite Connery’s efforts, Wrong Is Right remained an unstable blend of thriller, action film and satire that moves at a frenetic pace. Hale, a critique of the

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new phenomenon of television reporters becoming superstars, is an ambivalent character, and Connery struggles to find a balance between Hale’s vanity, integrity and his Bond-like capabilities. The New York Times’s reviewer, Vincent Canby, thought Connery gives ‘the first uncertain performance of his otherwise exemplary career’.177 The film performed so poorly in America – returning only $3,583,513 at the box-office – that when it was released seven months later in the UK in November 1982, it was promoted with Connery in Bond pose, camera replacing gun, under the release title The Man with the Deadly Lens.178 Five Days One Summer (1982) would seem to have been Connery’s decision rather than Ovitz’s, motivated by the prospect of acting with High Noon’s director, Fred Zinnemann, whom Connery considered ‘a living legend. I always hoped to work with him.’ 179 Zinnemann, who had nurtured the project for forty years, thought Connery the only actor who could play the lead, able to cope with the physical as well as the acting demands.180 He was so anxious to secure the star’s services that he requested Connery be made a full partner on the film, ‘consulted on all major creative matters as well as the many logistical problems that arise in any location’.181 The film is set in the Swiss Alps in 1932, with Connery playing a Clydeside doctor in an illicit relationship with his niece (Betsy Brantley) half his age, who has been infatuated by him since childhood. She falls in love with their mountain guide (Lambert Wilson), who dies in a rock-fall accident. Connery thought his role had Ibsenian proportions, ‘ostensibly a pillar of the community, but ruled by his darker emotions’.182 The critics praised Connery’s low-key, subtle and utterly convincing performance, but most thought he was wasted on such a minor film. Described by Variety as a ‘glacially slow drama with dim box-office appeal’, Five Days One Summer only had a limited release before disappearing.183 As Andrew Rissik diagnosed, the film treats Connery as if he were simply a character actor; Zinnemann ‘seemed to have wanted Connery’s weight and presence, the solidity and strength of an accomplished star actor, without taking account of the unique potency of his accepted screen persona’.184

Returning as Bond: Never Say Never Again Ovitz had, at this point at least, been no more successful than Selinger in finding parts that could develop Connery’s career. Ovitz’s choice of two science fiction films seems to have been expedient rather than part of a deeper understanding of the roles that might accommodate and develop, as the earlier mythic films had done, the ‘unique potency of Connery’s accepted screen persona’ by transmuting rather than denying or displacing

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the Bondian elements. A more obvious if cruder answer to Connery’s waning bankability was to return as 007. Connery had never lost his fascination with Bond, whom he considered ‘an interesting character. There’s a lot more I can do with him.’ 185 He had been approached in 1975 by maverick writer-producer Kevin McClory about the possibility of a return, as a clause in McClory’s settlement over Thunderball (1965) entitled him to develop another film based on the same story after ten years had elapsed. Returning to the project a decade on, McClory persuaded Connery to collaborate with experienced spy fiction writer Len Deighton to write an updated screenplay entitled James Bond of the Secret Service as part of McClory’s ambition to launch his own Bond franchise.186 According to Connery, this version had all sorts of exotic and spectacular events, including SPECTRE’s underwater base below the Bermuda Triangle, an attack on America’s financial nerve centre through the New York sewers and a climactic battle on the Statue of Liberty.187 Connery commented that he had enjoyed working on the script and claimed returning as Bond would be an acting challenge as well as a commercial prospect: ‘apart from making a great deal of money from it, it would be fun to see what I could do with the part now as an actor’.188 However, Eon blocked development of McClory’s project, arguing that the story went beyond Thunderball’s original storyline, which caused Paramount to withdraw its offer to finance.189 McClory continued to pursue Connery, visiting him on location in Morocco (The Man Who Would Be King) and Arnhem (A Bridge Too Far).190 However, it was not until 1981 after Jack Schwartzman, lawyer turned independent producer, managed to pick his way through the legal tangles that production could begin. Using his trump card that Connery was to star, Schwartzman persuaded twenty-six independent financiers, in return for distribution deals in various markets, to provide the initial funding and Warner Bros. to supply the bulk of the $36 million finances in return for distribution rights for North and South America and the UK.191 Schwartzman became the producer with McClory relegated to executive producer. Connery was paid a $5 million dollar salary ($1 million more than Roger Moore earned as Bond) and an undisclosed percentage of the gross.192 Connery had what he termed ‘unconditional control’ from the outset ‘in terms of conception, writing, ideas and where [the story] would go’, which included selection of director and major casting choices. Connery was determined to get back to the original idea of the lone agent battling against the odds ‘with as much humour as possible’.193 Never Say Never Again therefore offered Connery the opportunity to create, or recreate, Bond and the Bond world as he thought it should be portrayed. Connery also had pressing financial reasons to make another Bond film because his former accountant, Kenneth Richards,

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had invested the money he had earned from the previous Bond films in unsecured property deals.194 Connery eventually sued Richards for $4.1 million in 1984 but never received the money.195 Connery’s wife, Micheline Roquebrune, was enthusiastic about the film, apparently suggesting what became the title, Never Say Never Again.196 Ovitz’s views about the wisdom of a return are unrecorded, but we do know that he was very active in the salary negotiations and supported Connery on set during what became a fraught production. Connery secured most of the cast he wanted, including Klaus Maria Brandauer, a European actor he much admired, to play a young, attractive and very contemporary villain, a greedy businessman not a power-crazed grotesque. Connery also obtained his preferred cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe, whose subtle, subdued lighting contributes significantly to the film’s mellow mood. When Connery’s first choice of director, Clive Donner, was unavailable, he turned to Irvin Kerschner, with whom he had worked on A Fine Madness and who had recently directed the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Although Never Say Never Again was to have the requisite exotic locations, chases and beautiful women, the production had what Kerschner called a ‘certain holding back’ to emphasise the characterisation rather than a parade of gadgets and spectacular action.197 Kerschner shot scenes so that character interaction could be shown without cutting, thus giving greater flow, space and weight to the performances. Connery worked on every scene closely with the director and made changes to the script nightly, adding humour where possible.198 The fundamental agreed conception was to make Bond a more human figure ‘and not to go on pretending Bond is still 32’, as Schwartzman commented. Connery was to play a more mature Bond that reflected his own age, fifty-two.199 Although Never Say Never Again could not depart fundamentally from Thunderball, its screenwriter, Lorenzo Semple, emphasised that it was a ‘readaptation’ rather than a remake, ‘a parallel story’.200 However, as the production developed, Connery expressed his dissatisfaction with Semple’s initial screenplay, essentially the study of a burned-out spy in rehab, which he felt lacked action, drama and suspense, and over-emphasised Bond being out of condition.201 As he explained in interview, to have Bond wheezing and puffing over every action was ‘one good gag. You can’t build a whole plot round it.’ 202 Connery’s agitation about the deficiencies of the script persisted and eventually, three weeks after shooting had begun, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, established British television writers, were brought in to sharpen the dialogue, create additional humour, rewrite the opening sequence and sort out several problems with the storyline. Clement and La Frenais recalled the factions and tensions on set where everything had to be checked by the producer, director, Connery and the legal department

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because of the constant efforts by Eon to mount a legal challenge to the production; they witnessed that everyone was ‘jittery’ because of the schism that had developed between Schwartzman and McClory on one side and Connery and Ovitz on the other.203 Connery reflected later, ‘I accepted it on the strength of the plot outline. But so much of it wasn’t properly prepared in advance … I found myself overseeing the whole movie – the script, the locations, even the set designs. And the production dragged on much longer than it should have done because of all the hassles.’ 204 The lack of preparation was a consequence of the determination to have the film released before Roger Moore’s sixth outing as Bond in Octopussy. However, despite this exigency, Connery was scathing in his criticisms of the producer he considered incompetent and out of his depth. Several others involved in the production concurred with this view, including Kerschner, who judged that only Connery’s ‘controlled, steadfast commitment’ enabled the film to be completed.205 These difficulties weakened the final film, which has many flaws, but there is much to enjoy in Connery’s return as Bond. The basic running joke of Never Say Never Again is that Bond, scarred and creaking at the joints through his years in the field, has been sidelined, relegated to training younger recruits and subject to relentless scrutiny and constant badgering by a martinet M (Edward Fox), who has an undisguised contempt for the 00s. When M dresses down Bond after he has been killed in what turns out to have been an elaborate testing exercise and berates him about his health, Connery adopts a mock-concerned expression and a slightly weary tolerance. Bond’s relationship to a younger man is deliberately very different from his respectful if slightly truculent relationship with Bernard Lee’s much older M in the Eon films. Because Connery was determined Bond carried the same potency, threat and sexual allure that were fundamental to the figure, he made strenuous efforts to get himself into shape. He looked slimmer and fitter than he had on Diamonds Are Forever in order to maintain credibility as an action hero. However, his portrayal does not simply replicate his earlier incarnation but crafts a subtle and nuanced performance of an ageing agent. Rather than display the instinctive reflexes of his younger self, he makes each act deliberate, based on the calculation of risk; all Bond’s movements are very carefully controlled throughout, expressive of someone who needs to harbour his energies. Although Connery walks and runs with the old panther-like grace and is capable of thrilling and effective action, his expression always registers a slightly bemused sense of cautious surprise that he has actually managed to survive. Roquebrune persuaded her husband to lighten his brows so that his eyes were more prominent and warmer, which helps convey the mellower, more reflective figure Bond has become, particularly in reaction shots.206 Connery adopts a habitual expression of

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4.6  A ‘mature, autumnal Bond’: Connery in Never Say Never Again (1983)

quizzical acceptance, even slight sadness on occasions, which lends an autumnal tone to the film. Because Connery retains Bond’s strength and charisma, he can convincingly outperform a much younger opponent in Largo – an intelligent performance by Brandauer, investing his character with a quixotic unpredictability that can be goaded into a jealous rage – and also steal his partner, Domino (Kim Basinger). There is no embarrassment for the audience in watching this romance unfold, beginning with a cleverly contrived encounter in which Bond manages to touch her body quite intimately whilst pretending to be a masseur. His prize for winning the game of world domination with Largo is to dance with Domino, which, alongside the necessity for Bond to impart information about her brother’s death, becomes a star spectacle as the pair dance a vigorous tango.207 When he moves to kiss Domino, Bond murmurs, ‘I’m doing this for two very good reasons. One: I hope to provoke a reaction.’ ‘And the other?’ ‘Because I always wanted to.’ That second line neatly registers the older Bond’s more considered relationship with the ‘Bond girl’. The emphasis on Bond’s greater humanity is balanced against the film’s knowing reminders of his legendary status. The under-resourced Q (Alec McCowen) quips, ‘Things have been awfully dull around here. Now you’re on this case, I hope we’re going to have some gratuitous sex and violence.’ Playing with the Bond legend is most evident in the scene when Bond is cornered by Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera). As the female villain, Blush is immune to Bond’s seductive powers but, like Fiona Volpe in Thunderball, she overplays her hand by trying to humiliate Bond as well as kill him. As she stands poised to strike, Blush demands he write down that she was ‘the greatest rapture of my life’ and ‘sign it James Bond 007’. In mockreflective mode, he replies, ‘Well, to be perfectly honest, there was this girl in Philadelphia …’ When she screams in rage at this blasphemy, Bond

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apparently concurs: ‘You’re right. I was going to put you in my memoirs as number one.’ Stalling for time, he pauses: ‘I just remembered. It’s against service policy for agents to give endorsements’, before dispatching her with Q’s lethal pen-cannon, one of the few gadgets Bond is permitted but which is not functioning properly and he has difficulty in firing. Contemplating the destruction, Connery adopts an expression of surprised approval that it has actually worked. In this clever, beautifully paced and played scene, Connery brought his mock-ironic conception of Bond to perfection. Nick Roddick thought that in Never Say Never Again Connery ‘has brought back the world of adult fun which made the Bond movies so compulsive – a fun, like the best Christmas panto jokes, balanced on a knife edge between naivety and knowingness’. Roddick argues that Connery respected an audience’s desire to be Bond ‘at the same time as he demonstrates its absurdity’.208 Although other reviewers harboured more pronounced reservations about the film – considering it too long, and lacking clear direction in parts, which made the action sag – Connery’s performance was almost universally praised: ‘In fine form and still very much looking the part … the actor has brought Bond very gracefully, and pleasurably, into middle-age.’ 209 Several critics commented on Connery’s being ‘in magnificent trim’ and contrasted his ‘rueful machismo’ favourably with ‘the after-shave blandness’ of Roger Moore.210 One, writing his review in the form of a letter to Connery, congratulated the actor on a marvellous performance ‘because you don’t try to pick up where you left off all those years ago. You almost play your age … the sagging jowls and lines’ that added character to his face.211 Another thought Connery ‘combines the wry reserve of yesteryear with a hint of weariness that, in the context of the screenplay’s insistence on adventure, is genuinely amusing’; she enjoyed the portrayal of ‘an older, seasoned man of much greater stature’.212 There had been a huge press interest in Connery’s return as Bond, especially in what was dubbed the ‘Battle of the Bonds’ between Connery and Moore.213 However, because of the production difficulties, Never Say Never Again was released in October 1983, four months later than Octopussy. Connery undertook a gruelling publicity campaign including attending premieres and plugging the film energetically on the talk show circuit.214 October is a notoriously difficult month in which to release a film but the opening weekend gross of $9,725,154 was announced as the biggest autumn opening in motion picture history.215 Although Never Say Never Again’s final worldwide gross of $159 million did not quite match that of Octopussy ($182 million), it was eloquent testimony to the public’s continued appetite for Connery as Bond. At the end of Never Say Never Again, an exhausted Bond relaxes in a Jacuzzi as he watches Domino swim energetically round the pool, and gives

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a knowing wink to the audience as he tells her his old life is definitely over, which makes it appear, as Christopher Bray argues, that Connery was thinking of another series.216 However, he professed to be ‘disillusioned’ by all the vexations of the production and in 1985 initiated a lawsuit against Schwartzman for not paying what Connery considered he was owed from the film’s profits, $172,843, alongside a claim for $25 million in punitive damages.217 In the same year he instigated a $225 million lawsuit against Cubby Broccoli and what was now MGM/United Artists, alleging he had been defrauded of his rightful profits in the series.218 Never Say Never Again was indeed Connery’s last outing as Bond. Not even a reported offer of $15 million from McClory in 1985 to star in Warhead could tempt another return.219

Lost cause hero The release of Never Say Never Again appeared, on one level, to bring Connery full circle back in Bondage. However, in an extended article about Connery in Cosmo written in 1982 when the film was in production if not yet released, James Horowitz argued that a major change had occurred in Connery’s star image in these ten years: ‘The Connery charisma, and the aura about him of strength, sexuality, awareness and some mystery is his own and not merely a reflection of that fabulous caricature he once played so well.’ In Horowitz’s view, the mythic mid-1970s roles ‘slew the lingering ghost of Bond. He looked magnificent with beard and thinning hair. His performances were expansive, yet subtle and laced with charm. And his presence could hardly be contained on the screen.’ 220 Horowitz’s analysis identifies the importance of these epic films in which Connery blossomed as an actor, delivering what remain several of the best performances of his career, which earned him a high reputation with independent producers even if studio executives remained stubbornly sceptical. Reviewers were fulsome in their praise of the subtlety and conviction of his gestures, movements and facial expression, which were increasingly nuanced and precisely keyed to the emotions of a particular scene. Playing a mythic figure could accommodate the dual nature of star performances: the realisation of a specific character suffused with Connery’s unique presence as a star. The most intelligent directors he worked with – Boorman, Huston, Lester and Milius – understood the nature of his persona as well as his abilities as an actor, constructing films that transmuted elements of the Bond image into a new persona that was epic and mythic. In a similar vein, Connery contributed a marvellous cameo as King Agamemnon to Terry Gilliam’s epic fantasy Time Bandits (1981), which turned out to be a huge hit. Connery is the only character in the film who fulfils the image of an old-fashioned hero,

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which, as in The Wind and the Lion, is played to the admiring gaze of a young boy.221 Together these films, whatever their variable commercial returns, constitute a major body of work that forms an important part of Connery’s legacy as a screen actor and which had repercussions on his later career. They also, I wish to argue, compose a significant contribution to 1970s screen stardom that drew on Connery’s particular strengths but also his unique positioning as a transnational star, one who was able, as Rissik discerned, to embody ‘an international language for epic and romance’, which gave him a distinctive currency in the marketplace. This distinctiveness was aligned historically with the zeitgeist. Connery’s mythic roles – and also his military ones, Major Dapes in Cuba and Major General Urquhart in A Bridge Too Far – are variations of what Rissik labels the ‘lost cause hero’: ‘men haunted by dreams of heroism and nobility, persistently and tragically outmanoeuvred by the contingencies of the modern age’.222 Neil Sinyard contends that Connery’s characters, trapped wholly or in part by their own legend, made him an epic actor ‘for a modern, more ironic, self-questioning age’. Sinyard argues that the reason Connery’s films were not that commercially successful was because ‘the values he embodies seem unfashionable. What he tries to project is an acceptable face of heroism in an anti-heroic age … dourly determined on a right course of action’, fighting for a lost cause that is nevertheless worth risking everything.223 Through the power and accomplishment of Connery’s performances, a new kind of self-reflective epic can be discerned, one which portrayed figures who are critiqued as caught up in the construction of their own myth rather than simply embodying a myth, as was the case with Bond. It is the critique of those mythic figures and their elegiac quality that distinguished Connery from Charlton Heston, the epic actor he, in a sense, succeeded, whose roles – as in Ben-Hur (1959), El Cid (1961) or Khartoum (1963) – were more stolidly virtuous.224 If, as Michael Wood contends, these earlier epics were a celebration of Hollywood itself, its capacity to create grandeur, splendour and scale, these 1970s epic evoked Hollywood’s own lack of certainty about its continued ability to produce ‘big’ films.225 In this sense, though the values were entirely different, Connery’s persona had certain similarities to Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name in his mythic westerns, or his vigilante cop ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan. Connery’s embodiment of the zeitgeist was paradoxical as it also expressed a nostalgia for a vanished past. As Frank Rich in the New York Post commented apropos Robin and Marian, Connery and Hepburn ‘epitomise ideals of glamour and sophistication that have since passed out of our lives’.226 Connery’s stardom itself looked backwards to Hollywood’s Golden Age rather than being of the moment. In his overview of the emerging Hollywood stars in the 1970s, James Morrison argues that they are bound

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together by a ‘provisional rejection’ of the idealisation of the star image: ‘Nearly every major star to emerge defies the familiar norms of beauty, glamour, and traditional masculinity or femininity that stardom itself had done so much to establish.’ 227 Connery embodied, even if bald or weatherbeaten, traditional masculine strength, power and beauty nowhere more captivating than when he dies or bids farewell, a figure with no future or place in the present. Thus these films may be read as allegories for a vanished era of stardom. Arguably Connery’s cultural significance was not matched by his commercial success. This was the decade, 1974–83, during which Connery lost his superstar status, never appearing in Quigley’s annual poll of Top Ten MoneyMaking Stars.228 He remained combative and became famous for his litigiousness, but his lawsuits were important attempts to enforce the claims of freelance cultural workers, which, as discussed, encouraged other stars to join his struggle against corporate greed or indifference and to make the case for the importance of stars’ creative labour. Although Connery made his own choice about what roles he took and the direction of his career, in this period he conceded the increased importance of the agent. However, the attempts by Selinger and later Ovitz to resurrect his career had mixed results. Christopher Bray argues shrewdly that Selinger’s volume strategy was much more effective for Michael Caine – a character actor who was also a leading man – than for Connery, who played character roles but as an international star.229 Selinger’s approach was also at odds with that pursued by the major Hollywood stars, who appeared infrequently, therefore driving up the value of each appearance; it was quality, not quantity that helped sustain a star’s status at the highest levels of the industry.230 Ovitz’s initial choice of projects was no more enlightened than Selinger’s. Neither agent was able to help Connery achieve the development of a stable post-Bond persona. However culturally significant, Connery’s ‘lost cause hero’ is a retrospective discursive construction rather than one that was able to be marketed actively by studios. It was not, as shown, a persona that could maintain Connery’s currency as an international star, hence the need to return as Bond. However, this return was not a reversion to the status quo ante. Never Say Never Again was made on Connery’s own terms and foregrounded characterisation, playing Bond as a mature man. Connery’s other mythic heroes, most notably Robin Hood, were also older figures, reliant on Connery’s increasingly weighty presence and his acting strengths rather than simply his looks and athleticism. Thus, although his career may appear to have circled back on itself, playing a mature hero was the decisive shift that enabled Connery to overcome one of the most difficult challenges facing any actor: ageing. How he was able to develop this in his subsequent career and forge a coherent persona is the principal focus of the next chapter.

5

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Ageing star, 1984–90

I’ve always taken parts that attracted me. The age factor has never been a consideration … I just ask: would playing this character be stimulating for me?1

Introduction: ageing stars Connery’s remarks in this epigraph are somewhat disingenuous – there were many other considerations in his choice of role – but he was not an actor whose success depended on youthful male beauty. Indeed, critics often argued that his looks improved with age, lending his face more character, expressivity and mature charm. The screenwriter Michael Crichton was one of many fellow creative labourers who thought Connery’s looks had ‘benefited from the softening of age’ because the ‘rich, dark animal presence that is almost overpowering’ which had characterised his early films was now leavened by maturity, warmth and humour in which Connery used his ‘considerable comic gifts to undercut and play against [his] sensuality’.2 The critic Sheila Johnston thought ‘the years have lent him a mocking authority and the dignified remoteness of one who no longer needs to please anyone but himself’.3 William McIlvanney considered it was Connery’s ‘remarkable sangfroid in dealing with the effects of time’ that contributed to his success, the ‘confidence with which he put on age’, unfazed by early baldness.4 Although he wore a toupee in his return as a mature Bond in Never Say Never Again, his looks in that film were untypical; as he grew older Connery often appeared with thinning hair and grew facial hair, usually a beard, as in Robin and Marian where he played a character older than his actual years. A beard framed, defined and softened his face, accentuating the eyes that registered a range of nuanced emotions and which now offered the promise of wisdom, wit and compassionate understanding rather than the opacity of an arresting handsomeness. As one reviewer phrased it, in close-up Connery’s face had become ‘one of cinema’s great shifting human landscapes’.5 The charismatic and sensual appeal of Connery’s mature looks received

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public acclamation when he was pronounced the ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ by People magazine in 1989, aged nearly sixty.6 My discussion of Connery’s later career focuses on how he managed to use these advantages in various ways to make what became an extremely successful transition to mature star, enabling him to enjoy a second period of superstardom. This analysis is informed by the increasing academic interest in the cultural politics of ageing stars, ‘a new field of research emerging in response to the growing number of older actors who are highly visible within broader circuits of celebrity culture and who populate a burgeoning number of fictional films depicting the pleasures and problems of aging characters’.7 Interest in older stars forms part of wider social and cultural debates about ageing that have gained greater prominence over the last twenty years as the demographics of Western societies have undergone profound changes; academic attention has mirrored the cultural industries’ recognition of the box-office appeal of ageing stars – what Sally Chivers calls the ‘silvering screen’ – itself part of greying America’s multibillion-dollar ‘ageing industry’.8 Ageing, like other markers of difference, is a discursive construction that reflects cultural assumptions, social practices and material conditions.9 The spectacle of the ageing star is also a profoundly gendered phenomenon that differentiates sharply between the sexes and privileges males. Connery’s ability to enjoy an extended career into old age was legitimated by Western societies’ high valuation of older males’ social, cultural and physical attributes. In her discussion of ageing – which she notes ‘is much more a social judgment than a biological eventuality’ – Susan Sontag argues that older males are ‘identified with competence, autonomy, self-control – qualities that the dissolution of youth does not threaten’, valuations that are not available to women.10 Historically, male stars have enjoyed greater economic power and longevity than their female counterparts. This was a function of cinematic production cultures that were highly masculine and often sexist but also because of the deep-rooted patriarchal ideology Sontag identifies, which associates older males with experience and wisdom.11 Some genres, for instance the western, privilege the older male hero, allowing the careers of many stars – including Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, James Stewart and John Wayne – to blossom even as their youthful allure faded.12 Although the action-adventure genre trades on the vigorous athleticism of a youthful male lead, more recently some ageing male action stars – notably Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis – have invented a new sub-genre of the ‘geri-action’ film, which has prolonged their careers.13 Some American stars whose careers have extended into old age – Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford – have been seen as ‘heroes of ageing’.14 Eastwood’s later career, in particular, has been the subject of extensive

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commentary: ‘the spectacle of America’s most granite-like, indestructible icon of masculine power sinking into age and doubt has compelled a kind of awed fascination, like watching huge chunks of ice-shelf falling into the sea’.15 My argument is that Connery’s later career, partly because of the continuing iconic power of the Bond image, provokes a similar fascination as he continued performing in action-adventure films, but also played other types of role in which the effects of age were foregrounded. Like Eastwood, Connery did not ‘sink’ into playing character roles or ‘retreat’ into a longrunning television series – two standard tactics for extending a film star’s career – but remained a top-line star right through to his final feature film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2003. My concern with the ageing Connery extends across this chapter and the following one but to avoid undue length I have split them into two roughly equal periods. This chapter focuses on how Connery was able to revive his career gradually from the doldrums of the early 1980s to restored superstar status by the end of the decade by accommodating the ‘problem’ of ageing through the construction and consolidation of a post-Bond persona, the father-mentor. Although the American film industry ‘remained a business critically dependent on stars’, Connery was not in a position to initiate or greenlight projects during this period, nor exercise the ‘authority over the production process’ permitted to top stars.16 However, he benefitted from his bold decision, discussed in the previous chapter, to sign with CAA and Michael Ovitz, whose power and influence increased significantly during this period; by the mid-1980s CAA had become the leading agency and Ovitz recognised as the most powerful single figure in Hollywood.17 Part of Ovitz’s control – and his value to his clients – was that, as on Never Say Never Again, he was prepared to involve himself in productions once they were under way, working like a de facto producer to keep them on track.18 Connery continued to take responsibility for his own decisions, but needed Ovitz’s guidance to navigate an industry increasingly dominated by vertically integrated media conglomerates (with interests in film, television including cable, music and publishing) looking to exercise control across various markets, notably the exponential growth of DVD rentals, which could rescue a film that performed poorly in its theatrical release.19 Although Connery continued to work with auteur directors during the 1980s, the 1970s ‘movie brats’ had become incorporated into mainstream filmmaking. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, in particular, became identified as ‘blockbuster auteurs’ who saw themselves, in Spielberg’s words, as ‘independent moviemakers working within the Hollywood establishment’ and whose films had huge budgets.20 Connery continued to be a singular presence within this reconfigured industry. He starred in British and European films as well as American ones, often in highly distinctive roles, which lends the



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spectacle of his ageing a particular cultural interest and significance by providing a transnational focus in contradistinction to the dominant academic concern with ageing American stars such as Eastwood.

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Creating the father-mentor Although, as previously discussed, Ovitz claimed that Connery’s career difficulties came from accepting too many sub-standard offers, his actual advice seems to have been that Connery needed to keep working. This would, of course, enable Ovitz to take his 10 per cent of any salary cheque. Thus he counselled Connery to accept the $1 million salary for six days’ work on Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1984), an Arthurian fantasy adventure in which he plays the Green Knight, without worrying about the film’s quality or trying to solve any of its production problems.21 Ovitz also approved Connery’s decision to accept a supporting role in Highlander (1986) for another reported $1 million salary.22 Connery’s involvement surprised several reviewers, who wondered why he appeared in ‘something as nasty and inane’.23 However, in addition to the pay cheque, Connery seems, throughout his brief appearances, to be having an enjoyable time. The studio production notes intimated that part of the incentive was the prospect of filming in Scotland as he ‘clearly enjoyed working in the land of his birth and on frequent occasions demonstrated his pleasure by breaking into song’.24 Connery plays Juan Sánchez Villalobos Ramírez, a two thousand year-old Egyptian immortal who becomes the mentor of Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert), who, as a fellow immortal, has been ostracised by a fierce Scottish tribe known simply as Highlanders. Sporting a grey wig with ponytail, neat goatee beard and resplendently dressed as a Renaissance Spanish courtier in a peacock cloak draped over his wine-red doublet and hose, Connery looks arrestingly handsome as he makes a spectacular, superstar entrance on a white charger. Highlander may well be an adolescent fantasy-film, but, as with the Bond films, Connery takes his manifestly absurd role seriously, lending all his physical and vocal resources to create his fantastical character. Ramírez’s mission is to prepare Connor for his epic encounter with the Kurgan (Clancy Brown), a Bond-style villain whose triumph would cause mankind to ‘suffer an eternity of darkness’. Ramírez’s rigorous training regime becomes the occasion for Connery to display his trademark sardonic wit at his apprentice’s initial ineptitude. Although Ramírez’s mentoring is moral and emotional as well as physical – he attempts to make Connor aware of the poignancy of falling in love with a woman who will age and die as he lives on – the emphasis, unsurprisingly, falls on athleticism, mastering

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5.1  The first father-mentor: Connery as Juan Sánchez Villalobos Ramírez, Egyptian immortal, explaining the way of things to his tutee Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) in Highlander (1986)

the art of sword-fighting amidst the spectacular Highland scenery, especially atop various vertiginous crags. In the most memorable scene, Ramírez urges Connor to feel the power of the stag as the pair run along a beach together delighting in the energy and strength of their bodies, concluding with a headlong plunge into a loch. Connery’s running has lost almost none of its power and graceful athleticism, which is also on display in the action set pieces. These provide several opportunities for Connery to demonstrate his prowess as a swordsman, including his own fight with the Kurgan, prompting the Glasgow Herald’s reviewer to wonder why this ‘mature Errol Flynn’ had not played more swashbuckling roles.25 Highlander was generally panned by critics, albeit with an occasional grudging acknowledgement that it was intermittently enjoyable.26 Although ineptly promoted in America by Twentieth Century-Fox, where it grossed only $5,900,000, Highlander performed better internationally, especially in Europe where it was released with a longer running time, grossing over $7 million.27 Its popularity in Europe was a strong indication of Connery’s global appeal, and Lambert’s cachet with younger audiences following his success as the star of Subway (1985). Highlander’s director, Russell Mulcahy,

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recalled that for the French premiere, ‘there were 30ft cut outs of Sean and Christopher all the way down the Champs-Elysées’.28 Aided by Queen’s memorable music, Highlander became a huge success in the burgeoning video market, eventually spawning three sequels and a television series that demonstrated the importance of these new outlets.29 On the strength of this, Connery was paid a $3 million salary for only ten days’ work on Highlander II: The Quickening (1991), in which he injects some wit and style into an otherwise dull and largely incomprehensible film, partially redeemed by its breath-taking set design and visual spectacle. Highlander II had a modest theatrical release before garnering its main market on video.30 If Highlander was a well-rewarded jeu d’esprit, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose (1986) – a French–German–Italian co-production of Umberto Eco’s international bestseller that had won numerous literary awards and sold over four million copies – was much more culturally prestigious. Annaud devoted over three years to its preparation, using four scriptwriters to work on a screenplay that went through seventeen versions.31 Connery’s interest had been sparked by the novel’s themes and the nature of the central character, Brother William of Baskerville, ‘the man of reason in a world of blind faith’: It’s about the suppression of information … [that] has Twentieth Century parallels all over the place: Poland and Solidarity; the Soviet Union, of course. It’s such a pleasure to play somebody who’s intelligent, witty and humorous. Most movies are bereft of that … it got me excited, which rarely happens.32

Connery would also have been conscious that this was a highly ambitious production, but to play a bald Franciscan friar was both an acting challenge and high risk rather than an obvious career move. Nevertheless, he lobbied assiduously for the part. Ovitz telephoned Annaud every two months: ‘His speech was invariable: “I remind you Sean would love to be in your film. I remind you Sean is a wonderful actor”. I invariably answered to his invariable request: “Sherlock Holmes plus James Bond, there’s one character too many in the abbey.”’ 33 However, having dismissed his initial choice of Roy Schneider as ‘too American’, and frustrated by his year-long search for a suitable unknown actor, Annaud agreed to meet Connery. The encounter left a lasting impression: He came into my office. He was a royal fine figure of a man. His build took the doorframe. I invited him to sit. He did it as in the theatre, like Polyeucte or Agamemnon … He read the first cue; he gave me goose pimples. What I was hearing was what I had heard inside myself for almost two years. I stopped him on page 3.

Though the circumstances were very different, Connery had clearly rehearsed this interview as carefully as his first encounter with Saltzman and Broccoli

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in 1961, re-employing the Malmgrenian precepts – the need to appear strong, self-assured and in command – that had been so effective on that earlier occasion. For Annaud, seeing Connery in the flesh was enough to exorcise the spectre of Bond. Annaud’s eagerness to cast Connery was not shared by Columbia, the original distributors, which considered Connery ‘an actor in decline’. However, Annaud’s enthusiasm was supported by his producer Bernd Eichinger, head of the German company Neue Constantin, which put up half the money and took over management of the production, persuading Barry Diller, Twentieth Century-Fox’s CEO, to part-finance the film in return for the North American rights, an arrangement that afforded Annaud complete creative control.34 The agreed budget of $18.5 million was high by European standards but, with costs roughly half those of an American production, production designer Dante Ferretti was able to create the largest exterior set built in Europe since Cleopatra (1963).35 As the production proceeded, Annaud came to appreciate the wisdom of his choice of leading actor, praising Connery’s ‘marvellous energy and humour’ and his ‘physical beauty’, alongside what he recognised as his highly developed understanding of the role, all of which gave the part depth and audience appeal. Like many directors, Annaud was impressed by Connery’s technical precision, but also marvelled at the ‘thing in his eyes that is quite wonderful’. Unlike Highlander, in which Connery is filmed in long shot to capture movement, Annaud frequently shoots Connery in close-up to make full use of the star’s facial expressiveness. The technical precision that Annaud admired was the result of Connery’s customary professionalism but also of his recognition that he was part of a production committed to achieving a meticulous authenticity. He therefore learned ‘the dance’: exactly how close to stand to another character, ‘how much obeisance to give, who sings and who talks’.36 The result was one of Connery’s most subtle creations, composed of small but telling gestures: ‘a twitch of the head here, an adjustment of the magnifying glasses, the flicker of a raised eyebrow, the momentary set of jaw’.37 These details help realise a complex characterisation, part Holmesian proto-detective, enlisted by the abbot of a remote monastery (Michael Lonsdale) to help solve a series of grisly murders, respected intellectual disputant summoned to take part in a papal conference, and man of integrity and principle, a former inquisitor when their mission was ‘to guide, not to punish’. In a superbly judged performance, Connery complements his portrayal of William’s intellectual acumen, picking his way through Eco’s ‘universe of signs’ where every detail is part of a larger design, with occasional irascibility, and the vanity of hubris. His gestures and actions also convey the depth of his relationship with his young apprentice Adso (Christian Slater), which mingles stern

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5.2  Medieval Sherlock Holmes: Connery as William of Baskerville with Adso (Christian Slater) in The Name of the Rose (1986)

admonishment with playfulness and affection. Annaud considered it to be ‘a marvellous relationship in which a young man is fascinated by an older person because of his culture and intelligence, while the older man is fascinated with the spontaneity, charm and naiveté of the boy, in whom he sees his younger self’.38 To Adso’s plaintive ‘Will you hear my confession?’ William replies, ‘I would rather you told me as a friend.’ Through this relationship, William can share his emotions, his rich capacity for enthusiasm and joy

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in knowledge – as when he emits a cry of delight as he tells Adso, ‘We’re in one of the greatest libraries in the whole of Christendom!’ He can also confess his secret sorrow, confiding in Adso the horror of his recantation under duress from his accuser Bernardo Gui (F. Murray Abraham) representing the tyrannical church, which resulted in an innocent man being burned at the stake. Having survived the flames that engulf the monastery library, William embraces Adso, his expression a mixture of relief, sorrow that he could only rescue a few volumes, and love for the surrogate son whom he has guided into manhood. Connery’s performance is complemented by Slater’s, which convincingly mingles fear with adoration, perhaps helped by his being in awe of his co-star: ‘I grew up watching the Bond movies, and working with him at 16 was like having a master class in acting, life, all sorts of things.’ 39 Many reviewers had substantial reservations about Annaud’s success in adapting Eco’s novel. One thought that ‘the real terrors of the tale – the terror of uncertainty, of the Inquisition, of blood-stained superstition and of a world abandoned by God – are rendered grotesque rather than violently frightening’.40 However, there was almost unanimous praise for Connery’s performance. The Wall Street Journal’s reviewer admired Connery’s ‘expressive restraint that lets you know his character is a man who’s learned to hold back … when William lets loose a rare whoop of excitement … you get a chill’.41 British reviewers, often equally sceptical about Annaud’s adaptation, shared their American counterparts’ enthusiasm for Connery’s characterisation. Marina Warner was fulsome in her praise of ‘such an expressive actor that his scalp, here visible under his tonsure, actually wrinkles in thought like his face’.42 Their judgement was echoed in the 1987 BAFTA ceremony at which Connery won Best Actor award, the first time his acting received an important public acclamation. The Name of the Rose’s intellectualism, leisurely pace and dark lighting screamed European art house to North American audiences; it earned only $7,153,487 at the US box-office.43 Their prejudices had been fanned by an ill-judged publicity campaign that, as Connery remarked, made Annaud’s film seem ‘as if it were a farce, an Italian comedy’; he also criticised Fox’s decision to give the film a wide initial release instead of letting it build gradually by word of mouth.44 By contrast, The Name of the Rose was a huge hit in the UK and Europe, where it grossed $124 million.45 Although precise figures for its UK box-office are not available, Robin Buss noted the ‘queues in the Haymarket [which] suggest that it is going to achieve a popular success that will be well-deserved’.46 Although Connery remained disappointed that so few American viewers had seen what he considered to be one of his best performances, he was compensated financially. In a generous gesture, Eichinger gave him 2 per cent of the international gross,

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although he was not legally obliged to do so, in recognition of the importance of his performance to the film’s success.47 Connery’s characterisation demonstrated not only his appeal for European audiences but also his willingness to experiment, to play non-romantic roles, and his skills as an actor who could make playing an ageing bald monk into a charismatic star vehicle, a range beyond that of any of his American counterparts. In doing so, he allayed Annaud’s fears about there being ‘one character too many in the abbey’ by completely submerging his Bond persona. Connery’s enthusiasm for The Name of the Rose was thus amply justified, but it did not restore his popularity in the North American marketplace. This came through The Untouchables (1987), which had its origins in producer Art Linson’s idea to make a large-screen version of the successful television series (1959–63) as a full ‘A’ production. He persuaded David Mamet, a playwright with high cultural standing who had just won the Pulitzer prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, to write the screenplay with little reference to the television series save to retain the character of the principal investigator, Treasury Agent Eliot Ness. Linson approached Brian De Palma to direct because his ‘operatic’ visual style could give ‘weight and depth to a drama that was already well known’, whose subject, Prohibition, Linson judged had ‘mythic grandeur’.48 Although De Palma agreed to casting Kevin Costner, a relatively unknown actor at this point, in the central role of Ness, he was adamant that the film’s impact could only be achieved by having well-known stars playing Al Capone and also Jimmy Malone, the older cop who aids Ness. De Palma was convinced that only Connery could play Malone because of his ‘ability to project command. He radiates that sense of a man who knows what he’s doing’ and whose death would have a huge impact on audiences.49 However, although Paramount owned the rights, Linson had difficulty persuading the studio that this film would be a money-spinner. To Paramount’s executives it appeared a risky prospect. De Palma’s previous two films had not been successful commercially, neither had Robert De Niro’s, the actor cast as Capone; Connery had not had a major success in America since his return as Bond; and Costner was not yet marketable as a star. Indeed, the studio thought The Untouchables, as a known property, did not require stars and demanded Linson work within a very tight budget of $18 million.50 Struggling to find Connery’s $2 million salary within his modest budget, Linson was surprised when Ovitz brokered a deferred deal in which Connery received a very modest salary, $50,000, but with a full 10 per cent of the box-office gross.51 The nature of this deal showed the limitations of Connery’s star power at this point. He was back in circulation, but both Highlander and The Name of the Rose had made no impression on the North American market and therefore Connery and Ovitz were moving cautiously, prepared

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to take the risk on a supporting role in a film that might restore Connery’s reputation in the US. Connery thought its prospects good because The Untouchables would ‘exploit audience knowledge of the television series’.52 Connery had other reasons for taking the part. He was attracted by the quality of David Mamet’s screenplay, which he found ‘a revelation. We all see so few scripts of this calibre. Malone has a nice humour. His dialogue is beautiful.’ 53 He was also attracted by the chance to play Ness’s mentor. Production stills and the recollections of those involved suggest that Connery played that role both off screen as well as on. Costner commented, ‘When you’re with Sean, you learn pretty quickly your place in the galaxy.’ 54 For his part, Connery considered Costner had a ‘very elemental openness and directness’ and was prepared to expose vulnerabilities in a way he thought rare in young American actors.55 Connery’s enthusiasm for the script and cast appears to have overcome his reservations about working with De Palma, whose films he considered technically accomplished but emotionally detached. However, as the production unfolded, Connery was impressed by ‘how well [De Palma] had conceived the human elements’. He surmised that ‘audiences and reviewers might well be surprised at the emotional level of the story’. Connery also appreciated the full week spent in rehearsal to get the actors used to working with each other and De Palma’s willingness to allow actors to improvise and bring their own interpretations.56 Connery worked hard with Mamet and De Palma to give the role depth and shading, insisting he build his part gradually, starting with Malone as a ‘real pain in the ass so that you wouldn’t think he could be concerned with such things as Ness’s feelings or Ness’s family, and then show he was someone else underneath, capable of real relationships’.57 Costner plays Ness straightforwardly and unselfishly as the film’s bland moral centre, as what he termed ‘the original stiff’ conscious of his place in the star galaxy.58 He is thus the perfect foil for Connery’s Malone, the older, experienced man who knows all about the ‘Chicago way’ becoming Ness’s mentor and guide. Mamet saw Capone and Malone, their names echoing each other, as archetypes, ‘the idealist and the pragmatist’, who act as competing fathers in the struggle for Ness’s soul.59 But, in contrast to De Niro’s scenes as Capone – shot like self-standing tableaux – Malone becomes the film’s emotional centre, displacing Ness as the figure for audience attention and empathy. In their first meeting on the bridge, Ness, defeated and forlorn after his first attempt at halting Capone’s power has been sabotaged, is berated by Malone for dropping litter. Malone is acerbic and patronising, still handsome in his uniform, walking with the insolent strut of the cop who has seen it all and who commands his beat. When Ness comes to his house, the setting is very different. Malone is dressed in baggy trousers and a shabby cardigan,

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which exaggerates his age and bulk, especially in contrast to Ness’s sharp three-piece Armani suit. Malone now appears much older, and also vulnerable. When Ness asks, simply and directly, for help, Malone gets up, laughs slightly nervously and, as described in Mamet’s screenplay, ‘walks over to the mantelpiece, on which are placed five or six photographs of men in police uniform. One is Malone as a young man. One, judging from the age of the photo and the style of the uniform, may be his father. Malone looks at the photos. Then back to Ness.’ 60 Connery invests Mamet’s next line – ‘Well … That’s the thing you fear. Isn’t it?’ – with a sense of poignant regret and, after several intakes of breath, pats his waistline ruefully as he replies softly, ‘Mr Ness, I wish I’d met you ten years … and twenty pounds ago’, which movingly evokes the regrets of a lonely bachelor who has contented himself with a tightly circumscribed life. In their third meeting, the situation is reversed again. Malone takes control, ushering Ness away from the police station and into a nearby Catholic church. It was Connery’s idea to have the scene in which he explains the ‘Chicago way’ to Ness take place here. The magnificently decorated ceiling can be glimpsed as, framed in a low-angle close-up, the pair agree their Faustian pact, exploiting the incongruity between the ruthlessness of what Malone proposes and the iconography of the setting. Throughout the exchange, Connery gives full weight to Mamet’s famously stripped-down prose with its distinctive rhythmic beat: malone: ‘Do you really want to get him? You see what I’m saying? What are you prepared to do?’ ness: ‘Everything within the law.’ malone: ‘And then what are you prepared to do? If you open the door on these people Mr Ness, you must be prepared to go all the way, because they won’t give up the fight until one of you is dead.’ ness: ‘I want to get Capone. I don’t know how to get him.’ malone: ‘You wanna get Capone? Here’s how to get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way. And that’s how we get Capone. Now, do you want to do that?’ [More softly]. ‘Are you ready to do that? I’m making you a deal. Do you want that deal?’

From this moment Malone assumes control, of Ness, the operation and the leadership of the group of four ‘untouchables’ who spearhead the fight against Capone, the others being the bookish accountant Wallace (Charles Martin Smith) and George Stone (Andy Garcia), the young, volatile ItalianAmerican, the foil to Malone’s phlegmatic Irishman. The group forms a male family, whose deep emotional bond, characteristic of Mamet’s drama, displaces Ness’s own family as his central relationship.61 At its centre is the developing loyalty and trust between Ness and Malone. As they prepare for the border raid to ambush Capone’s shipment of liquor in partnership

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5.3  Connery as Jim Malone, demonstrating the ‘Chicago Way’ to his admiring pupil Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) in The Untouchables (1987)

with the Canadian Mounties, Malone dispenses fatherly advice: ‘Take it easy. Take it easy. It’ll all happen in time. This is the job. Don’t wait for it. Don’t wait for it to happen. Don’t even want it to happen, just watch when it does happen.’ When Ness replies, ‘Are you my tutor?’ Malone responds simply, ‘Yes, son, I am.’ At the end of the raid, Malone extracts co-operation from one of Capone’s gang by pretending his partner is not dead and shooting him in the mouth. This graphic example of the ‘Chicago way’ elicits a horrified ‘Mr Ness, I do not approve of your methods’ from the leader of the Mounties, only for Ness to reply, ‘Yeah? Well you’re not from Chicago.’ After a tiny moment of surprised hesitation, Malone looks approvingly at his tutee. Although Connery plays the reinvigorated Malone as strong and decisive, able to battle gangsters on foot or on horseback, to wield his fists as well as a gun, he never allows the audience to forget he is an ageing man. During the raid, he fires his rifle in the air muttering, ‘Enough of this running shit’, as he rounds up one of Capone’s henchmen. As Pauline Kael noted, viewers ‘watch in horror’ his fight with the corrupt chief of police, whom he knows well, as the ‘punches land on flesh that has lost its resilience’.62 Malone’s shocking and unexpected death comes when, in a moment of hubris, he

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overreaches himself. Chasing a knife-wielding killer round his flat, Malone exclaims gleefully, ‘Isn’t that typical of a wop, bringing a knife to a gunfight’, only to be surprised by Frank Nitti (Billy Drago), Capone’s top hit-man, perched on a nearby fire escape with a machine gun. As Kael comments, ‘Malone, registering in a glance that he has been outfoxed … makes you feel the full, pulsing force of life in him.’ 63 That moment helps creates the horror of his death even more tellingly than the graphic, blood-soaked crawl round the flat and the desperate final gesture as he points out the railway timetable that leads to the capture of Capone’s accountant. As De Palma had envisaged and as every critic recognised, Malone’s death becomes a moment of great pathos, made all the more affecting because of an audience’s emotional investment. Despite the macabre setting, De Palma orchestrates an old-style Hollywood death scene as a distraught Ness embraces the bullet-riddled body of his hero-father, unable to contain his grief. Paramount, continuing to be nervous about The Untouchables’ box-office potential, only provided limited advance screenings. However, the film was an immediate success, including a record weekend opening, recovering its costs in twelve days.64 Linson’s audience research showed that 50 per cent of the viewers were women, which he attributed to the film’s delineation of ‘redemption and relationships’ that offset its graphic violence.65 The Untouchables made the cover of Newsweek on 22 June 1987 and a six-page inside spread. Time’s critic, Richard Schickel, was one of several reviewers who recognised that the film was a ‘parable’, exploiting indigenous American myths about Chicago gangsters during Prohibition that had been used creatively as an opportunity ‘to reimagine all the clichés of crime fiction’. He admired Connery’s performance, ‘weary, steady, very clearly seen by an actor whose every gesture is wryly informed by the humorous, and uncynical knowledge of a lifetime’.66 Variety’s reviewer thought Connery ‘delivers one of his finest performances ever. It is filled with nuance, humor and abundant self-confidence.’ 67 Connery’s frequent champion, Pauline Kael, whose admiration has already been noted, praised his ‘brawny impudent authority’, judging that he delivered the ‘Biblical simplicity’ of Mamet’s lines with a ‘resonant underlayer – Malone is always thinking and feeling much more than he is saying’.68 Reviewers recognised that the mature Connery brought a far weightier presence to his roles than in his earlier films. One commented on that ‘immense, quiet, assured authority that only senior screen personalities achieve … He was wonderful as Bond and has frequently been very good indeed, but never … quite so commanding’; he judged that Connery ‘will substantially increase the vitality of the film and the vitality of the box office’.69 The Untouchables’ huge success in America – its domestic rentals of $76 million made it the sixth highest earning American release film of 1987 – and

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also internationally, proved the wisdom of Connery’s decision to take 10 per cent of the overall box-office gross.70 Its commercial success was complemented by a rather belated recognition from the Academy: an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. The combination afforded Connery a popularity ‘unmatched since his Bondian heydays of the 1960s’.71 His return to superstardom triggered a spate of newspaper and magazine articles that celebrated his continued, even enhanced charisma. Benedict Nightingale, for instance, in an article entitled ‘Bottled in Bond, He’s Vintage Connery’, celebrated an actor who was prepared to extend his range whilst retaining his Bondian charisma and potency, taking roles ‘not usually associated with lustrous superstars’.72 Nightingale’s use of ‘vintage’ is a typical laudation of males who have successfully aged, associating them with fine wines that improve with age.73 His contention that Connery’s distinctiveness came from taking unusual and challenging roles rather than playing safe was echoed by Connery’s own comments quoted in the article: The reason Burt Lancaster had a longer, more varied career than Kirk Douglas was that he refused to allow himself to be limited … He was always ready to play less romantic parts, and was more experimental in his choice of roles. And that’s the way I’ve tried to be. I don’t mind being older or looking stupid or whatever. I’ve tried to be guided by what was different, what was refreshing, stimulating to me.74

His choices were, however, partly conditioned by his unconventional status as a transnational star, one who was judged to be acceptable to audiences in roles that might have strained the credibility of an American star. In the process of taking three such contrasting roles, Connery had also – this seems to have been fortuitous rather than strategic – discovered a post-Bond persona, the father-mentor. He opined, ‘all of a sudden … I seem to have become a kind of teacher-father figure’.75 One journalist noted that the ‘sage mentor figure’ had become Connery’s ‘speciality’ and argued that he was now a ‘senior star who brings gravitas and a hard-earned wisdom to the role’.76 The father-mentor was a part that could accommodate his status as an ageing actor, whose potency in part derives from his relationship with an initially sceptical but eventually adoring surrogate son who gradually understands Connery’s character as an idealised self, imbued with wisdom and maturity and an authoritative certainty. This construction was not unique to Connery. It had been used by Wayne as early as Red River (1948), in which Montgomery Clift plays the surrogate son, and by Eastwood in The Rookie (1990), where that role went to Charlie Sheen, as well as numerous other male stars as they aged.77 In box-office terms, this strategy combines the appeal of the ageing star to an older audience demographic alongside the ability of the younger actor to tap the youth market. It enabled

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the ‘father’ to continue to be active and decisive, to perform heroically, but complemented by the energy and vigour of the younger man.78 One of Connery’s biographers contends that this new persona made Connery much easier to cast and to market; ‘producers could stop playing lucky dip. There suddenly arose the notion of what felt right as a Connery role.’ 79 In recognition, Ovitz put together a CAA package of Matthew Broderick, Dustin Hoffman and Connery for Family Business (1989), directed by Sidney Lumet. Connery plays a serial criminal, Jessie McMullen, who becomes the mentor for his grandson Adam (Broderick) to the consternation of Adam’s father, Vito (Hoffman), who has repudiated Jessie and made honest money through a meat-packing business. Although there are delightful moments in the sparring between Vito and Jessie, Family Business’s thin plot, which slithers uneasily between comedy, melodrama and caper film, was a complete failure at the box-office.80 Much more important to Connery’s career was Ovitz’s negotiation of three deals in quick succession with Paramount: The Presidio (1988), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and The Hunt for Red October (1990), all of which build on the figure of the father-mentor.

The mature superstar Although the three Paramount films had high production values, The Presidio was much the least interesting and successful of the three. Connery played the role of Lieutenant Colonel Caldwell because he ‘was very interested in making a human side of the American soldier, that in a funny way got lost since the Vietnam War. That fellowship was what we really wanted to examine.’ 81 However, the exploration of the relationship between Caldwell and Sergeant Major Ross Maclure (Jack Warden), who, in an act of immense bravery, rescued Caldwell from death in the Vietnamese jungle, is displaced by The Presidio’s central focus – perhaps attributable to Connery’s new persona – on Caldwell’s relationship with Detective Jay Austin (Mark Harmon), who had served under his command until an abrupt fall-out. The pair are thrown together investigating a diamond-smuggling operation in which Maclure has become enmeshed. Caldwell’s daughter (Meg Ryan), much to his annoyance, falls in love with Austin. This focus undercuts the force of the film’s ending in which Caldwell makes an emotional eulogy at Maclure’s graveside as a veteran of a ‘war nobody liked’. By common consent, Harmon’s performance was too weak and colourless to provide an adequate foil to Connery’s abrasive, commanding Colonel. In a representative review, Kim Newman thought The Presidio lacked the ‘energy and drive’ to stand out in the ‘current cycle of contrasting cop-team movies’

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and also failed to contribute meaningfully to revisionist Vietnam War films.82 It performed poorly, only grossing $20 million at the US box-office.83 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) was a very different proposition, the third film in the hugely successful series directed by Steven Spielberg, written and co-produced by George Lucas, that had displaced the Bond films as top money-spinners and created the pair’s status as ‘blockbuster auteurs’, working independently but with the budgets and resources of studio-mounted productions. The Indiana Jones films were a return to the old-fashioned adventure series but with ‘A’ feature budgets, bowling along through a series of self-contained and spectacular set pieces that parade their makers’ cinematic allusiveness and in which Indiana Jones is the modern, if still sexist and racist, imperial hero of the Pax Americana.84 Lucas and Spielberg were also indebted to the tropes of the Bond franchise – exotic locations and spectacular action, including frantic chases and set piece scenes – which they admired but were determined to surpass.85 Critics detected the same tongue-in-cheek self-knowingness that had been the cornerstone of Bond’s appeal.86 Both Lucas and Spielberg considered that the second film in the series, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1982), had been too dark and violent, therefore the third film needed to be lighter and more humorous. Their principal strategy was to introduce the figure of Indiana’s father, Professor Henry Jones, who had disappeared on a lifelong quest to locate the Holy Grail. However, Lucas and Spielberg differed in their conception of Henry’s character: George wasn’t thinking in terms of such a powerful presence for Indiana’s father. His idea was for a doting, scholarly person, played by an older British character actor. But I always imagined Sean Connery. Without a strong, illuminating presence, I was afraid that Harrison Ford would eradicate the father from the movie. I wanted to challenge him. And who would be the equal of Indiana Jones but James Bond?87

Thus, as Professor Henry Jones, Connery becomes Indiana’s literal and meta-cinematic father. Connery had turned down the role initially because of the way in which Lucas had conceived the father as an ‘elderly, gnomish, Yoda-like figure’. He only agreed to sign up on condition that the role was substantially refashioned as ‘something more flamboyant, like one of the old explorers – Sir Richard Burton or Mungo Park’.88 As discussed in Chapter 4, Connery had a strong interest in Burton, the scholar-explorer who had ‘so many hidden elements in his life including an obsessive self-absorption that meant he would not think twice about abandoning wife and child for a year to go on an expedition. That’s quite un-American of course, and I think I shocked them in a way.’ 89 It was nevertheless a risky part to play, one that

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Connery’s ex-agent, Dennis Selinger, thought none of his other clients such as Michael Caine or Roger Moore would have been prepared to attempt.90 However, knowing Connery was playing the father encouraged the screenwriter, Jeffrey Boam, to trade on his continued sex appeal. Boam introduced the idea that both Joneses had slept with the same woman: ‘When asked if the character of Henry Jones as originally conceived could have slept with Elsa, “No” says Boam with impeccable movie logic, “but Sean Connery would.”’ 91 After Indiana snorts a disbelieving ‘Huh’ when his father reveals he has slept with Elsa – ‘How do you know she was a Nazi?’ ‘She talks in her sleep’ – Henry preens defensively, ‘I’m as human as the next man’, to which Indy growls back, ‘I was the next man.’ This pointed exchange was part of what gradually developed into the film’s principal focus: the competitive, uneasy relationship between father and son. At Connery’s request, Lucas and Spielberg agreed to employ Tom Stoppard to reshape some of his dialogue and add new scenes that focused on the tensions in their relationship and also to introduce the father much earlier in the screenplay.92 Spielberg commented: Sean wasn’t supposed to be introduced until p. 76 of the script, but he kept coming up with so many extra scenes that we put him in 20 pages earlier. Then we added more scenes with him later. He was instrumental in all the rewrites and when he has a good idea, which is about 20 times a day, he’s such a child; his face lights up.93

Lucas reflected that ‘before [Connery] became a central character, [the film] was mostly action-driven and the fact that we could do one which was essentially a character piece with some action in it surprised people’.94 The strength of Connery’s presence enabled Spielberg to reshape the central narrative, which became the restoration of their relationship, a ‘meeting of the hearts’ as he put it: ‘the real issue … is finding inner happiness, eternal satisfaction. The film is about a father and son finding one another … They find the Grail in each other.’ 95 As the dynamics of the film shifted, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, who thought it was ‘brave and generous’ of Ford to ‘accept another male star on the same billing’, observed a genuine admiration between the stars, an off-screen camaraderie that helped forge their on-screen chemistry. Slocombe used multiple close-ups of Connery to ‘take advantage of the character in the face’.96 As in The Untouchables, Connery was keen to portray a developing relationship between the two principals. Although he clearly relishes his son’s discomfiture in the early scenes and initially speaks rather slowly to Indiana as if to a child – ‘Junior’ – in need of remedial education, Henry also displays a genuine admiration for his son’s tough guy skills, even as Indiana gains a whole new level of respect for the father he hardly knows.

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5.4  Father and son: Connery and Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

Their relationship gradually develops pathos and depth as the strength of their bond becomes apparent. Henry is distraught when Indiana apparently plunges to his doom at the end of the tank chase: ‘Oh God I’ve lost him. And I never told him anything. I just wasn’t ready, Marcus. Five minutes would have been enough.’ When Indiana, having hauled himself back up the cliff face, stands there unnoticed, wondering what all the fuss is about, Henry, suddenly aware of his presence, embraces his son warmly almost in tears before recovering himself: ‘Come on. Let’s go. Why are you sitting there resting when we’re so near the end?’ This scene acts as a prelude to the final, decisive moment when Indiana, holding on to his father’s grip with one hand and grasping for the Grail with the other, is told softly, ‘Indy, let it go’, thereby symbolically replacing the Grail quest with the father–son bond. One reviewer thought the film’s portrayal of a changing relationship, and its avoidance of undue sentimentality, was ‘due as much to the acting skills of Ford and Connery as to anything in the script’.97 It is clear that Connery was determined to have fun with the role, and Henry Jones is one of his most enjoyable creations, cantankerous, irascible, intolerant, mischievous, eccentric, absent-minded and fussy. Henry’s steely determination to find the Grail mingles with the frailties and querulousness that show his age, but overlain by an unquenchable wide-eyed enthusiasm for adventure: ‘What does that mean? … I don’t know (broad grin) … But we’ll find out!’ Clutching his Gladstone bag with its rolled umbrella, deerstalker placed securely on his head, Connery never lets the audience forget that Harrison Ford is the action hero, not him; Henry Jones is often placed in a confined and passive position, as when he rides in the sidecar on Indiana’s motorcycle, an old man startled by bombs and machine guns who often wears a slightly bemused expression and whose voice takes on a piping

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high-pitched lilt in moments of high-speed action. However, when he takes decisive action, Henry displays a boyish delight in inspired mayhem, best exemplified by the scene in which he shoos the seagulls by running at them with his open umbrella to bring down the attacking plane, because he had ‘suddenly remembered my Charlemagne: “Let your armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds of the air.”’ Connery’s performance – which won him a Golden Globe – gained some of his most appreciative reviews. Philip French, who identified Henry Jones as representing a ‘vanished tradition – the scholar-mystic’, enjoyed the wit and verve of a performance that was part pawky Glaswegian comic-turn, part stern Caledonian Calvinist patriarch, a cross between Harry Lauder and Lord Reith … Connery is in great form. I believed in him as Indiana’s father and was convinced by the mutual respect that grows up as they face shared dangers, and the love they can at last express for each other.98

Variety’s reviewer praised the teaming of Ford and Connery, which gave the film ‘an unexpected emotional depth, reminding us that the real film magic is not in special effects but in such moments as these two actors share on the screen’, and enthused that Connery ‘confidently plays his aging character as slightly daft and fizzy-minded, without blunting his forcefulness and without sacrificing his sexual charisma’.99 Derek Malcolm commented astutely that ‘any other actor playing a part a little beyond his age and a little below his capabilities might have camped up the result with a knowing wink or two’ but Connery’s ‘jolly high seriousness … is absolutely right for the material’.100 Pauline Kael, as usual waxing lyrical about ‘this burry Scotsman [who is] a masculine ideal’, enjoyed the pairing that was infused by their ‘associations from past roles’. She thought their scenes together are ‘so charged with personality that the atmosphere of parody is almost flirtatious’ and enjoyed Connery’s capacity to ‘be silly. He can introduce little boy mischief … Amusing himself, he gooses this movie along. Ford is a little dull until he has Connery to play off.’ 101 Connery’s captivating performance was instrumental in the commercial success of The Last Crusade, whose overall global box-office gross of $474,171,806 significantly outperformed the first two films in the franchise, Raiders of the Lost Ark ($398,925,971) and Temple of Doom ($333,107,271). It also had markedly higher foreign revenues than the previous two, climbing from 36.4 to 58.4 per cent of the total, which reflects, at least in part, Connery’s popularity with audiences outside North America.102 The script enlargements had enabled Connery, through Ovitz, to negotiate an undisclosed but significant salary increase and Connery ensured that his contract included the increasingly important issue of actors’ percentages on video sales.103

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The third film for Paramount, The Hunt for Red October (1990), offered Connery the opportunity to play a completely different version of the father-mentor and take the lead role rather than a supporting one. The film was based on a novel by Tom Clancy, at this point the world’s fastest-selling writer; the sales of the novel from which the film was adapted approaching six million copies.104 Producer Mace Neufeld had optioned the rights pre-publication in 1983 and had cast Klaus Maria Brandauer in the central role of the defecting senior Soviet naval commander, Marko Ramius. However, when Brandauer dropped out, Ovitz moved swiftly to alert Neufeld to Connery’s interest in the role. Neufeld had no hesitation in offering the part to Connery – for a reported $3 million salary, a sizeable chunk of the film’s $35 million budget – because he considered Connery capable of playing a Soviet officer with apparent authenticity in a way impossible for an American actor.105 In his review, Richard Schickel noted that Connery was ‘the actor to whom everyone most eagerly surrenders disbelief’, judging that he ‘quickly renders the movie’s central implausibility plausible’.106 After the success of The Last Crusade, Neufeld had no problem persuading Paramount to finance the film because, as one reviewer noted, ‘Connery is as hot as Mercury. There is no guarantee that his films are going to be hits with the public but he is himself the cast-iron guarantee which enables producers to raise money.’ 107 Connery’s restored superstar status also enabled him to exercise significant creative control.108 He persuaded Neufeld to employ John Milius to rewrite a part Connery felt was too thinly drawn.109 In particular, Connery wanted Ramius provided with credible reasons for his actions, which were absent from Clancy’s functional prose: ‘What would make this guy defect after giving his whole life to the navy? I wanted that made clearer.’ 110 In interview Milius revealed, ‘Sean said, “Make it about me.” So I did, writing it with him in mind. He’s brilliant on script analysis, and he had a superb idea here to make his commander not a typical communist military guy, but play him like a czarist warrior of the old school.’ 111 His comment indicates not vanity but Connery’s characteristically empathetic identification with dissidents and outsiders who follow their conscience rather than the system. Ramius is Lithuanian, therefore someone whose loyalties and allegiances have not been completely subordinated to a totalitarian regime. He is also a mythic figure. The opening scene shows Ramius on the submarine’s conning tower, staring with cold, hard intensity into the frozen distance, his clenched face framed in tight close-up as he announces simply, ‘It’s time.’ Ramius is presented as an epic hero, the ‘fated man’, pursuing a lonely destiny that only he comprehends: ‘Gentlemen, we sail into history’, he tells the crew, in what became a favourite line for Connery impersonators. Dramatically, Ramius’s motivations are only revealed gradually. In the crucial

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wardroom scene in which Ramius assembles his officers to brief them on the intended course of actions, he interrupts their bickering about the death of the Political Officer – murdered by Ramius but announced as an accident – with the magisterial ‘There’ll be no going back.’ After telling them that he has left a letter informing the Soviet authorities of his actions, he remarks, ‘When he reached the New World, Cortez burned his ships. As a result, his men were well-motivated.’ Ramius’s primary motivation in defecting is his understanding that the ‘one purpose’ of the nuclear submarine he commands – whose innovative silent propulsion renders it undetectable – is to be a first-strike weapon in a world war. However the reference to Cortez, introduced by Milius, whose instinct as a writer is always to make his characters mythic archetypes, links Ramius’s actions to deeper historical processes, which are returned to in the concluding scene, discussed later.112 Comparing that scene as filmed with Larry Ferguson’s screenplay shows how consistently Milius has pared down Ramius’s dialogue, the spare precision of his utterances increasing his gravitas. Connery enhances the effect of his character’s minimal utterances by eating his food slowly and deliberately, carefully masticating each mouthful.113 Overall, his performance is a marvel of restraint and expressive stillness with an air of impenetrability and mystery, which, coupled with his erect, military bearing, gives Ramius a dignified, monumental presence, aloof, majestic, the burden of history on his shoulders. One commentator thought ‘Connery barely has to speak … McTiernan uses him iconographically. Nobility is all the director’s after.’ 114 Connery is shot from low angles to make him more imposing, his every gesture calm, unhurried, radiating absolute authority: a half-raised arm results in the crew’s complete deferential silence. Connery looks exceptionally handsome in his naval uniform, with an iron-grey hairpiece he designed as ‘a sort of mixture of Stalin and Samuel Beckett, that kind of military brush of hair, the white beard. I think it works.’ 115 Director John McTiernan, who considered Connery to be ‘the most precise actor in the world; never forgets a line; never forgets a word’, praised both the exact timing of his utterances and his excellence in reaction shots.116 In this instance, Connery has to convey the emotional impact of apparently routine mechanical actions and suggest the series of minute computations he is making in his head before giving orders to alter course to evade the pursuing ships. Despite his reputation as an action director, McTiernan was convinced that it was ‘the characters that will make the film fascinating’.117 The Hunt for Red October’s lengthy running time, 135 minutes, gives McTiernan the space to develop characterisations and to unfold the film slowly and deliberately rather than bounce the audience through a series of high-voltage action sequences. Although Ramius has a trusting, even affectionate, comradeship with his second-in-command, Borodin (Sam Neill), the central relationship

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on which the plot hinges is with Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin), a researcher and writer about naval strategy, now deployed by the CIA to fathom the renegade Soviet commander’s actions and their possible consequences. It is Ryan who best understands Ramius’s tactics, his strategy and his motivations, and who has come to appreciate deeply his integrity and why he should wish to defect.118 In earlier versions of the script, Ryan was ‘Bond-like’ but this characterisation was replaced by what McTiernan described as a ‘a nice, bright young bureaucrat’, whose intuition, based on respect, not cynicism, saves the day.119 These alterations showed how clearly the film is built around Connery as the major star.120 The mutual admiration and trust that develops between Ryan and Ramius reaches its apogee in the final, moonlit scene, back atop the conning tower of the submarine, now at rest in a broad river in Maine where its whereabouts will be hidden from Soviet intelligence. As often in war films, the central emphasis is on male bonding through which knowledge and understanding can be passed on.121 To Ramius’s magisterial, ‘There’s one thing you haven’t asked me: why?’, Ryan replies deferentially, ‘I figured you would tell me when you were ready.’ Ramius nods in recognition; the son is now ready to understand the deeper reasons for his actions. ‘I miss the peace of fishing like when I was a boy. Forty years I’ve been at sea. A war with no battles, no monuments, no medals, only casualties. I widowed her the day I married her. My wife died while I was at sea.’ Fishing represents tranquillity, tradition, connection with nature, community and family, the human rhythms – obscured by the Cold War machinations and the superficial tit-for-tat of superpower rivalries – that unite East and West. The older man is teaching the younger to appreciate and understand the deeper forces of nature and history that lie beyond politics. The film ends with Ramius uttering an apocryphal quotation from Columbus: ‘And the sea will grant each man new hope. His sleep brings dreams of home’, invoking the world of myth and legend that frame and elevate his actions. Connery’s performance elicited almost unanimous praise. The Mail on Sunday’s critic thought it ‘takes a superstar of his gravity to carry off the high-flown idea [of defection] … and it takes an actor of the highest quality to win us to the character of Marko Ramus [sic], ice-blood killer who has become heat-intensive philosopher’. He added, ‘Favourable reviews of Connery have almost become a cliché. But my knee-jerk reflex this time is not only automatic, but doubled up with admiration at his performance.’ 122 The Sunday Times’s reviewer was equally enthusiastic, admiring the ‘coolly authoritative Connery’ whose ‘unpriggish probity … dominated the movie like a Lithuanian colossus’.123 Although the Monthly Film Bulletin considered The Hunt for Red October an old-fashioned film that could have been made in the 1970s, its huge success – a worldwide box-office gross of $2 billion

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5.5  Man of destiny: Connery as Marko Ramius in The Hunt for Red October (1990)

– proved that audiences would respond to a character-driven narrative rather than one that relied on special effects.124 It was promoted very actively by Paramount, including a royal charity premiere in the UK at the Empire, Leicester Square on 17 April 1990. This success, following the previous one, ensured that, for the first time since 1971, Connery’s name was listed in the Quigley poll of Top Ten Money-Making Stars, placed ninth in 1989 following the release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and eighth in 1990 after The Hunt for Red October. For the first time since Bond, Connery had become a marketable star ‘brand’, a label that denotes a series of successes that afford economic status and a set of meanings.125 Part of Connery’s status was his accomplished acting. As one reviewer contended, Connery had become a marker of quality, an asset who could guarantee a thoughtful, highly accomplished and compelling performance irrespective of the film: There aren’t many British actors who fall into the major international movie star category in the long term. Yet Sean Connery’s name on the marquee is always an indication that no matter how good or bad everything else about the film might be, he, at least, will turn in a decent performance.126

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He had also become a mentor to his younger co-stars. Alec Baldwin, for instance, recalled the moment when Connery arrived on set of The Hunt for Red October in his wig and military uniform looking not only ‘the most beautiful man ever to stand in front of a camera’, but one whose presence instantly dominated the film. Though initially overawed, Baldwin found Connery generous, kind and supportive, someone from whom he learned a great deal about acting.127 The father-mentor gave Connery’s career a coherence and stability that he had not known since the early Bond days, but as a persona that he had created rather than embodying a fictional figure. It was a capacious construction, capable of significant variations from the pawky humour of Henry Jones to the august and dignified stateliness of Marko Ramius. As with the mythic heroes of the 1970s, it was a figure that could accommodate the weight of Connery’s star presence. His father-mentors are figures whose surface realism is constantly poised to shift into legend. As Laurence Coupe argues in his study of myth, they carry the promise of another mode of existence to be realised beyond the present, acknowledging the difference between sacred and profane time but projecting their resolution, following the rhythms of temporal experience but pointing to a timeless realm, a deeper and a more fundamental narrative logic.128

Ageing successfully The challenge Connery faced in 1983 was the usually deadly combination of declining stardom and advancing age. His trajectory over these eight years was therefore remarkably successful. There were some misjudgements but many of his films achieved resounding commercial success and also confirmed his status as an actor of rare and consistent quality. Although Connery did not initiate projects during this period, he was nevertheless able to exercise often significant creative control, which he used to try to ensure his characters had a complexity and depth not conventionally associated with thrillers or action-adventure films, genres that, notoriously, concentrate on plot and spectacle. Connery frequently drew fulsome praise from reviewers even in films they found dull or lightweight, ‘one of a select band of actors with a magnetic presence [who] has given even mediocre films a distinction’.129 Connery’s stature persuaded even the most powerful producers – Lucas and Spielberg – to allow him to reshape his character and enlarge his role. Thus even in films as stridently commercial as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Connery was able to construct charismatic, multifaceted characters and to create the space in which they could be developed.

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Connery’s greatest achievement in this period was to develop a post-Bond persona through which he was able to negotiate successfully the notoriously difficult transition to mature star. As discussed, the figure of the father-mentor emerged fortuitously, but as a transnational cultural construction it exploited Connery’s popularity in Europe as well as America, enabling star and agent to negotiate a wide variety of roles – Russian submarine commander, medieval monk, Irish-American beat cop, even an immortal – that afforded Connery opportunities to play a range of inflections on that central construction. Not only was this persona distinctively his own rather than conflated with a fictional figure, its spaciousness provided more varied acting challenges than the repetitive and restrictive figure of Bond. Even more importantly, the father-mentor enabled Connery to draw on his own attitudes and values as a maverick and dissident, an outsider, often politically progressive, at odds with a corrupt and venal society that has lost its way, possessing an individual integrity that is not beholden to the state or any institution. The father-mentor is not, like Bond, a loner. He is completed by passing on his knowledge to a younger man, which ensures the continuity of the values he represents and distinguishes the father-mentor from the ‘lost cause’ heroes of the 1970s. These were roles that enabled Connery, like Charlton Heston, to ‘age gracefully’.130 The role in which he played an over-the-hill hero, Robin Hood in Robin and Marian, was an earlier enactment of ageing; in the films of this period Connery retains his power and much of his athleticism. What these later roles had in common with Robin Hood and with Bond is their mythic dimension. The father-mentor had to be mythic in order to contain Connery’s on-screen power and presence, and his audience appeal. His father-mentors are both realistic and fabular, part of worlds at once recognisable but also mythical. Ramius is a Soviet Cold War defector, but he is also a fictionalised version of Columbus and Cortez riding the tides of history; William of Baskerville is a medieval monk but also Sherlock Holmes; Henry Jones is the Grail knight who comes to recognise the futility of his quest and the importance of family. This mythic dimension – which transcends the ageing process – was another key element in Connery’s ability to ‘age successfully’ and is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7. The next chapter extends this discussion into the final phase of Connery’s career in which he was able to exercise a greater control over his choice of roles.

6

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Star as producer: Fountainbridge Films, 1991–2003

I’ve been virtually doing executive producer or associate producer duties for the last twenty-five films but never took the position. It just seemed easier to make the decision and the definition that that’s my function in the picture as well as being an actor. And I’m going to continue to do it.1

Star agency As my account has made clear, Connery was very engaged by the film industry as a business. He showed no great interest in technical aspects – cinematography or editing, though he often expressed an opinion about set design – but had always concerned himself with scripting, direction, casting and with the roles of other actors as well as his own. Connery saw this as part of his professional responsibilities as an actor: ‘I work with the sound, I work with the set design, I work on the scheduling, I work with the director, I work with all the other actors. I block the scenes before I get to them.’ 2 His technique as an actor was to familiarise himself with the overall shape of the story and the relationship between his part and others, including characters’ attitudes to his character. In order to do this, Connery turned down the top corners of the pages in which he appeared and read only those. Then he went back and read the other parts in which he was absent. In this way he absorbed not only what the character was aware of, but equally important what he was not aware of: as far as Connery is concerned the trap bad actors fall into is playing information they don’t have or playing scenes before they get to them.3

As John Boorman commented, Connery was ‘an actor who looked at a script for its total effect, not just his own part’.4 Connery saw his own performance as contributing to an ensemble whose common aim was to ensure that the film as a whole was coherent and made to the highest standards possible. Connery expected the professional exactitude with which

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he approached his own performance to be replicated throughout the production. Taking executive producer credit for the first time on Medicine Man (1992), as the epigraph indicates, was a means to ensure this professionalism and a logical extension of his approach to filmmaking. He could now be credited for taking an active role ‘in the pre-production stage and the casting and working with other actors, with scheduling and logistics on location, one is in the middle of all that’.5 Connery was accepted as an executive producer because of his enhanced status consequent upon the huge commercial success he enjoyed at the end of the 1980s. However, the restoration of his superstardom was, as argued in the previous chapter, accompanied by an industry-wide acknowledgement that he was no longer the man who played Bond but an actor of range and depth whose presence would enhance any production. That dual status – a bankable star (‘as hot as Mercury’) and prestigious actor who had received an Oscar – gave Connery the confidence to extend his interest in the business of filmmaking by founding his own production company, Fountainbridge Films, established in 1992, the name proclaiming his Edinburgh birthplace. This was the realisation of an ambition Connery had nurtured since his struggles with Saltzman and Broccoli in the 1960s. A production company held the promise of significantly enhanced financial rewards but also the opportunity to exert increased creative control and fulfil his artistic aspirations. As discussed in Chapter 4, although top-drawer American stars had been able to set up and sustain their own production companies since the mid1950s, it was almost impossible for British or transnational stars to achieve that status. Connery had managed only a brief flirtation with the Londonbased production company Tantallon Films in 1972–73, which could not be extended beyond The Offence, funded by United Artists as part compensation for his return as Bond. However, such was the scale of his resurgent stardom that Connery could hope that Fountainbridge Films would be a success, affording him greater independence to initiate projects rather than simply responding to offers, to mould and shape his career to a greater degree than previously. Connery interspersed films made by Fountainbridge with others provided through CAA. As in previous decades, Connery moved between blatantly commercial films and more artistic ones that offered roles of a different kind. Connery played a greater variety of parts than in the 1980s, continuing with father-mentor roles but also others in which, for the first time since the low-key Five Days One Summer in 1982, he played a lover. The first of these was The Russia House (1991), which antedated the formation of Fountainbridge Films. It was a return to the spy genre, not as a Bond-style action hero, but as ‘boozy’ Barley Blair, who runs an old-fashioned publishing firm, a tousled, slightly dishevelled late-middle-aged bachelor, balding with

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unkempt hair, who describes himself as looking like ‘a large, unmade bed with a shopping bag attached’. The Russia House deserves detailed treatment because it contains what is generally regarded as one of Connery’s finest performances and an important depiction of the ageing male.

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The Russia House Though not a blockbuster, The Russia House had high production values and a substantial budget of $21 million, financed and distributed by MGM with a view to a lucrative US Christmas release. Connery was reputed to have been paid a salary of $5 million and also to have control over casting.6 Whereas The Hunt for Red October had to cover its tracks by situating its Cold War struggle in a pre-glasnost past, The Russia House, adapted from John le Carré’s novel, celebrates the post-glasnost era; both the novel, in serial form, and the film were made available for Russian audiences. Producer/ director Fred Schepisi, having commissioned Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay, managed to persuade Alan Ladd Jr., CEO of Pathé Entertainment, that it would make ‘an extremely involving love story with an incredible sense of scale’. In addition, there was a ‘historic opportunity’ to make the first American film to be shot on location in Leningrad and Moscow. Schepisi’s co-producer, Paul Maslansky, had Russian connections and was able to broker a working arrangement with Corona Films, a German–Russian company operating under the umbrella of Mosfilm, the largest state studio.7 Ladd insisted Pathé would only make the film if Connery was cast as the male lead.8 Fortunately, he had always been Schepisi’s first choice: ‘When you think of someone who is box-office, someone who will attract attention and possibly be surprising in the role, it all comes down to Sean Connery.’ 9 Schepisi added, on another occasion, ‘When you are looking for an actor who is big in both Europe and America, all roads lead to Sean.’ 10 According to Schepisi, Connery needed little persuasion once he had been given the script.11 He responded strongly to the intriguing moral dilemma in which his character is placed, what Schepisi saw as less a spy thriller than a ‘drama of love, betrayal and secrecy’.12 Connery was also stimulated by the prospect of returning to Russia and witnessing at first hand the changes that had occurred since he filmed The Red Tent (1969) and to star in a spy thriller whose perspective was completely different from Fleming’s, the opportunity to portray a man ‘whose whole life and situation is in chaos’, who finds a way to ‘connect back finally to the world’.13 The Russia House is le Carré’s typically astringent take on the Cold War as a series of bluffs and double bluffs that are only a form of meaningless shadow boxing since neither side is prepared to admit that the arms race is over.

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6.1  ‘It’s mature, absolute, thrilling love’: Connery as Barley Blair, wooing Katya (Michele Pfeiffer) in The Russia House (1991)

Blair may be a somewhat seedy habitual drinker but he is another man of integrity and an outsider with a deep love of Russia. This makes him the target of the enigmatic Dante (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who has responded to Blair’s declaration at a dinner party – ‘If there’s to be hope, we must betray our country’ – sensing their comradeship as a pair of ‘moral outcasts’. Dante, a high-level scientist, has enlisted the help of a former lover, Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), who works for a Russian publisher, to smuggle a top-secret manuscript, which exposes the Soviets’ very limited nuclear capability, out of Russia through Blair. The manuscript is intercepted and turned over to British and American intelligence, who try to use Blair to get to Dante. Le Carré’s central irony is that all that the combined intelligence services of Britain and America succeed in doing is to assist Blair’s love affair with Katya. When first shown her photograph and asked, ‘Do you remember her?’, Blair replies, ‘No such luck’, his eyes slowly lowering with the look of wistful regret of a man whose gregarious sociability had not enabled him to form any deep attachments. When he meets Katya, she wakens in him emotions he thought long departed. Through glances and hesitant, uncertain

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gestures, Connery conveys the insecure feelings of an older man who feels exposed, vulnerable and slightly fearful of the consequences of his infatuation with this beautiful, capable and strong-minded woman twenty-eight years his junior, who senses in him her only hope. To her innocent question, ‘Did I disturb you?’ he replies simply, ‘Deeply.’ When she asks him, ‘Are you alone?’, referring to whether he is working for British intelligence, we understand his lie – ‘Yes, I am and that’s God’s truth. Never more alone’ – as an admission of his own emotional longings, which Connery conveys by lingering on the words and letting his voice cadence drop. When Blair finally summons up the courage to state his feelings, it is with the same disarming directness as his declaration in Robin and Marian: ‘I love you. All my failings were preparation for meeting you. It’s like nothing I have ever known. It’s unselfish love. Grown up love. You know it is. It’s mature, absolute, thrilling love.’ His embrace of Katya is at once passionate, tender, protective and wary, as if conscious that they have only a fleeting moment to enjoy. Schepisi cleverly places Barley’s declaration in the mundane setting of her cramped flat – as she washes up – rather than in one of the more obviously romantic moments when both are gazing at the beauties of Russian architecture, making his announcement appear uncontrived and convincingly genuine. Blair’s love is the means through which he recovers his self-esteem, providing the motivation and courage to betray his minders in exchange for Katya’s escape. In the novel, Blair sits waiting and hoping in his Lisbon flat that she will come. Stoppard’s adaptation is more upbeat: the lovers embracing passionately on the quayside as Katya disembarks from a ship accompanied by her children and uncle.14 Schepisi recognised that The Russia House was an intricate work with ‘lots of layers’, better suited to the longer format of a television series than a single film: ‘it’s quite a challenge to try to capture the essence of the book and present it in a very exciting way without losing the complexity and subtlety’.15 Not all reviewers felt he had succeeded in an adaptation that was criticised for being a slow-moving, often self-indulgent travelogue that lacked energy and punch. By contrast, Connery’s performance was much admired. One commentator thought Blair ‘may be the most complex character Connery has ever played, and without question it’s one of his richest performances. Connery shows the melancholy behind Barley’s pickled charm, all the wasted years and unkept promises.’ 16 The Russia House was a succès d’estime rather than a commercial hit; its US domestic box-office gross was a modest $23 million.17 However, it was recognised as another ‘quality’ performance by Connery, consolidating his status as an actor who could play a range of mature parts, one not confined to the actionadventure mode and who had credibility with European audiences as well as American ones.



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Fountainbridge Films Fountainbridge was a partnership between Connery and Rhonda Tollefson, who had operated as a development associate in television before moving into the film industry, assisting John McTiernan on several productions, including The Hunt for Red October, where she first met Connery. She assisted Connery in his executive producer duties on Medicine Man (discussed below), where the decision to form the company was cemented. Tollefson was based in Los Angeles while Connery remained in either Spain or the Bahamas. Her role was logistical and supervisory, to ‘oversee the development of current projects, the acquisition of new material and the production of future projects’.18 The company’s spokesperson for trade press announcements, Tollefson declared that Fountainbridge’s ambition was ‘to make movies that are not only intelligent and thought-provoking, but which embrace the hearts and minds of the audience’.19 On another occasion, she contended that Connery ‘tends to get locked-in to Bond-like roles. Having the company allows him to explore beyond that genre.’ She added that although his films would still focus on action-adventure, they would ‘involve serious character development and sophisticated plot twists’. The company reflected Connery’s passion for filmmaking and ‘the more he is involved from the embryonic stage the more control he has’.20 Forming Fountainbridge therefore widened the opportunities for Connery to take a greater range of roles, playing characters with some depth, but without departing too far from his core appeal as an action-adventure star. Fountainbridge Films also enabled Connery to market himself under an exclusive contract to his own company, thereby manipulating advantageously the burden of taxation on his services.21 Fountainbridge Films directly produced three films: Just Cause (1995), Entrapment (1999) and Finding Forrester (2000), but its existence helped Connery install himself as executive producer on a further four films: Medicine Man (1992), Rising Sun (1993), The Rock (1996) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). Fountainbridge was the vehicle through which Connery could initiate projects, shaping their conception and execution from the outset. Analysing its output, therefore, provides a significant opportunity to understand how Connery perceived the nature of his stardom during the 1990s, what roles he thought would most enhance or extend his appeal, as well as giving him the latitude to make other kinds of film. Fountainbridge had a relationship with a London-based stage production company that mounted artistic work, including Art by Yasmina Reza in 1996.22 However, the company’s principal function, as Tollefson’s comments reveal, was to sustain Connery’s career as an A-list star and a means through which he tried to insulate himself from corporate Hollywood, what he

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perceived as the widening ‘gap between the people who physically know how to make films and the people who make decisions about greenlighting a film’.23 Connery was responding to a further tightening of the studios’ grip during this decade through what Tino Balio identifies as a ‘second wave’ of corporate mergers in which they became part of multinational entertainment conglomerates that could repurpose product across a range of outlets, synergies that enhanced their size, reach and power. Balio argues that foreign markets became increasingly important, especially Europe.24 Therefore Connery’s established popularity in European countries was deemed an important asset. Studios continued to base their business strategies on the release of the high-budget, extensively hyped ‘tent-pole’ blockbuster, which found its logical extension in the search for the multifilm franchise, discussed at the end of this chapter. Fountainbridge Films lessened Connery’s dependence on Michael Ovitz, a relationship that attenuated further in 1995 when Ovitz realised his own ambitions: becoming the head of a studio, Disney, therefore emulating the achievement of his role model, Lew Wassermann. However, throughout this period Connery remained a CAA client with the agency now playing a complementary role as Connery alternated between starring in Fountainbridge productions and playing in films brought to him by CAA agents. He remained as busy throughout the 1990s as at any time during his career. Medicine Man, in production before Fountainbridge Films had been established, was more Ovitz’s creation than Connery’s. Ovitz put together the CAA package of Connery, McTiernan and screenwriter Tom Schulman, who had recently won an Oscar for Dead Poets Society that secured funding and distribution by Buena Vista, a Disney subsidiary. McTiernan thought its subject matter would make an ideal project for Connery, who was immediately attracted by its social and political relevance, the possibilities of making ‘a story about two people, who are extreme opposite types, played with comedy and adventure and still combining the serious theme of the rain forest disappearing at the rate of one acre a second’.25 Connery plays Dr Robert Campbell – a resonantly Scottish name – an irascible scientist sporting a ponytail who, deep in the Amazon rainforest, has found a cure for cancer he cannot replicate. The role combines many of the elements that constitute Connery’s distinctiveness as a star – a rebellious non-conformity (he has turned his back on the corporation that pays for his research), strength, integrity and self-sufficiency – to which are added eco-warrior and potential saviour, all wrapped in the customary abrasive and sardonic humour. In addition to commanding a salary of $10 million and a full 15 per cent of the gross, Connery’s role as executive producer enabled him to have Tom Stoppard work on the script and choose his co-star, Lorraine Bracco, judging that she was tough and dynamic, with a strong sense of humour, prepared

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to take on the challenge of jungle filming, ‘a woman who can hold her own and that is very important for me’.26 Medicine Man’s subject matter may have been fresh and of the moment but its rom-com generic elements were tired and trite. The clash between Campbell and Dr Rae Crane (Bracco) the ‘hard-nosed, very urban New York smart mouth’ sent by the pharmaceutical company to bring him back, lacks subtlety or conviction.27 Although McTiernan claimed to have conceived Medicine Man not as an action film replete with special effects but a twohander, almost an art house film, reviewers found it memorable for its aerial sequences above the tree canopy, not the character interactions.28 One critic thought the ‘first green blockbuster’ had ‘the money, the stars and the lush locations, yet the end result feels crabby and mean’, a long and lazy film whose elements do not work together effectively;29 another considered the film an uneasy mixture of ‘ecological propaganda and romantic wishfulfilment’.30 With occasional exceptions, reviewers thought the pairing of Connery and Bracco lacked chemistry, judged Bracco one-note and unconvincing as a high-powered scientist, and, unusually, castigated Connery for a routine performance that lacked ‘sparkle’.31 Medicine Man was only modestly successful commercially, generating $45 million at the US domestic box-office against its $40 million cost.32 Rising Sun (1993) was another Ovitz package, consisting of Connery, screenwriter Michael Crichton on whose novel the film was based, director Peter Kaufman and co-star Wesley Snipes, the black action hero de jour, all CAA clients, persuasive enough for Twentieth Century-Fox to provide the $35 million budget. However, although Crichton said that he created the Conner character with Connery in mind, he withdrew his name from the film after substantial changes had been made in the adaptation.33 The film pairs Connery’s Captain John Conner, a semi-retired Los Angeles police detective and oriental expert, with Web Smith (Snipes) to solve the murder of a sex worker killed during a sexual encounter on the premises of a respectable Japanese corporation. Connery, elegantly dressed in Armani suits, with a neat beard and silver hair, and equipped with his customary sardonic wit, radiates calm authority and unruffled urbanity, set against Snipes’s volatile and intuitive younger officer. As critics pointed out, perhaps through his role as executive producer – one account suggested that Mamet had written some of Connery’s dialogue – Conner gets almost all of the best lines.34 However, Rising Sun had few admirers; most reviewers found it a predictable entry in the mismatched, antagonistic cop-duo crime film sub-genre; they thought the central relationship between Connery and Snipes, although another father-mentor, surrogate son combination, ‘never quite sparks’.35 Unusually, they also considered Connery rather cruised through what was identified as ‘a feature-length homage to his old 007 self … he seems almost

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too comfortable coasting on the James Bond image’.36 Nevertheless, the attractions for audiences of Connery as a version of Bond were sufficient for Rising Sun to earn $107 million at the box-office, if performing more strongly in the US than internationally.37 Connery does not appear to have taken a very active role in Rising Sun’s script development, but he was much more centrally involved in the first film Fountainbridge produced, Just Cause (1995), based on John Katzenbach’s best-selling psychological thriller. He took a role that was in deliberate contrast to the two previous films and a more substantial acting challenge. Connery, as full producer, ensured that his character was changed from Miami-based investigative journalist to Harvard law professor. This shift enables Connery to play a character of exceptional moral integrity who is also an older man, Professor Paul Armstrong, first glimpsed giving an impassioned public talk about the horrors of capital punishment. According to Connery, the role’s attraction was not so much Armstrong’s impeccable ethical credentials, but that his character ‘soon finds himself experiencing the reality that is found outside the ivory tower of Harvard. He discovers that he is capable of things he never thought possible.’ 38 Although he has not practised for twenty-five years, Armstrong is persuaded to take up the case of death-row convict Bobby Earl Ferguson (Blair Underwood) by Bobby Earl’s grandmother, who claims his confession was coerced by the local police chief, Tanny Brown (Laurence Fishburne). During Armstrong’s investigation, he uncovers a series of grisly truths that lead to what the posters called its ‘explosive finale’ in the Florida Everglades. The director, Arne Glimcher, thought Armstrong’s ‘transition’ from ‘being an essentially passive man whose life is a rational series of deliberations to a desperate person who realizes that his choices and actions will affect many lives – particularly those close to him’, would be ‘a wonderful showcase for Sean’s gifts as an actor’.39 However, the inexperienced Glimcher was Ovitz’s choice, not Connery’s, and Ovitz had to send one of his underlings, Ray Kurtzman, to ‘referee’ the clashes that occurred on set between director and star.40 Connery’s performance is nicely keyed to representing a precise, ruminative man of letters who has settled into comfortable late middle age. Without a toupee, Connery looks his full sixty-five years, still handsome and attractive but unexceptional, with a neat beard and dressed in blue sports jacket, slacks and panama hat. However, although Just Cause may have offered the prospect of a different acting challenge, its underpowered central role provided few opportunities for Connery to stamp his unique authority on the film. The repression of his persona not only serves to negate the force of Connery’s presence but transfers the film’s energy to the characters he encounters, especially Tanny Brown, superbly played by Fishburne, and the psychopathic serial killer Blair Sullivan, enacted with histrionic bravura by

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Ed Harris; one reviewer thought Connery was ‘sadly lacking in vigour’ in what seemed to be an ‘old-style conscience picture’.41 Only in the final scenes does Armstrong become an action hero as he tries to save his wife and child from the freed Bobby Earle, who turns out to be the killer of a young girl for which he was originally convicted. As reviewers pointed out, Glimcher’s handling of this ‘transition’ – critics were generally scathing about his direction – is so abrupt and frantic that it becomes ludicrous rather than convincing, making Armstrong look a gullible fool.42 Sheila Johnston, who considered Just Cause ‘a passable investigative thriller [that] spirals into an absurd, ineffectual melodrama’, wondered what made ‘a respected and busy actor handpick such a thin character vehicle for himself’.43 Variety thought Just Cause was a ‘serviceable, if unremarkable late winter B.O. attraction’.44 This proved to be an accurate prediction for a film that grossed a modest $36,853,222 at the domestic box-office.45 The weaknesses of Just Cause and the mismatch between Connery’s intentions and Ovitz’s intervention demonstrate that establishing Fountainbridge Films had not solved all Connery’s production problems and that his judgement about suitable projects could be questionable. It was not necessarily the case that the star’s augmented creative control resulted in films that were either engaging performances and/or commercial successes. Indeed, the boxoffice disappointments of Medicine Man, Rising Sun and Just Cause meant Connery had slipped out of the top twenty Hollywood male stars.46 The offer to work on The Rock with Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, after Spielberg and Lucas the most commercially successful ‘blockbuster auteurs’ of the 1980s, was therefore extremely tempting, especially as the pair had just had spectacular hits with Bad Boys and Crimson Tide, both released in 1995, after a fallow period.47 Their intention was that The Rock would be their usual ‘high-octane’, action-packed, fast-paced thriller, especially as directed by Michael Bay, his talents honed on television commercials, who had become synonymous with a rapid editing style. However, as with Lucas and Spielberg, Connery was only prepared to accept the part of John Patrick Mason on condition that his role was substantially reworked. Bruckheimer, together with screenwriters Douglas Cook and David Weisberg, flew to Spain and worked with Connery for three days to ‘reconceive’ his character; there were several further meetings before he would finally commit.48 As with Never Say Never Again, Connery brought in Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to rewrite his dialogue.49 He also used his influence as both star and executive producer to demand Bay include quieter scenes in which to develop his character; Bay also acceded to Connery’s insistence on daily rehearsals and walk throughs.50 Bruckheimer commented, ‘The role was tailored for him; much of Mason’s backstory came directly from Sean himself. He did the research, and on his own designed

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and created a lot of who Mason is.’ 51 Connery was also able to negotiate a hefty $13 million salary that the Hollywood Reporter, failing to resist the obvious pun, claimed ‘rocked Hollywood’, ascribed to his ‘great impact overseas’ as well as continued appeal for North American audiences.52 Connery used the script revisions to construct a different perspective on the Bond myth. His reworked character of John Patrick Mason is a

6.2  High-octane entertainment: poster for The Rock (1996)

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Glasgow-born British SAS operative and another man of exceptional moral integrity, intelligence and cultivation, who traces his descent through a long line of dissenters: Archimedes, Walter Raleigh and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Like Barney Blair, he prizes truth above loyalty to government or country, and he has been incarcerated by the CIA for refusing to divulge the whereabouts of a microfilm that contains embarrassing political secrets. Imprisoned since 1963 – near the peak of Bond’s popularity – Mason is, as one reviewer remarked, Bond that might have been if he ‘had fouled up and was disowned’.53 Connery commented that this backstory enabled audiences to ‘understand why Mason has been incarcerated and why he is so capable’.54 Mason has become necessary to the authorities because a group of disaffected Vietnam veterans, led by Brigadier General Frank Hummel (Ed Harris), has seized control of Alcatraz – the ‘Rock’ – and, taking tourists as hostages, is holding the government to ransom by aiming chemical missiles at San Francisco. Hummel is determined to secure recompense for the men who died on clandestine missions under his command but whose deaths were not honoured nor their families recompensed. The Pentagon plans to retake the island using a US Navy SEAL team, enlisting the FBI’s top chemical weapons specialist, Dr Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), assisted by Mason, the only man ever to have escaped from the Rock, who knows how to get to the island undetected through uncharted underground tunnels. Connery is given the big star entrance, photographed in extreme close-up in his cell before the camera pulls back to reveal a figure who could have stepped out of Treasure Island: in chains with long, straggly grey hair down to his shoulders. Having set the conditions for co-operating– a luxury hotel room, shower and haircut – Connery is photographed in the bright sunlight of a top-storey balcony now looking extremely handsome with trimmed beard, carefully cut hair and exquisite suit. One reviewer remarked, ‘You haven’t lived until you hear Connery in the shower rendering “If you’re going to San Francisco/Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”, as he is transformed into an impeccably tailored, white-bearded loose cannon.’ 55 As Bond resurrected, Mason has a sardonic wit, asking the venal FBI chief Womack (John Spencer), ‘I’ve been in jail for longer than Nelson Mandela, so maybe you want me to run for President?’, before looping a rope round Womack’s wrist and throwing him off the balcony, where he hangs helplessly as they ‘negotiate’. This ruthless and shocking act of Bondian strength, agility and surprise shows Mason has lost none of his capabilities as an action hero. However, he is an ageing action hero and, as the raid on Alcatraz gets under way, becomes an abrasive and exacting mentor for Goodspeed, whom he thinks of not as a surrogate son but as someone who can be manipulated. As several reviewers remarked, this highly contrasted pairing is effective:

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Cage’s emotional befuddlement and anguished sensitivity – his extravagant gestures and hangdog, nervous, nerdy goofiness – are counterpoised to Connery’s granite certainty, dry humour and containment. Cage and Connery worked closely together, developing a rapport and improvising moves and dialogue in which, Cage attested, they ‘got a kick out of what each of us was doing’.56 Cage recalled Connery encouraged them to develop the off-beat comedy in their relationship, their sparring sprinkled with Mason’s typically sardonic assessments: ‘I’m fed up with saving your ass. I’m amazed you got past puberty.’ Mason’s remarks are also peppered with Bondian allusions. When Mason glimpses Goodspeed’s elaborate high-tech underwater apparatus, he remarks, ‘In my day we did it all with a snorkel and a pair of flippers’, a reference to the opening sequence of Goldfinger. Gradually their relationship modulates convincingly into one of mutual respect. In the penultimate scene – one of the quiet moments Connery insisted upon – having survived the mayhem, Goodspeed reports Mason’s death to the authorities. In a beautifully timed gesture, Mason thanks Goodspeed, thus re-establishing a bond of trust with someone for the first time in thirty years in what becomes the moment at which he can entrust the whereabouts of the microfilm to the younger man who has become his surrogate son. As Cynthia Baron observes apropos Denzel Washington, another action star of comparable power and subtlety to Connery, these quiet moments have a highly charged expressivity that comes from their contrast with the frenetic action.57 Connery continued to exercise his control through to post-production, refusing to take part in any publicity for The Rock until it had been edited to his satisfaction.58 Although many reviewers still found The Rock’s breathless action wearying, they enjoyed the central pairing. The Rolling Stone’s critic, although he thought Bruckheimer and Simpson, in casting Connery and Cage, had ‘used class to sell crass’, admired the actors’ energetic and engaging performances in which, rather than coasting through the film’s ‘blatantly commercial confines’, they were ‘having a ball’.59 Another reviewer found Cage’s ‘loping movement and emotional befuddlement’ as the American Everyman reminiscent of the young James Stewart were contrasted effectively with Connery’s ‘usual ironic, understated, supremely graceful self, but there’s a lightness in his performance that has been missing of late. In one small moment, he emerges from a grenade attack, holding himself gingerly erect with the look of a man who suspects he will never be pain-free again.’ 60 Other critics also sensed that Connery had worked harder on his performance than in some of his recent films and, as one memorably observed, ‘his stillness still mesmerises – that trademark glinting wince of surprise, like the sparkle of sunlight on the rock. And he handles action without a hint of embarrassment or frailty. How ineluctably he draws us in to his aura of authority.’ 61 As in the Bond and the Indiana Jones series, Connery’s sardonic,



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measured performance provides an ironic distancing from the frenetic excesses of the action, taking audiences on a witty and enjoyable romp that refuses to take itself too seriously. The Rock became one of Connery’s most successful films, grossing over $3 billion worldwide, which placed him seventh in Quigley’s poll of Top Ten Money-Making Stars in 1996.62 The Rock had used elements of the Bond persona but reworked them significantly, reversing the figure’s ideology, which aligned Mason with the outsider/man of integrity roles that characterise this period of Connery’s career.

Rivalling Cary Grant: Entrapment Having restored his superstar status, Connery felt able to take a role in Playing by Heart (1998), a small-scale, art house production for which he was paid $60,000.63 This intimate melodrama is the story of the role love plays in the lives of several seemingly unconnected couples. Connery plays opposite Gina Rowlands as his wife, who suspects her husband of having had an affair during the early years of their marriage. It was a quiet film that Connery found highly appealing: ‘I loved the idea of portraying an intimate, passionate relationship between people in their twilight years.’ 64 However, in the same year he took a blatantly commercial role as the villain in The Avengers (1998), although apparently having to be persuaded by producer Jerry Weintraub, who flew to Connery’s home in Spain alongside the screenwriters to work for three days on his character, Sir August De Wynter, before he would agree to sign on.65 Connery was presumably attracted by the opportunity to play a larger-than-life Bond-style villain – a megalomaniac meteorologist bent on world domination through controlling the weather – but even his energetically over-the-top performance could not rescue what the Daily Telegraph’s reviewer characterised as a ‘leaden, witless fiasco, lacking thrills, excitement or surprise’.66 This review was typical of a film that had been drastically re-edited just prior to its release without press screenings. Reviewers trounced what they considered to have been a thoroughly misguided attempt to resurrect the 1960s television series, devoid of all those qualities – wit, charm, elegance and style – that had made it a cult classic; even the usually generous Philip French asked, ‘Can I have my money back?’ 67 Critics’ views were reflected in The Avengers’ dismal boxoffice, a $48.5 million worldwide gross against a budget of $60 million.68 These films were essentially fillers as Connery worked towards realising what became Fountainbridge’s highest-budget and most ambitious film, Entrapment (1999), another departure from his father-mentor roles in which he sought to promote himself as a great romantic star. Entrapment was a glossy, glamorous caper film whose varied locations – New York, London,

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Blenheim Palace, Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull and what was then the world’s tallest building, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur – rival those of a Bond film. Connery plays the world’s greatest jewel thief, Robert ‘Mac’ MacDougal, an old-style gentleman burglar in the tradition of E.W. Hornung’s Raffles, played by Ronald Colman in 1930, the most famous screen incarnation. However, Connery’s nearest model was Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) but also Charade (1963) in which Grant’s urbane sexiness is enhanced by playing opposite beautiful and much younger female stars, Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn, respectively. Entrapment was an attempt by Connery to rival Grant by playing a romanticised version of the Bond fantasy, a character with class, sophistication, impeccable taste and sex appeal, but with a sardonic inflection that was quintessential Connery. In addition to rivalling Grant, Connery was perhaps determined to succeed in a sub-genre, the caper film, which he had played twice before – The Anderson Tapes and The First Great Train Robbery – with limited success. Entrapment observes what Kim Newman identifies as the caper film’s well-established plot trajectory and settings in which professional crooks plan and execute a clever, daring and often fantastical robbery of either cash or a priceless art object in a light-hearted and stylish way that appeals to audience sympathies for thieves whose crime is without social repercussions. The high period of the caper film was the 1960s, in which various ‘welldressed, impeccably cool’ male actors were assisted by a ‘glamorous female star in high-fashion outfits’ to undertake a carefully choreographed theft from an apparently impregnable institution.69 Connery had lost out to Steve McQueen for The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968, one of the most successful examples.70 In his study of the heist film, Daryl Lee notes that caper films made a strong return in the later 1990s, in which the generally successful robberies registered a protest against the power of financial interests.71 Entrapment was in the vanguard of this resurgence, which included a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair starring another ex-Bond, Pierce Brosnan, released four months later in August 1999. As Lee argues, part of the caper film’s appeal is the imagination with which the thieves perform the robbery, in which labour becomes art. Lee’s observation makes it tempting to read Entrapment as an allegory of Connery’s relationship with the Hollywood studios, the freelance star as cat burglar whose artistry enables him to outwit corporate might. Tollefson and Connery had persuaded Twentieth Century-Fox’s President Tom Rothman to provide a budget of $68 million that would enable Fountainbridge Films to mount a lavish production, with Connery taking a salary of $20 million. Rothman enthused, ‘This is a movie that is tremendously exciting for us because I think it delivers something to an audience that they’re hungry for – namely both style and substance. It’s glossy, it’s

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sexy and it’s smart.’ He recognised in Connery not only a star with strong audience appeal but also a capable, knowledgeable and thoroughly professional producer likely to deliver the film on time and on budget.72 Tollefson argued that Entrapment combined expansive and spectacular action with a ‘character-driven plot, which we hope will keep audiences guessing about the relationships and the adventures’.73 The central relationship is between Mac and Virginia Baker (Gin), a computer-savvy insurance company fraud investigator with whom he teams up to conduct an audacious high-tech robbery. Tollefson considered that an audience has to ‘fall in love with Mac and Gin’ for the film to work and thought they needed to cast ‘[s]omeone relatively new and fresh to take the audience through the twists and turns of the story’.74 Connery argued that the film shows Mac ‘becoming more and more emotionally involved with [Gin]. Against his own wisdom … maybe not, judgement yes. [Entrapment]’s got wit, a very intriguing romantic element and quite a sting in the tail.’ 75 They chose Catherine Zeta-Jones, who had trained as a professional dancer and possessed the necessary supple athleticism to execute some very precise sequences. She was also a rising star after her success in The Mask of Zorro (1998). In order to keep the balance between action and character, Connery took the drastic decision to fire his original choice of director, Antoine Fuqua, who, according to his replacement, Jon Amiel, ‘wanted a homage to James Bond: his script had car chases, explosions, helicopters and 20 guys in black leather running round Borough market with Uzi machine guns’.76 Amiel – an ex-Royal Shakespeare Company and BBC director and one who, despite relocating to Hollywood, professed not to be interested in making ‘movies that were more American than the Americans’ – was much more simpático with the producers’ conception of Entrapment as primarily a ‘romantic film … a two-hander, in spite of the huge locations and action sequences’, providing numerous quiet scenes that focused on conversations between the central pairing. Amiel worked closely with Connery on the script – which was rewritten three times before Connery was fully satisfied – in order to ‘consolidate the relationship at the heart of the story’. Like Rothman, Amiel thought caper films had audience appeal: ‘smart without being intellectually superior, glamorous without being ludicrous, exciting without leaving a nasty taste in your mouth and sexy without being explicitly sexual’. He judged that the focus on characterisation would enable this action-adventure film to succeed ‘at a time of general dissatisfaction with the genre’. Thus Ron Bass’s initial drafts of the screenplay in which their relationship was ‘explicitly sexual from the first act onwards’, were rejected in favour of a developing romance that Amiel stressed ‘is about looking, distance and the gradual closing of an emotional gulf’, a relationship that becomes ‘more complex and rich’ as the plot unfolds.

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6.3  Manipulative romantic hero: Connery as ‘Mac’ MacDougall in Entrapment (1999)

Amiel was also at pains to point out that he and the producers were conscious that audiences were becoming ‘thoroughly disgruntled at the amorous antics of wrinklies like Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford with much younger partners’, therefore Entrapment would not pretend ‘that our ageing film star is not an ageing film star … before critics sharpen their quills, I hope they look at what is happening. Sean is vulnerable, emotionally conflicted, comically wrong occasionally. He gets winded when he runs.’ Entrapment thus draws explicit attention to Mac’s age from the outset. When Gin is trying to persuade her boss Hector Cruz (Will Patton) that Mac stole the Rembrandt, Cruz replies, ‘He’s sixty years old. He ain’t Spiderman anymore.’ (As Connery was sixty-nine when Entrapment was made, this is rather economical with the truth.) In their first encounter, Connery plays Mac as a Bond-style action man, utterly sure of himself with the threat of violence: ‘I’m going to ask you some questions. And if I don’t like your answers, you’re going out of the window.’ However, as the relationship develops, we start to understand his emotional conflict. The strength and subtlety of Connery’s performance is that he never lets the audience forget that Mac is attracted to Gin, wants to believe in her and trust her, but is

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both professionally and emotionally wary: ‘Has there ever been anyone you couldn’t manipulate, beguile or … seduce?’ Mac does not have Bond’s insolent, cocksure sexual certainty, but seems genuinely unsure of his ground. When he asks his supplier Thibadeaux (Ving Rhames) to estimate Gin’s dress size in preparation for their appearance at a masked ball (the occasion for a robbery), this request is greeted with a dismissive ‘Mac, you’re too old for this shit.’ When he presents the dress to Gin, he dutifully repeats Thibadeaux’s line: ‘I thought you were probably a six but would look very nice in a four’, this studied remark contrasting with a dismissive Bondian quip indicating a lack of emotional involvement. As they plan the main robbery, Gin lets her hair down as she explains its intricacies on a computer screen. Mac becomes distracted as he feels the soft caress of her tresses on his cheek, blinks and then snaps back to attention for the elucidation. Entrapment maintains interest in their relationship through the oscillations of who appears to be in control as well as who is telling the truth. Gin is equally unsure about Mac’s motivations and wary of her own increasing dependency and attraction. When he confesses he had been trying to persuade her not to attempt the final heist, he whispers, ‘I know that if I told you to forget this job and get the hell out of here, you wouldn’t do it, would you?’ She replies, ‘Were you worried about me?’ ‘I was worried about both of us.’ At this point Gin makes her most explicit attempt at seduction. He starts to respond and then pulls away. ‘My situation is so complicated. I can’t … I can’t explain.’ ‘Not going to try?’ ‘I’m sorry.’ This preserves Mac’s essential mysteriousness as a fantasy figure but Amiel photographs Connery in close-up looking old and wrinkled as puts his hand protectively on her shoulder, showing his vulnerability as well as strength, the duality that had always been one of the actor’s core qualities. Through the skill of Connery’s performance it becomes a poignant moment, reminding an audience of their age difference but also their deepening emotional entanglement. Although in the daring high-wire robbery, Mac proves himself to be the omni-capable action man in defiance of age and the occasional creaking joint, he seems genuinely uncertain whether they will stay together. When she eventually embraces him in the final shot, Mac winces in pain, making the classic Hollywood concluding clinch another reminder of Mac’s age and physical frailties. Despite Amiel’s hope that critics would recognise that Entrapment conceded its male star’s age before ‘sharpening their quills’, most reviewers were fixated by the forty-year age gap between the leads, several commenting that Connery was old enough to be Zeta-Jones’s grandfather.77 The Observer’s reviewer made his quill razor sharp by querying whether audiences would believe that ‘she really desires this grey-haired man with a face like the Cairngorms’ and blames this misjudgement on Connery’s ‘heavy hand’ as

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co-producer.78 Many were particularly critical of the scene in which a leotard-clad Zeta-Jones is shown lithely weaving her way through the network of crisscrossing laser beams Mac sets up in his castle to replicate the protective security she needs to overcome as fetishising the female body through endless ‘butt-waggling’. In an astringent review, Anne Billson thought Mac would only have been convincing, even acceptable, had Connery been thirty years younger. She added, ‘I defy anyone not to find it creepy when the old man ogles his co-star’s bottom.’ 79 Although she and others recognised the wisdom of Connery’s not baring his body – the mistake Clint Eastwood had made in True Crime, released a month before in March 1999 – they thought Entrapment had substituted a ‘leaden playfulness’.80 A minority of reviewers were more generous. One, who thought Mac was ‘precisely how you might imagine James Bond would end up if he got lucky’, responded more positively to Connery’s portrayal of a man ‘who occasionally wonders if anything in his life has really bitten deep’, which is why he eyes Gin with ‘such flushed hunger’; she actually thought Entrapment should have been bolder in presenting their romance: ‘Let these people collide!’ 81 Time’s reviewer concurred, judging the film’s acknowledgement of their age disparity was ‘tinged with too much regret. I could have done with less melancholia and more whoopee.’ 82 José Arroyo in Sight and Sound considered that, although close-ups reveal Connery’s skin is ‘losing the battle with time … his appeal was never really based on youth’. He considered Connery to be a star so ‘completely at ease with his masculinity’ that he ‘can afford to be nonchalant and playful’ in a way that was impossible for rivals such as Eastwood. Arroyo was one of the few reviewers who admired Zeta-Jones’s performance – ‘flirting with such intelligent sultriness not even a man of Connery’s strength can resist’ – and in a minority of those who considered their pairing had ‘an undoubted chemistry’.83 Connery showed his skills as a producer by delivering Entrapment on time and marginally under budget.84 He advertised the film assiduously, conducting over sixty promotional interviews.85 This formed part of what Variety described as Entrapment’s ‘lavish and sexy campaign … [that] should be enough to generate good mid-range grosses internationally across the audience spectrum’.86 This proved to be an understatement. Box-office grosses of over $2 billion made Entrapment the fourth most successful film of 1999.87 Its success suggests that not only were audiences prepared to tolerate the stars’ age difference, but that Connery, aged sixty-nine, continued to be a glamorous star who retained his sex appeal. In a poll at Santa Monica, Florida, on the film’s opening night, 70 per cent of the audience reported they had been ‘drawn by Sean Connery’ as opposed to 34 per cent for Zeta-Jones.88 Perhaps Entrapment could have been bolder in its handling of their relationship – providing ‘more whoopee’ – but in my reading it is



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precisely withholding their eventual embrace, the absence of clinches and sex scenes, that makes the film appealing and engaging.

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The actor and the star: final films Connery’s concluding two films – Finding Forrester (2000) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) – encapsulate the twin drivers of his career: searching for a meaningful acting challenge and the desire to maintain his position as a superstar. Both films demonstrate the characteristic ironic humour and Connery’s persona as a father-mentor, but their orientation and execution present a stark contrast. The first is a quiet chamber piece; the second a blockbuster meant to launch a new franchise. Taken together they are a richly symbolic pairing, deeply expressive of Connery’s lifelong ambivalence towards stardom. Finding Forrester is an elegiac review of the life of a reclusive artist who shuns celebrity. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen depicts the fantasised man of action, saving the world and thrilling audiences. In 1999, after concluding Entrapment, Fountainbridge announced a ‘multi-year first look deal’ with Sony Pictures.89 The initial fruit of this deal was Finding Forrester, based on a script by first-time screenwriter Mike Rich, which, having won a prize in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 1998, was picked up by John Calley, head of Sony Pictures, who showed the screenplay directly to Connery.90 The film afforded a distinctive and unusual role for Connery, the opportunity to play a very different type of older man. Tollefson commented: In the eight years I’ve worked with Sean, I’ve noticed that seldom can you discover a role for him as an actor that isn’t something he’s already done before. The character of Forrester immediately stood out as something different. Sean loves literature. The idea of playing a Pulitzer Prize-winning author held a lot of appeal for him. The fact that the writer was a recluse and a bit of a misanthrope made it even more interesting.91

After writing the ‘great American novel’ in the 1950s William Forrester has remained in self-imposed isolation in his Bronx apartment. Forrester was based on J.D. Salinger, who, Connery argued, ‘hated celebrity. He shunned fame.’ Playing the role enabled Connery to explore his own ambivalent attitude to stardom and refusal to become incorporated in Hollywood’s celebrity culture: ‘I myself have avoided many of the pitfalls of fame by choosing not to live in Los Angeles.’ 92 Rich’s script was also appealing because it was about a ‘rather marvellous and humorous and quite passionate relationship’ between two outsiders that constituted ‘the

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kind of film I like; a contemporary drama that tells a constructive story about friendship’.93 Following a hostile initial encounter, Forrester gradually develops an improbable and incongruous friendship with Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown), a sixteen-year-old African American who has outstanding talent as a writer. Wallace becomes the protégé whom Forrester guides and trains in developing his potential as he tries to establish himself at the prestigious private school to which he has gained a scholarship. The challenge was finding an actor who could play his Wallace. When an inexperienced newcomer, Rob Brown, was hired, Connery insisted on extensive rehearsals before shooting began so that they could develop their performances together, a courtesy never accorded to Connery himself when he started out.94 Thus Finding Forrester becomes – at a meta level – another instance of an actor at the end of his career passing on his knowledge to the next generation, which gives an added dimension to the father-mentor figure. In constructing his own role, Connery worked carefully with Rich in delineating Forrester’s insecurities and vulnerabilities, thereby ‘enriching [his] inner life so that his past, and his reasons for retiring from the world were completely convincing’. Because Rich had not written the part with the star in mind, Connery supplied additional background, especially Forrester’s Scottish ancestry.95 Forrester is given the same birthdate as Connery, 1930, and a birthplace in Dranmurie, an apocryphal Scottish town, and the production used actual photographs of Connery to depict Forrester’s younger self. As a result, Forrester became a ‘more reclusive, more eccentric, more compassionate’ character than in Rich’s original screenplay, alongside the decision to postpone revelations about his reasons for being a recluse for as long as possible. Rich acknowledged that in reconfiguring Forrester, Connery’s character notes were very detailed and imaginative.96 Connery also chose Gus Van Sant as director because of his reputation in handling sensitive character-driven films. They worked closely together to fine-tune Forrester’s characterisation. Forrester has become a virtual hermit, never leaving his flat, with long, unkempt hair, pottering about in pyjama bottoms or baggy trousers, shapeless cardigans and patched leather jacket with a shambling, shuffling gait, his days spent drinking whisky and observing birds through his binoculars. He is initially suspicious about forming a friendship with Jamal, despite having recognised his potential as a writer. Connery displays Forrester’s insecurity and fears by pacing about the flat, fiddling with a glass as he sips his drink: ‘If I ask you not to say anything to anybody about here … us. Is that something I can trust you on?’ Connery handles the transition from curmudgeonly recluse to a man willing to embrace life again with assurance, including the set piece scene in which he arrives unexpectedly at the school to defend Jamal from the charge of plagiarism. He takes the opportunity

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to pass on his wisdom to the next generation, who gaze in rapturous adoration at the sage who has graced their gathering. However, the most memorable scene occurs when Forrester suffers an anxiety attack, having been persuaded by Jamal to attend a baseball game at Madison Square Gardens. Buffeted by the crowds, fearful at losing contact, Connery convincingly plays a man who appears genuinely terrified, frail and uncertain. This traumatic event becomes the occasion when Forrester finally reveals why he has retreated from the world: failing to stop his beloved brother who had ‘survived the whole goddam war’, from driving off drunk and dying in a car accident. Through Jamal’s friendship, Forrester is reconciled to his past and cycles off into the New York sunshine determined to revisit the land of his birth. He dies on the trip, leaving Jamal his flat and his second, unpublished, novel, Sunset. The critical consensus considered Finding Forrester well-intentioned rather than compelling, its humdrum storyline animated by Connery’s accomplished ability to imbue his character with depth and believability, which made his ‘writer-hermit cranky and palpable’.97 One reviewer admired Connery’s ‘wonderfully controlled and quite believable performance’, but considered that it was inhibited by a flawed film that ‘limps towards a conclusion that is woefully predictable’.98 This comment was typical of a critical response that considered Finding Forrester cloying, dull, slow, over-long and sentimental, lacking the risk-taking experimentation Van Sant displayed in his earlier films such as Good Will Hunting (1997). Finding Forrester performed moderately on its theatrical release but was extremely successful on DVD, indicating its appeal for a more mature audience.99 Finding Forrester was Fountainbridge’s final film. The company had developed plans for Connery to star in (at a salary of $17 million) and produce End Game, in which he was to have played a CIA agent who goes on an undercover mission to expose illegal arms dealings only to discover he has become a pawn in a huge conspiracy. The project had been in development with Mandalay Pictures since 1999 but the company withdrew its involvement in 2002. Connery issued a lawsuit that was met by the inevitable counter-claim. The dispute was settled out of court, leaving Fountainbridge free to continue the project. However, perhaps because of the release of The Bourne Identity (2002), which covers the same territory, End Game was stillborn.100 In May 2002 the trade press announced the closure of Fountainbridge Films, which also meant that an intended production of Mary, Queen of Scots collapsed, along with Connery’s intention to build a major studio outside Edinburgh.101 The reasons given were that Connery wished to concentrate on his acting career, but there were widespread rumours of disputes with Tollefson.102

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6.4  Connery as William Forrester and surrogate son Jamal Wallace (Rob Brown) in the semi-autobiographical Finding Forrester (2000)

Most commentators seem to wish that Finding Forrester – with its autobiographical elements and image of Forrester cycling off into the sunset in search of his homeland – had been Connery’s final valedictory appearance on screen, not what they see as the disastrous decision to make The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), dismissing the film as an ill-judged mistake. This deeply flawed film nevertheless merits close consideration as Connery’s attempt to extend his longevity as an international star through being part of another successful franchise, now the driving force of the Hollywood majors, which became increasingly focused on high-budget series

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that could be exploited across multiple platforms.103 The indicators were the success of the first Harry Potter films (2001–2) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3). The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was also designed to capitalise on the taste for comic book superheroes following the spectacular successes of X-Men (2000), its sequel X2 (2003) and Spiderman (2002). Connery’s fee as the main star and executive producer on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was $17 million.104 Producer Don Murphy touted The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a ‘period X-Men’, proclaiming, ‘This is going to be a big superhero film in the X-Men mould with explosive special effects, loads of stunts and lavish sets.’ 105 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was loosely based on the initial volume of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s graphic novel series, first published in 1999, which features a collection of famous Victorian fictional superheroes, all outcasts. Moore had sent an initial treatment to Murphy while he was producing From Hell (2001), based on another of Moore’s graphic novels about Jack the Ripper. Moore had become the central author in the burgeoning ‘steampunk’ cultural phenomenon, the term defining a ‘subgenre of science fiction and fantasy literature, primarily concerned with alternative history, especially an imaginary “Victorian era”, when steam power and mechanical clockwork dominate technology’.106 From literary beginnings, steampunk, a form of retrofuturism, had grown into an entire aesthetic: films, television programmes, graphic novels, computer games, music and fashion. The sub-genre’s wondrous and horrific landscapes of spectacle and adventure had the potential to be exploited across multiple outlets.107 Because of the public’s appetite for these fantasies, Twentieth Century-Fox, which had also financed From Hell, agreed to greenlight a $78 million summer blockbuster to be shot almost entirely in the Czech Republic.108 The character of M, who orchestrates the League, was a deliberate salute to the Bond franchise; Moore’s other novels had been purchased by Fox – one of which, The Black Dossier, features James Bond – indicating the studio’s plan to produce a franchise with Connery as the major star.109 In Moore’s novel, Connery’s character, H. Rider Haggard’s hunteradventurer Allan Quatermain, is depicted as a cadaverous opium addict recruited from his drugged stupor in Cairo by the League’s leader, Mina Harker, with whom he has sex. A physical wreck, Quatermain is only gradually rehabilitated into heroic masculinity, a transformation that Ian Dawe sees as representing the erotic-grotesque core of Moore’s work.110 However, the production team’s decision to create a summer blockbuster meant that James Dale’s screenplay was far more conventional in its characterisation and sexual politics. Quatermain is wrenched out of retirement from the Britannia Club in Nairobi, where he spends his days with other superannuated colonials, at the behest of British intelligence to quell the

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Fantom, who is intent on fomenting a world war. Quatermain is physically fit and needs no rehabilitation. Connery described him as ‘an instinctive, old-fashioned character embodying a different era’.111 He is typically his own man rather than an establishment figure, whose son died in his arms on a previous expedition: ‘After that I washed my hands of England, the Empire and Allan Bloody Quatermain.’ With Connery as the still virile star, Quatermain immediately assumes leadership of the motley assortment of crusaders and, although the only one without a special power, is good with his fists and a peerless marksman. Connery’s performance is typically taciturn, sceptical, sardonic and authoritative. Despite telling his partners, ‘I’m not the man I once was’, Quatermain shows resourcefulness, courage and tenacity in overcoming the series of attacks orchestrated by the Fantom. As the action heats up, Quatermain, muttering, ‘old tigers sensing their end are at their most fierce’, dies fighting. Fox pressed for the introduction of an additional, American, character, not in the graphic novel: a young Secret Service Agent Tom Sawyer (Shane West), to whom Quatermain passes on his legacy of marksmanship and rugged, no-nonsense masculinity: ‘May this new century be yours son, as the old century was mine.’ According to the studio production notes, Sawyer ‘comes to view Quatermain as a father figure, and the special bond that forms between them becomes perhaps the most vital link in the group’.112 It is Sawyer who arranges for Quatermain’s body to be returned to Africa because Quatermain had explained that the witch doctor whose village he saved had told him that there he could never die. A final scene shows a lightning bolt striking his grave and the earth appearing to move, leaving the possibilities of sequels open. Connery was reported as enthusing, ‘the sets are fantastic and the film is epic. The construction and design are as good as anything I’ve encountered in all my years.’ 113 This seemed to have blinded Connery to the defects of the script, which become glaringly apparent in Stephen Norrington’s prosaic direction, alongside the film’s focus on fantastical events and spectacular sets, which eschew any depth of characterisation. The opportunity to have shown Quatermain’s transformation from Cairo drug-derelict to hero – analogous to Connery’s metamorphosis that was so successful in The Rock – was ignored, as was any involvement with Mina. Despite their assorted special powers, the absence of any major co-stars means that Connery has no strong characters to play against. Forty years on, Connery seemed to be back mired in Bondian trammels: fighting for space and attention in a film given over to special effects. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had a troubled production with a disastrous studio flood and numerous reports of several acrimonious disputes between Connery and Norrington.114 The film was critically trounced. Philip French thought that it had ‘exhausted its imaginative energies by the time the cast has been assembled.

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What ensues is a repetitious succession of gunfights and giant explosions in an indifferently realised version of London, Paris, Venice and Outer Mongolia, interspersed with some arch, mostly witless, dialogue.’ 115 Nevertheless, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen garnered a more than respectable $179,265,204 worldwide gross and a further $80 million in DVD sales and rentals.116 However, Connery announced that the experience of filming had been so dispiriting that he was thinking of retiring from acting, which effectively scuppered the possibility of further films in the franchise.117 In 2004, Connery withdrew from Josiah’s Canon, in which he was to lead the world’s foremost team of bank robbers.118 In 2006, at the American Film Institute ceremony in which he was presented with a ‘lifetime achievement’ award – discussed in the next chapter – Connery announced his retirement from screen acting.119 In many ways founding Fountainbridge Films was the culmination of Connery’s career, affording him the levels of commercial and creative control he had been searching for since he became a screen actor. It proved he had the status equivalent to a major Hollywood star able to initiate projects and choose roles in the expectation that they would be funded by one of the major studios. The three Fountainbridge films he produced were clearly designed to provide Connery with different acting challenges: a campaigning law professor in Just Cause; an urbane super-thief in Entrapment; and a literary recluse in Finding Forrester who embodies the autodidact’s reverence for education and literature. Of these, only Entrapment was a resounding success with audiences. One reviewer noted of Finding Forrester that Connery’s ‘totemic status completely overwhelms the character’.120 Another commented of Just Cause that Professor Armstrong was an ‘unsuitable role … We expect Connery in the jungle, the desert or the big city’s streets, not academia.’ 121 Critics found Connery’s performance as an older man who falls in love with a younger woman much richer and more interesting in The Russia House than in Entrapment, but audiences preferred Connery when he exuded Bondian glamour and sex appeal despite being sixty-nine. Thus even though Connery had constructed a successful new persona – the father-mentor – and had become accepted as ‘himself’ rather than as Bond, audiences responded most positively to roles in which he reworked the Bond persona, as in The Rock, and films in which he continued to be the action hero. In this respect The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a last roll of those dice but one in which Connery fights a losing battle with the array of special effects and spectacular set designs, the bête noir of the later Bond films. As ever, Connery was a star associated with fantasy, not realism, one whose character needed a mythic dimension to contain his potent screen presence. By the 1990s, Connery had become an icon as well as a star, and the next chapter considers in detail this further dimension of the occupation of stardom.

7

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Iconic star

[Connery’s] status is now more than that of megastar: Somewhere along the line he has become an icon. (Magnus Linklater, 1991)1

Stardom and iconicity Edgar Morin argues that only a very select few stars become icons, an attribute ‘compounded of life and dream’; ‘Malraux was the first to explain the phenomenon clearly: “Marlene Dietrich is not an actress like Sarah Bernhardt; she is a myth, like Phryne.”’ 2 In what follows I explore how and why Connery became iconic in the 1990s, examining the differences between the megastar and the icon alluded to in Magnus Linklater’s gnomic remark. Although both depend on popularity and public recognition, megastardom is the result of commercial processes, iconicity the accumulation of symbolic or cultural capital.3 As Paul McDonald remarks, the conferment – or consecration, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term – of a star’s iconic or legendary status is ‘based on assertions of desirability and permanence that exceed the high spots of a performer’s marketable value’, and thus bestowed by cultural authorities rather than the cinemagoing public.4 In this way Connery’s later iconicity was very different from his earlier one as Bond in the 1960s, discussed in Chapter 2. Connery’s iconic status was the result of long-term processes that intensified in the 1990s following his 1988 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in The Untouchables. That award triggered what became an evolving set of intersecting discourses – critics’ evaluations, peer approbations and a succession of public accolades and awards – all of which constructed and promoted Connery as a ‘screen legend’. Connery had little control over this process of iconisation although he recognised it was taking place; Michael Caine noted Connery’s ‘gradual acceptance of an attribute many of us can only dream of, a mythic nature’.5 Before examining the evolution of the ‘Connery myth’, a brief discussion of ‘icon’ or ‘iconic’ is required because, as Barry King argues, they

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are frequently invoked but rarely inspected terms, often used merely as synonyms for ‘popular’, their significance asserted rather than analysed without a careful scrutiny of the process of becoming an icon or of how icons function.6 Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright argue that icons are not simply stars or celebrities who have achieved global popularity, but ones thought to possess profound symbolic meanings that are often assumed to be transcendent or universal.7 The process of becoming iconic is one of condensation and simplification, eliminating contradictions.8 However, icons have to retain a degree of flexibility because they ‘must be both fixed (that is recognizable, representing continuity) and mobile (open to the imposition of new layers of meaning and identity)’.9 Bishnupriya Ghosh contends that cultural icons are at once deeply embedded in their particular cultures but always opening out to a wider realm of associations beyond that context.10 The specific cultural and historical context of Connery’s iconisation in the 1990s and the kinds of transcendent and timeless qualities with which he was invested provide a revealing demonstration of how this process of condensation and the attribution of high symbolic value works in detail.

Evolving the icon: star and character Before discussing the moment of the 1990s, we need to look at the evolution of a process that goes back to the beginnings of Connery’s professional career. Morin argues that the development of film star iconisation – which makes it distinct from other forms – consists in the dialectical interpenetration of actor and role, the ‘transference of actor to character and of character to actor’. Iconic stars absorb, and in the process rework, the characters they play: The star determines the many characters of his films; he incarnates himself in them, and transcends them. But they transcend him in their turn; their exceptional qualities are reflected back on and illuminate the star. All the heroes Gary Cooper contains within himself direct him to the presidency of the United States and, reciprocally, Gary Cooper ennobles and enlarges all the heroes he plays: he garycooperises them. Actor and role mutually determine each other. The star is more than the actor incarnating characters, he incarnates himself in them, and they become incarnate in him.11

Morin contends that this dialectic only occurs in stars’ most successful roles, the ones with which they are associated in the popular imagination. Several of Connery’s most accomplished performances – in Marnie, The Hill or The Offence, for instance – have been largely ignored or been forgotten and do not contribute to his iconicity.

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Morin also argues that stars act out the myth that is already inscribed in their body.12 Connery’s dark good looks, muscular physique, height, erect manner and bearing shaped him to play leaders: kings and conquerors; in the overwhelming majority of his films he is the hero. Connery’s heroic males fall into two basic groupings: quotidian and mythic. Only the latter contributes to his iconicity. The quotidian group – including Ransom, Meteor, Outland, The Next Man or Just Cause – were unsuccessful precisely because they lacked a mythic dimension. In the two films where Connery plays courageous soldiers – A Bridge Too Far and The Presidio – the narrative is downbeat: an operation no one would admit was flawed and a war no one liked. Although Jack Kehoe is the hero in The Molly Maguires, his struggle against the bosses is ultimately futile, thereby failing to fulfil the expectations of the cinemagoing public that Connery played men who succeed, who sort out problems in a satisfying manner, as Bond had done. These roles became ignored or forgotten in the creation of Connery’s iconicity. By contrast, the second group of heroes who are myth figures are central to his iconisation. Like John Wayne, or Charlton Heston discussed below, Connery’s sheer size and power, the dominance of his physical presence, mean he performed most effectively in an expansive setting whose space and scale has epic proportions. Connery’s one attempt at a western – Shalako – was a disaster; his major successes came in the action-adventure genre with its more diffuse locations and iconography. Within that loose generic framework, he plays a series of myth figures, including Bond, though it was rare for Connery to play a contemporary character. More typical are historical or fantasy roles where ‘the past’ or the dream world provides the space in which his stardom can operate effectively. Connery played a range of legendary figures: Alexander the Great in Adventure Story, Robin Hood in Robin and Marian, King Arthur in First Knight discussed below, and cameos as King Agamemnon in Time Bandits and Richard the Lionheart in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, released in 1991, thereby contributing directly to the second moment of iconisation. He played an immortal in the Highlander films, and Zed in Zardoz, the Exterminator who becomes the saviour. His creation of Professor Henry Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade embodied two myths: the Arthurian legend in which both he and Indiana are Grail knights, and the meta-cinematic: having the original Bond as father of his mythical successor. The films in which Connery plays historically situated figures have what Emily Truman contends is the dual existence of an icon, partly actual, partly mythic, existing in a liminal state between the ‘historical’ and ‘fictional’, the ‘real’ and the ‘ideal’.13 As discussed, his characters are always poised to shift into a mythical realm. El Raisuli in The Wind and the Lion is an actual Arab chieftain but also embodies a timeless myth of unconstrained,

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nomadic freedom as the leader of his people struggling to preserve their traditional values and lifestyle. Ramius in The Hunt for Red October is both a pre-glasnost Soviet submarine commander and a mythical seafarer, the heir of Columbus who ‘sails into history’, the man of destiny operating to a higher set of values. The ordinary working-class beat cop Jim Malone in The Untouchables is transformed into the ‘father’ of the mythic band capable of defeating Capone. Daniel Dravot in The Man Who Would Be King is transfigured into the second Alexander, the god-king, the petty con man capable of a visionary greatness as a nation-builder whose death has an almost tragic pathos. Because these characters are figures of myth and legend, as Morin argues, their ‘exceptional qualities are reflected back on and illuminate the star’, becoming absorbed into Connery’s evolving persona as a film legend. This absorption illustrates what Jeffrey Alexander contends is the process through which modern male cultural icons retain the ability of their religious avatars to encompass moral ideals and spiritual values. In his view, heroic male celebrity-icons, like ‘the ancient gods and demigods’, satisfy deep emotional needs because of audiences’ engagement in the male icon’s ‘struggles over greatness in his mythical stories … His visage communicates wisdom, strength and courage.’ 14 Although Connery’s iconisation appears, on a general level, to illustrate the accuracy of Alexander’s contention, it elides differences in how Connery’s mythic status, in particular its endorsement of patriarchal values, was understood, a disjunction to which I will return. Although I have suggested that stars have little overall control over this process, they do, as Morin indicates, intervene in this dialectic between star and role. Not only did Cooper impose his persona on the roles he played in performance, he also examined his roles carefully in order to judge whether they were appropriate to his persona, often stripping away what he saw as unnecessary dialogue.15 John Wayne commented frequently in interview that he would never accept a part where his character was mean or petty.16 As discussed, Connery worked closely with various directors, screenwriters and producers to rework or augment his roles to make them his own, to conneryise them, often introducing his trademark wry, ironic, sceptical humour that made his characters highly distinctive. Connery does not play straightforward authority figures; his heroes are usually mavericks, sceptics, rebels and outsiders, at odds with established authority. This is most obvious in his ‘lost cause’ heroes of the 1970s, but continues through the subsequent decades including John Patrick Mason in The Rock, who endures imprisonment rather than collude in state corruption. Connery’s later iconic characters, as in this instance, have some continuities with Bond – the strength, sexual charisma and ironic humour – but their values are profoundly different. Whereas Bond was an icon of amoral,

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hedonistic consumption, a fantasy of ‘liberated’ sexual prowess and legitimated killing, Connery’s father-mentors, including Mason, are admirable figures, possessing strength and wisdom that is the fruit of long experience and hard-won victories, which gives them high moral authority. They are men of exceptional integrity whose abrasive independence expresses their refusal to be incorporated into or corrupted by organisations or institutions. Although they are self-made and self-reliant, their completion comes through passing on their knowledge to a surrogate son who will ensure the continuity of the values they incarnate. Connery’s father-mentors’ integrity derives from their devotion to learning and the pursuit of knowledge, most obviously Brother William in The Name of the Rose or William Forrester in Finding Forrester. Mark Cousins sees this love of learning and respect for books as the ‘structuring principle’ behind Connery’s best films.17 In one journalist’s view, Connery’s determination to work hard matched by his determination never to stop learning enabled him to make ‘such a success of characters which were essentially resourceful autodidacts’;18 another suggested that his autodidacts ‘through learning and knowledge, reveal corruption, inherited privilege and the abuse of power’.19 This emphasis on learning and knowledge was another aspect of the powerful dialectic between actor and role. It was this second iconic figure of the father-mentor that provided the basis for Connery’s evolution into a screen legend.

The iconic film: First Knight and DragonHeart Connery starred in two films in the mid-1990s – First Knight (1995) and DragonHeart (1996) – that transposed the father-mentor figure into an explicitly mythic realm. In First Knight Connery plays King Arthur, the central figure in one of the most potent and often retold myths, who has been depicted on screen even more frequently than Robin Hood.20 As Stephen Knight comments, Arthur is the legendary embodiment of heroic and royal authority but he is also vulnerable and his kingship has an elegiac sense of transience: ‘Arthur’s rule is always going to pass away, it is valued and celebrated as a lost ideal.’ 21 In many versions, as in this film, Arthur is a Celtic hero who embodies the utopian myth of the world king, the great unifier of the ancient British people presiding over his court at Camelot, a visionary leader dedicated to building ‘a land of peace and justice’.22 First Knight excludes the mystical elements of the Arthurian legend – Excalibur, Merlin and Avalon – and, despite John Box’s resplendent pre-Raphaelite sets, Camelot functions as a civic abstraction rather than a numinous realm, representing the myth of the ‘American Middle Ages of Democratic Possibility’,

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7.1  Iconic actor/iconic role: Connery as King Arthur with Julia Ormond as Guinevere in First Knight (1995)

thus an international rather than specifically British construction.23 According to co-producer/director Jerry Zucker, Connery was chosen to play Arthur because of his strength and moral authority: ‘As soon as Sean steps in front of the camera that’s all taken care of instantly … Arthur must be a natural leader – not just by the words that come out of his mouth or his actions, but by the kind of person he is, and, of course … our Arthur has that kind of charisma. I can’t imagine anybody else but Sean Connery in the role.’ 24 The financial rewards of attaining legendary status were high: Connery was paid $6.2 million for his iconic presence, a sizeable chunk of the film’s overall budget of $63.2 million.25 Zucker had also hired an actor who retained his sexual charisma, which made First Knight’s December–May romance between Arthur and Guinevere (Julia Ormond) credible, and who could portray convincingly the insecurities and uneasiness he feels in the presence of a beautiful and much younger woman whom he suspects may have agreed to their marriage out of loyalty to her father or the desire for Camelot’s protection of her imperilled kingdom, Lyonesse. The disruptive force is Lancelot (Richard Gere), the emotionally damaged (traumatised by memories of his parents’ violent death) wandering entertainer who lives by his sword, but who, according to the studio production notes, finds in Arthur ‘the whole and purposeful masculine identity he has been seeking’.26 In this case the surrogate-son and father-mentor become sexual rivals, but are reunited in repulsing the attack by the ‘rogue son’, Malagant (Ben Cross), the knight who has abandoned the communal pieties of the Round Table in order to pursue a life of cruelty and destruction.

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Arthur is killed in the battle with Malagant, and, in a classic death-bed scene, claims to feel Guinevere’s love, bequeathing her and the kingdom to Lancelot in a magnanimous act of forgiveness. The final image is of Arthur’s body being burned on a floating funeral bier, with Lancelot, Guinevere and the surviving knights gazing beatifically at the ennobling spectacle, which ensures that in this version of the myth Arthur’s vision of Camelot as the ‘land of peace and justice’ will be perpetuated rather than lost.27 Reviewers considered First Knight to be a mediocre and maudlin misfire.28 However, as usual Connery’s performance garnered praise. One critic thought the cuckolded Arthur ‘Connery’s most challenging role in years, and he rises to the occasion with a kingly vulnerability so touching and rare that most women would happily dump Lancelot in return for a chance to soothe that gruff beard and wrinkled brow’.29 Variety’s reviewer was one of many who considered Connery was a ‘dream Arthur, perfect as a man of exceptional character, purpose and righteousness’, but who lacked an adequate foil in Gere, considered to be too lightweight, narcissistic and anachronistically insouciant to inspire love.30 Connery’s vulnerability is indeed touching, but in the end subordinate to his martyrdom and a death that is sentimental rather than moving, of a piece with Zucker’s two-dimensional understanding of both the Arthurian myth and the Connery legend. The second film, DragonHeart, was even more explicitly mythic. It was the passion project of American director Rob Cohen, determined to make a computer animated film that would outdo Jurassic Park (1993) technically and at the same time be a cinematic tribute to Connery as a screen icon. Cohen enthused, ‘Draco is not solely an animal; he’s the first computer graphic imagery actor. He speaks, he emotes, he has feelings, a soul and humour. He’s Sean Connery, essentially as an 18-foot-high, 43-foot-long dragon.’ 31 Cohen and producer Raffaella De Laurentiis nurtured the project for five years before Phil Tippett and a team of Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) animators could realise this level of animatronic sophistication.32 Cohen assembled hundreds of images extracted from Connery’s entire body of work representing his every mood and expression: ‘We categorised every possible emotion: sardonic, amused, sceptical, critical, charming, seductive, angry, intellectual, introspective and melancholy. We broke down his emotional life on film and studied how he used his eyes, posture and body, then applied them to Draco.’ 33 This library of clips was grouped into types and sent over to the animators at ILM on laser discs along with Connery’s pre-recorded dialogue, which enabled them to create subtle facial expressions, moving the dragon’s mouth – the animators could even map Connery’s tongue positions and lateral lisp – but also adjusting the creature’s whole body and movements in devising Draco’s various expressions and moods.34 Therefore, according to Cohen, Connery ‘wasn’t just voicing the dragon, but was

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actually acting the part … It was wonderful because Sean saturated the film with presence … The look, movement and feel of the dragon – its heart and soul – were totally conceived with the Oscar-winning star in mind.’ 35 DragonHeart was Cohen’s personal tribute, but one sanctioned by the public recognition of Connery’s iconic status. Cohen wanted Draco to embody Connery’s characteristic acting tropes, but in addition the ‘character and moral quality he also brings’.36 Cohen opined, it ‘never entered my mind that it could be anyone other than Sean’ because of his ‘unique voice, instantly recognisable, but also what he stood for as an actor and as a man’. Because Draco had to have a ‘strong, majestic, mythical being’, Cohen needed not just an instantly recognisable voice but Connery’s ‘masculinity, wisdom, charisma, sense of humour or sexuality and the dimension of moral fibre created over forty years of film-making’, that is, his whole iconic star persona.37 It was Connery’s casting and the technological sophistication of this ‘special-effects breakthrough’ that persuaded Universal to fund the film, even though the studio imposed a fairly strict budget ceiling on the production, which used Slovakian locations and a European crew.38 Connery professed that he, ‘adored the script. I adored the character of the dragon, the idea that the dragons were the original intelligence, and that man would destroy the dragons because they were all sufficiently arrogant to think they had learned everything. I think there’s a great lesson in it.’ 39 Thus he both accepted this hommage and endorsed the values his star persona would absorb in playing the role. In order to embody the myth, DragonHeart creates a loose-limbed historical allegory – set in tenth-century Britain – in which Draco is the last of his

7.2  Cinematic apotheosis: Connery as Draco, confronting Bowen (Dennis Quaid) in DragonHeart (1996)

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kind, embodying the Old Code of ethical behaviour and morality – the ‘Once Ways’. He nobly donates half his heart to save the young King Einon (David Thewlis), an act that bears ‘witness to the wonders of the ancient glory’, but which cannot prevent Einon from becoming an evil tyrant. Draco’s looks, gestures, eye and head movements create, at this point in time, a new level of expressiveness for an animated character. Many of the scenes, especially those between Draco and the disillusioned wandering knight Bowen (Dennis Quaid), Einon’s former tutor, display an extraordinary level of subtle, fluid interaction. In these scenes, DragonHeart’s incipient sentimentality is held in check as they deploy Connery’s abrasive humour and sardonic wit. Replying to Bowen’s charge that he killed people, he confesses, ‘I mainly chewed in self-defence – but I never swallowed.’ However, the sardonic element of Connery’s iconicity becomes smothered by Cohen’s determination to make Draco symbolise ‘our unconscious, the place from which dreams arise’.40 Draco is both Einon’s better father – his actual father is a violent oppressor who dies whilst burning a near-defenceless village – and the mentor of Bowen who has become lost and disillusioned, losing his grasp of the knightly code. Having rekindled his true purpose, Bowen reluctantly kills Draco as the only way to end Einon’s life and thus liberate the kingdom from his tyranny. In the process, Draco attains an apotheosis, rising up to the heavens and becoming a star, joining his ancestors as ‘warders of an ancient glory’. This spectacle is witnessed by an awed assembly of onlookers who are transfigured by an event that ushers in ‘a time of justice and brotherhood’. As with First Knight, critics were merciless about DragonHeart’s cod medievalism and lumbering plot.41 Derek Malcolm judged Cohen’s ‘feel for a mythical time is perfunctory’.42 However, Connery’s performance again elicited praise. The Financial Times’s reviewer enthused that Draco was ‘[b]rought to sonic life by Connery’s matchless rasps and vocal curlicues, the dragon’s face is a wonderful floorshow of anguished blinks, appealing moues and sudden shows of ravening indignation’.43 However, not everyone enjoyed Connery’s performance. The New Statesman’s critic thought ‘the initial impact of that smooth, over-familiar Scottish purr is anything but awe-inspiring: you keep expecting the dragon to ask for Miss Moneypenny’.44 Although neither First Knight nor DragonHeart was a major hit, their box-office, despite critical excoriations, was respectable.45 Derek Malcolm, who, as noted, disliked the film, reported that at the Edinburgh Film Festival premiere of DragonHeart ‘a crowd outside the Odeon gave [Connery] a thundering welcome, echoed by a standing ovation in the theatre’, demonstrating the strength of Connery’s star appeal, especially in Scotland, a point explored further in the next chapter.46 Thus Connery’s status – and the quality of his performance – could survive even such sentimental banalities

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as these films provide. Their importance for my argument is that both trade on Connery’s cumulative moral as well as mythic qualities – what Cohen called the ‘moral fibre created over forty years of film-making’, thus reinforcing the dialectic between star and character described in the previous section. In First Knight Connery absorbs the characteristics of the mythic King Arthur; in DragonHeart he embodies his own iconicity as Draco. Nigel Andrews’s review of First Knight was no less critical than many others, but he noted that because ‘the actor is now as godlike as anybody since Charlton Heston, he can represent any Edenic golden age the cinema throws at him’.47 Michel Mourlet famously described Heston as an ‘axiom’ of power, strength and male beauty, whose presence in a film carries a range of meanings that exist irrespective of the character he plays and which ‘not even the worst director can degrade’.48 Heston, who thought he had a face that did not ‘fit into modern times’, enjoyed ‘wearing costumes. I like playing heroes of antiquity whose values were grander, more spectacular than those of today. And not every actor can do that convincingly.’ 49 Connery, who looked equally good in costume and could play historical or mythic figures convincingly, had also become an axiom that, like Heston, no director could efface, thought to embody timeless values and a diffuse idea of greatness that, judging by their reception, satisfied some deep emotional needs for at least sections of the cinemagoing public. Importantly, both First Knight and DragonHeart are elegiac, offering a final image of the sacrificial god-king/dragon who dies for the cause of justice, peace and freedom. Arthur is the mythic ‘once and future king’, a symbol of resourcefulness and hope in times of national need; Draco, correspondingly, becomes deified as humanity’s eternal, vigilant protector who can inspire and unify. Those qualities become absorbed into the Connery legend. Draco’s apotheosis is surely an allegory for the process of Hollywood stardom itself with Connery as the ‘last of his kind’, a point I return to later.

Awards and accolades Connery’s Oscar in 1988 had been a long time coming, although he had received a BAFTA in 1987 for his performance in The Name of the Rose. As has been argued, Connery struggled for recognition as an actor because he was regarded within the industry as a mainstream star who appeared in commercial genre pictures. He also had to fight the prejudice, derived from theatrical performances that have a higher cultural status than those on screen, that ‘great acting’ consists of highly visible – what James Naremore calls ‘ostensive’ – performance tropes that often require a high degree of transformation.50 In the theatre, the iconic star is one whose status is the

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result of a succession of critically lauded performances that derive from the brilliance of their acting rather than the development of a coherent persona the public recognises. To take one obvious example, Laurence Olivier, despite his many pictures, never became an iconic film star because he did not create an ongoing screen personality. Sheridan Morley argues that although Olivier transformed himself wonderfully on stage, all that came through on screen was his basic personality, which was rather nondescript.51 However, as a theatrical star, it was precisely Olivier’s ability to transform himself, to obliterate his own ‘self’, which was lauded to the point of idolatry.52 As one of his biographers argues, Olivier’s ‘ambition always was to be the character he was portraying and the more those characters differed the happier he would be’. He quotes Olivier’s desire to be ‘completely different in every performance. I like to appear as the chameleon’, which Olivier hoped would make audiences wonder if this could be the same actor.53 The process Olivier followed to become a character involved total absorption: ‘I loved Richard and he loved me, until we became one’, he observed of one of his greatest triumphs as Shakespeare’s Richard III.54 This dialectic between character and theatre star is thus quite different from that of the film star who needs to absorb each role into a coherent persona. The cinematic equivalent is the ‘prestige star’ such as Dustin Hoffman or Meryl Streep, whose performances exhibit a similarly chameleonic quality, submerging personality into ‘difficult’ roles that attracted awards.55 Paul McDonald discusses Daniel Day-Lewis, the recipient of numerous awards in recognition of his ability to play challenging roles that require him, like the theatre actor, to transform himself in the service of a disinterested artistic endeavour to realise a particular character, appearing in an eclectic series of roles in which he ‘disappears’ into the character he is playing.56 Although Connery never became a prestige star in this straightforward sense, the award of an Oscar shifted the perception of Connery as simply a successful mainstream actor by drawing attention to his acting accomplishments. Because Oscars are awarded irrespective of a film’s commercial performance and by the film academy itself, they confer artistic status on the recipients and are a highly visible form of recognition.57 However, although Connery had to wait over forty years for his Oscar in 1988, this accolade was followed swiftly by a succession of subsequent prestigious awards that marked his cultural status (Table 7.1). These awards had been anticipated by the conferment of the French Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur and Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1987, which recognised Connery’s contribution to arts and culture and, pre-dating the Oscar, demonstrated his higher cultural valuation in Europe than in America. These awards were accompanied by tributes that set out the terms in which Connery’s iconicity was to be understood.



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Table 7.1  Major awards Year

Award

1993 1996

Career Achievement – National Board of Review (USA) Cecil B. deMille Lifetime Achievement/Golden Globe Award – Hollywood Foreign Press Association Fellowship – British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Lifetime Contribution to Arts and Culture – Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award – European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award – American Film Institute (AFI) Lifetime Achievement Award – BAFTA Scotland

1998 1999 2005 2006 2006

A representative example was the remarks by Roy L. Furman, Chair of the Film Society at the Lincoln Center, the organisation that hosts the Golden Globe awards, who opined: Sean Connery is one of the great film stars of any age. His commanding presence, sophisticated manner and unflappable humour place him in a class by himself. His enduring popularity harks back to the days of the Hollywood star system. In fact, he may well be the last of that breed.58

Aida Takla-O’Reilly, President of the Foreign Press Association, the awardgiving body, emphasised the breadth of Connery’s appeal: His range is so wide – he has done a variety of movies, he crosses over the ages, both the young and the old love him. He crosses national boundaries. He is loved all over the world. He does everything very well, and he is a gentle human being – he sets a good example.59

Her salute – in which ‘gentle’ means something like ‘admirable’ – shows that Connery had come to be viewed as a moral exemplar as well as a much-loved star whose appeal was international. Connery’s acceptance speeches reveal an actor who receives the acclaim as his due, though without egotism, now able to cast a fond but sceptical eye back over his career, laced with acerbic humour. At the Cecil B. deMille Award in December 1996, Connery joked that he was most grateful to have been ‘very well paid for his acting’ but ‘that doesn’t mean I won’t sue you’. Producers’ greed, unnecessary waste and the undue prominence given to ‘inflated special effects’ in Hollywood productions are recurring themes in these speeches, contrasted with what he considered was the importance of the ‘stories we help to tell’, and of characterisation, because it is the interaction between characters that enables audiences to understand ‘how we behave and how we feel’.60 The American Film Institute Lifetime

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7.3  Connery receiving his BAFTA Award (1998)

Achievement Award in 2006 – Connery is the only non-American actor to have received that honour – is perhaps the best example on which to pause briefly. Harrison Ford provided the main tribute, remarking, ‘John Wayne gave us the old West. James Stewart gave us our town. You gave us the world’, which neatly summed up Connery’s status as an international rather than specifically British or co-opted American star. In his response, Connery used the occasion to stress his humble origins and the ‘long journey



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from Fountainbridge to this evening’, as the prelude to his core emphasis on learning and self-betterment:

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I got my break, big break, when I was five years old. And it’s taken me more than seventy years to realise it. You see, at five I learned to read. It’s that simple. And it’s that profound. I left school at thirteen. I didn’t have a formal education, and I believe I would not be standing here tonight without the books, the plays, the scripts.61

Connery’s response reinforces the respect for education and culture that, as noted, formed a major element in his screen characterisations, as well as reminding his audience that he was a self-made man who had risen from obscurity. I will discuss the importance of this component of Connery’s iconicity in the final section.

Screen legend The construction of Connery’s iconicity in public awards was mirrored by discussions in the press and in the way in which Connery’s industry peers began to refer to his stardom. This was also consequent upon his Oscar award, which was seen to mark the moment at which Connery had finally overthrown the Bond image. In a lengthy piece in the Independent, David Smith argued that Connery’s role as Malone ‘broke the Bond shackles … he wiped away forever the image of the suave, sophisticated amoral Bond and replaced him with a grizzled ageing hero, still tough as nails but weathered and wise with experience, able to laugh at himself now, as well as others’. In Smith’s view, the post-Bond Connery ‘carries a tremendous authority, which is a studied, physical act as well as a moral essence; he doesn’t suffer fools at all; and his current success playing father figures is because he is everybody’s notion of an ideal father who always knows best’.62 In a 2000 survey, Connery was voted ‘the man most people would like to have as their father’.63 His role as national father figure has analogies with the one Ginette Vincendeau argues Jean Gabin played in French cinema, or John Wayne’s role as the ‘first American Adam’.64 Smith’s judgement, which implicitly acknowledges the dialectical interaction between star and role, was highly typical of the critical consensus that emerged at this time. One critic maintained that Connery ‘seemed to have achieved a venerable agelessness’;65 another that the ‘mellower Connery is a national asset’.66 Diane Shah, entitling her 1989 GQ article ‘All Together, Now: Sean Connery Is an Icon!’, was the most explicit. She argued that Connery aggrandises his characters, ennobling them with ‘the kind of toughness and romanticism you rarely find onscreen anymore’. In her view, Connery is ‘worshipped for

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being the man other men’ want to be, ‘the tough individualist who lives by his own set of ethics and his wits, who knows exactly who he is and how far he can go. A man who will fight for what he believes in, a dreamer who is never deluded by what is not possible.’ 67 Writing in 1996, the Daily Telegraph’s critic thought Connery’s star appeal, which ‘radiates authority on screen and eclipses mere actors’, embodied the archetypal hero, ‘the good man in a dirty world’, who ‘inhabits our dream world’.68 A recurrent theme in this consensus was Connery’s embodiment of something he never actually was: the last of the ‘great stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age’, as Shah formulates it.69 Another critic saw Connery as ‘[o]ur last authentic star, mentioned reasonably in the same breath as Clark Gable or Errol Flynn’.70 Others, in broadening the pantheon of Hollywood legends to include Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy and John Wayne, adopted an elegiac tone: ‘in many ways [Connery] seems a throwback to the American men of the past, representing an era that is passing’ so that ‘much of the affection is tinged with nostalgia, with a feeling that Connery’s way, like Wayne’s, will not come again’.71 As shown in his casting as King Arthur, Connery’s presence, like Wayne’s or Heston’s, evoked a Golden Age, a reminder of nobler times, a vanished period that was starting to fade from view. That mythical Eden evoked another myth: the last great star of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Sue Harris argues that Alain Delon – another transnational actor always out of step with shifting fashions of acting – was ‘the modern heir of a certain kind of classic stardom whose value is primarily historical’, one who acts as a bridge to that past age.72 Connery performed an analogous role, a glamorous star on a scale and with a timeless mythic grandeur that dwarfed contemporary stars enmeshed in a culture of ubiquitous and evanescent celebrity. Connery formed part of a ‘deep (and marketable) nostalgia attached to the lost glory and glamour of the classical Hollywood star’.73 As I noted when discussing Bond, Connery was, even then, associated with the star glamour that was absent in his contemporaries, who played much more downbeat roles. This sense of Connery representing a vanishing old-fashioned star glamour and greatness, the last of an era – the burden of First Knight and DragonHeart – is also prominent in the comments of his peers who, like the critics, now regarded Connery as a confirmed screen legend. Vincent Patrick, screenwriter of Family Business (1989), averred: ‘You suddenly realise he’s the closest we have now to Clark Gable, an old-time movie star. Everyone knows him and likes him, there’s something very likeable about him on the screen.’ 74 Larry Gordon, the film’s producer, concurred, invoking another Golden Age icon: ‘If you were casting High Noon today, who could leave Grace Kelly behind and walk down the street like Gary Cooper did? I think only Sean Connery could.’ 75 Larry Ferguson, The Hunt for Red October’s screenwriter,

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contended, ‘Apart from being a great actor [Connery] carries with him a tremendous amount of audience good will. People want to like Sean.’ 76 Connery’s fellow professionals, most of whom were now much younger than the star, regarded him with an awed reverence. Jon Amiel, who directed Entrapment, enthused, ‘Watching him step up in front of the camera is a revelation – the energy that seems to blaze from him makes it obvious why he’s not just an actor or a movie star, he’s truly an icon.’ 77 The importance of these remarks – which are typical in invoking iconicity rather than attempting to explain it – is not their exactitude but what they reveal about the way in which Connery’s stardom was, during the 1990s, coming to be understood. It was no longer confined to a single role as with Bond, but resided in the cumulative weight of his star presence. James Naremore remarks apropos Cary Grant that after a certain career duration a star can count on an ‘audience’s affectionate response to his mere presence’, irrespective of the role and, to an extent, the quality of the film.78 Reflecting on his lengthy career, Charlton Heston opined, ‘After an actor becomes established in the public mind you become followed throughout your career by the long shadow of the parts you’ve played. It blocks you out of certain things, but it makes you credible by just standing there. I’m usually accepted in whatever I try.’ 79 As has been discussed, from the late 1980s onwards Connery was accepted in almost any kind of role and, during the 1990s, he started to play the screen legend he had become, as Pauline Kael argues Cary Grant did in his later films. Connery, like Grant in Kael’s analysis, enjoyed the ‘authority enduring stardom confers’ in which he became the ‘sum of his most successful roles, and he has only to appear for our good will to be extended’. She argues that there may be a tension between actor and icon: ‘one does not necessarily admire an icon as one admires, say, Laurence Olivier, but it can be a wonderful object of contemplation’.80 This cumulative weight, public approbation and audience regard produces a moment, Richard Dyer argues, when a ‘star’s image is so powerful that all signs may be read in terms of it’.81 All Connery’s roles in the 1990s, not just the mythic ones, became saturated with his star presence as ‘screen legend’. This adds a third, iconic, layer to the duality of star performances: the co-presence of specific character and star persona. Later roles that could not accommodate this third layer failed. Although this construction, as was the case in First Knight and DragonHeart, inclined to sentimentality as well as nostalgia, it was contradicted by Connery’s continuing symbolic force as the rebel and the outsider. It is instructive that Connery’s two most successful roles in the 1990s, The Rock and Entrapment, were variations of the Bond archetype, films in which audiences could enjoy, as they had done for over thirty years, Connery’s sardonic humour, sexual charisma, masculine power and authority laced

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with a sense of danger and threat. Although he was publicly feted by the Hollywood establishment, Connery remained an outsider. On one level this was a spatial separation, residing in Spain, later the Bahamas, rather than relocating to Beverley Hills. On another it was metaphoric, a refusal to be incorporated into the Hollywood system. To the end of his career, Connery retained the image of the truculent star he had been in his Bond days, which arguably reached back to his Fox contract in the 1950s and was, as discussed, typical of his generation of British working-class actors who distrusted the commodification of Hollywood and stardom itself. Connery’s image was always that of the independent star who refused to maintain an entourage of managers and press agents and the usual trappings of star glamour. This image permeated almost every magazine article and the comments of his fellow professionals. One, highly representative, article celebrated a star who had guarded his privacy and his separateness, whose litigiousness expressed his ‘hatred of falsity’, quoting Connery’s contempt for ‘the mastodons, the Bel Air crowd who never dirty their feet’.82 Connery was respected for having maintained his integrity, especially, as he argued, because it placed him at a commercial disadvantage: ‘If a big role was between me and a couple of others, I think the attitude has sometimes been to dump me. It has a lot to do with Hollywood political strategy, which I have never been privy to. I have never understood how it worked.’ 83 Connery was thought to embody, on and off screen, the man of integrity at odds with a corrupt system. In John Boorman’s view, Connery’s problem was ‘that he remains inside the system while living outside it. He is his own man whatever the cost. He will never be an actor who conforms to the Hollywood way and he will always suffer for that.’ 84 Connery’s embodiment of separateness and integrity meant that he became an icon of authenticity opposed to the shallow commercial culture of Hollywood, the surface glamour of Tinseltown. Almost all press profiles and the reminiscences or comments of fellow film professionals stress his downto-earth ordinariness, wary but genuine. The favoured metaphor was a ‘rock’ – something strong, solid, substantial and weighty, not trying to be other than itself. Fred Schepisi, the director of The Russia House, thought Connery ‘one of those people whose qualities in life do translate onto the screen … He has largess – and a largeness – which carries to an audience. There is a strength in him, a solidarity. There’s a rock in there you know.’ 85 He was often talked about as a star unaffected by success, someone straightforward who expected others to have the same candour. Candice Bergen, his co-star in The Wind and the Lion, averred, ‘what struck me as most unusual in a star of his stature was his lack of vanity, his confident sense of assurance. There was an honesty and directness about Sean, a wholeness, a manliness, that stardom had not eroded.’ 86 The Scottish writer William

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McIlvanney celebrated a star who was ‘free from visible personal vanity’, who had ‘survived wealth without succumbing to using it as a measure of himself. Not many rich or powerful people can do that.’ For McIlvanney, Connery was a ‘hand-knitted commodity in an industry of synthetic fibres’.87 As a ‘genuine’ star, Connery embodied the founding myth of stardom, the rise from obscurity to the heights of fame, incarnating the American success myth, which had ‘few parallels in British cinema’.88 Thus part of Connery’s iconicity was to embody the American Dream but as a hard-bitten Scot who was nobody’s fool. The condensation and simplification that is integral to the process of iconisation glossed over Connery’s problematic status as a masculine icon. As noted in the discussion of Bond, Connery aligned himself with the character’s sexism, and his remarks in the infamous 1965 Playboy interview, ‘An open-handed slap is justified – if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning’, appeared to condone male violence. This had been compounded when, in a television interview with the ABC News host Barbara Walters in December 1987 – following Connery’s resumption of superstar status after the release of The Untouchable – he reaffirmed those views. Although he stressed in an interview for Vanity Fair in June 1988 that his remarks had been taken out of context and misinterpreted – that he was contrasting a slap with the much more destructive psychological and emotional cruelty that can be inflicted – he did not repudiate his opinions, arguing: ‘Sometimes there are women who take it to the wire. That’s what they’re looking for, the ultimate confrontation – they want a smack.’ 89 Connery’s misogyny was not limited to unguarded comments in interview, as revealed in the autobiography of his ex-wife Diane Cilento in which she describes in harrowing detail how Connery had struck her twice in a hotel in Almería during the filming of The Hill in 1965: ‘Once inside, in the darkness, I felt a blow to my face and was knocked to the floor.’ Following a second blow, she managed to lock herself in the bathroom and fled the following morning.90 Although Connery always denied that the incident took place, Cilento’s account is not vindictive, rather his actions are placed in the context of the intolerable pressure he had been under as Bond. However, she also makes clear that the attack is the act of someone who not only resented her success as an actor and an author, but who felt she should not work at all but play the dutiful, house-proud wife. Kathleen Murphy, describing Connery as ‘a fertility god with brains’, thought that his attitudes were tolerated because he ‘moves with such natural authority that his rampant “incorrect” maleness works as mythic iconography’.91 However, another critic, writing in 2000 when these accusations resurfaced in the context of Connery’s knighthood – as discussed in Chapter 8 – refused the position that such iconisation invites, deploring this ‘unreconstructed

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male icon’, who lacked any sense of the ‘troubled self-questioning’ present in more modern stars such as Nicolas Cage or Tom Cruise.92 The timing of Cilento’s revelations was significant. Her autobiography was published in 2006, after Connery had retired and after he had received the succession of accolades from the industry mentioned earlier. However, they affected Connery’s legacy, as will be discussed in the Conclusion.

Star as icon Martin Shingler argues for the importance to star studies of an investigation of stars’ iconicity, that is, ‘how and why stars acquire symbolic value’. He suggests the need to map the shifts that take place over the course of a star’s career, as an evolving process rather than a static attribution, rather than fixing upon a moment of supposed significance.93 This chapter has attempted to map Connery’s changing iconic status, showing that the process is both long term, but, pace Shingler, also exhibits moments of highly charged intensity. One such moment was being Bond in the 1960s, the second, analysed here, was the 1990s, in which Connery became a screen legend for a body of work, rather than a single role, one highly valued by critics, by industry professionals and in public awards. In tracing this process, I have explored Connery’s stardom from a different perspective, as an occupation whose logic was cumulative and cultural rather than individualised and commercial, although these are interlinked. Connery’s Oscar made him a more desirable property in the eyes of producers and studios, and his iconicity led to starring roles in two films – First Knight and DragonHeart – which were created to exploit that status, thus helping to secure production finance. Connery could exert a measure of creative control over his choice of role and its interpretation, but he became the passive recipient of these broader processes of iconisation through which he became a screen legend. By the 1990s, Connery had become an axiom, both on screen and off, his presence serving as shorthand for a cluster of values that were seen as transcendent and timeless, the object of professional respect and public adoration. To many he symbolised an idealised masculinity, a moral guardian and protector, though this was always attended by dissenting voices that critiqued this masculine myth. Connery represented a lost Eden and Hollywood’s own Golden Age as the ‘last of the breed’. Even though he was thought to have finally come out from under Bond’s shadow, it would be more accurate to say that he had succeeded in incorporating elements of Bond – strength, sexual charisma and a sense of danger – into a greater whole, one that could inspire affection and respect and embodied the moral



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integrity of the self-made working-class man, down to earth and rock solid. His triumph, like that of all great stars, was to create a mythic self, the Connery myth, to which his whole career, on and off screen, contributed. There was a further and equally significant dimension to Connery’s iconicity: his Scottishness. However, the development of Connery as a Scottish icon, which had a much more overtly political dimension, derived from a different set of processes that require separate mapping and analysis, explored in the next chapter.

8

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Scots actor/activist/icon

I am proud to come from Scotland and my dearest wish is to see Scotland free.1

Until his death on 31 October 2020 Connery was ‘the world’s most famous Scot’, the ‘only person, according to the Scottish Tourist Board, whom foreigners unhesitatingly identify as a Scot. The burr in his famous voice is the voice of Scotland to the world.’ 2 Named ‘Scotland’s greatest living national treasure’ in a 2011 poll,3 Connery was thought to project ‘the figure of the ideal Scot – rugged, tough, laconic, self-deprecating, yet curiously homely.’ 4 Celebrated as a ‘lad o’ pairts’, the Scots term for the self-made man who achieves success through his own efforts and ambition to better himself, Connery was lauded as the ‘only Scottish superstar … no other Scot in the cinema has had the international impact, acclaim or staying power of this son of Edinburgh’.5 According to Ross Wilson, who directed the 1994 documentary Sean Connery: A Profile, Connery was ‘not so much an actor as a Scots actor. And that attention to roots, the primitivism in him … gave James Bond his power.’ 6 The tributes and obituaries that followed Connery’s death often emphasised his Scottishness; Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon intoned, ‘Our nation mourns one of its best-loved sons … Sean Connery was a global legend but, first and foremost, he was a patriotic and proud Scot.’ 7 Connery proclaimed his patriotism in a number of ways. He had ‘Scotland Forever’ tattooed on his right arm and, as discussed, named his production company Fountainbridge Films in honour of his birthplace. His long-term aspiration is captured by the epigraph and also in an opinion piece he wrote in support of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence: ‘As a Scot and someone with a lifelong love for both Scotland and the arts, I believe the opportunity for independence is too good to miss. Simply put – there is no more creative act than creating a new nation.’ 8 The importance of his Scottish national identity to Connery had three principal dimensions: to his acting and the nature of his stardom; his direct political activism in support of Scottish nationalism, education and culture; and his iconic role as the ‘world’s most famous Scot’, all of which are



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interlinked. The significance of Connery’s Scottishness to his creation of Bond and his performances in other films has already been discussed in previous chapters. In what follows I extend that analysis, but my central focus is on the other two dimensions, his activism and his iconicity. Although Connery’s Scottishness has been frequently commented on, this is, to my knowledge, the first extended account, one that draws attention to its evolution and its multifaceted complexity; Connery was often a controversial figure, no more so than in Scotland itself.

Connery and Scottish national identity Part of the complexity of Connery’s Scottishness is that Scottish national identity is itself conflicted and contradictory, dominated by the romanticised Highland myth – ‘Tartanry’ – that is only one, sentimentalised, version. Like all national identities, Scottishness is not a fixed entity but a discourse that is dynamic, contested, multiple and fluid, the outcome of a wide range of economic, social, historical, cultural and symbolic processes in which popular culture, including films, plays a highly significant role.9 As Neal Ascherson argues, there is no essential Scottish nation but a range of competing constructions that struggle for influence and legitimacy.10 Although a ‘stateless nation’ that does not possess its own language – Scots Gaelic is neither widely spoken nor a rallying point for independence – Scotland has a welldefined and, at least in the modern period, uncontested territory, strong national institutions and a keen sense of its distinctive history. One commentator contends that Scots’ ‘characters, history, emblems and identity have been more widely recognised and appreciated than those of almost any other small nation on earth’.11 And, like all constructions of national identity, Scottishness has a mythic dimension that only fulfils its realisation in the imagination, in ‘the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force’.12 Benedict Anderson contends that modern nation states are the embodiment of an idea that ‘always comes out of an immemorial past and … glides into a limitless future’, aligned ‘not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded’ them.13 Connery’s consciousness of his national identity had, as will be shown, both a mystical, cultural dimension and a hard-nosed, political determination to espouse the cause of Scotland whenever possible. Although Scotland was absorbed, by the 1707 Act of Union, into ‘one united kingdom by the name of Great Britain’ dominated by the English, the Scots retained their strong sense of a separate identity, therefore one which could be mobilised rather than manufactured.14 Scotland disappeared as a separate state but its civil institutions were retained, preserving a strong constitutional and civic identity

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through distinctive, and separate, educational, legal and also religious systems, all of which acted as transmitters of Scottish national identity from one generation to the next through to the present. Sociological accounts have shown that a strong cross-class nationalism exists in modern Scotland.15 Thus Connery’s fierce patriotism is in many ways typical of what Tom Devine argues is Scots’ ‘visceral attachment’ to their nationhood in which they ‘feel themselves irredeemably Scottish and are excited about it’.16 Connery is also typical in emphasising his pronounced dislike of the English ‘oppressors’: ‘The Scots have nothing in common with the English … I don’t like the English at all because I’m Scottish.’ 17

Scots actor As discussed previously, Connery’s strong sense of national identity and the music of his ‘home tune’ fuelled his determination to retain his Scottish accent whatever the role and he accentuated it as his career progressed.18 Although it created difficulties, retaining his accent gave Connery what he considered was an emotional authenticity that was central to his power as an actor. His accent also contributed to his distinctiveness, distancing him from the patrician English tones of previous British actors who had achieved international success and lending Connery a classless transnationalism that was essential to his success as James Bond. His Edinburgh burr became one of the distinguishing traits that enabled Connery to play a wide variety of roles, and those invariable tones and cadences also acted ‘as a constant reminder of his roots, regardless of who he is playing on the screen’.19 I have shown how in Connery’s interventions to reshape his roles, he often takes the opportunity to emphasise or invent their Scottish roots or characteristics.20 His characters in Just Cause, Finding Forrester and The Rock are transformed from Americans to Scots. In Just Cause Connery’s law professor comes from a small town in Fife, the first in his family to go to Cambridge but who moved to America, not England, to realise his career aspirations, and who retains an egalitarianism and an understanding of injustice that derives from his Scottish upbringing. Forrester comes from a small Scottish town and returns to the country of his birth to die, having bequeathed his legacy of personal integrity and the sovereignty of talent over connections to another ‘lad o’ pairts’, his surrogate African American son, Jamal. In The Rock, John Patrick Mason may have been ‘trained by the best – British Intelligence’ – but his refusal to collude in cover-ups and his street-fighting skills are, by implication, derived from his Glaswegian birth. Medicine Man and Rising Sun imply that the integrity and knowledge Connery’s characters display derive from a Scottish ancestry or, in The Next

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Man, from a Scottish education. In A Bridge Too Far, Connery made Major General Roy Urquhart sound much more Scottish than he did in real life, thereby aurally accentuating his positioning as slightly to one side of the pukka British high command and thus able to take a more detached view of events and question the wisdom of Operation Market Garden.21 When delivering his eulogy at the graveside of a fellow Vietnam veteran, Connery’s Lieutenant Colonel in The Presidio emphasises Scots’ and Americans’ shared love of freedom as he recalls the moment at which he arrived in America from Scotland as a ten-year-old and saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time. This moment encapsulates these progressive nations’ mutual sense of emancipation from the tyranny of the English class system and colonial oppression. A Good Man in Africa (1994) contains perhaps the most direct celebration of a fiercely independent Scottishness. Connery’s Dr Alex Murray, the ‘last good man’ of the title, helps the local population selflessly in his underresourced clinic; he is a man of integrity who cannot be bribed by either the corrupt president of this fictional country or the English colonisers. At one point Murray lets rip at the venal First Secretary Morgan Leafy (Colin Friels), ‘Never, ever talk to me like that you little English shit or I’ll rip your fucking tongue out’, a much more forceful version of the encounter than in William Boyd’s source novel, which suggests the lines were at Connery’s behest.22 Thus through his performances Connery’s ‘alternative’ Scottishness stands for moral uprightness, integrity, hatred of dissimulation and privilege, fearlessness and egalitarianism. His Scots are unswervingly their own men, self-contained, beholden to no one, the persona that Connery himself cultivated in his interviews and which became integral to the projection of his stardom. Connery’s identity as a transnational star was infused with this combative, ‘flinty’ Scottishness. As one obituarist argued, Connery’s ‘unique power … was always rooted in his Scottish working-class origins, which gave him a threatening, splintery edge that all the glamour in Hollywood could never quite sand off’.23

Scots activist Connery’s championing of Scotland took its most obvious and public form in his activism, sustained over a period of fifty years in a series of interconnected activities through which he promoted the country’s independence as an economic, cultural and above all political entity, most notably his longstanding support for the Scottish National Party (SNP). These activities complemented what I have already discussed as his labour activism, his constant fight to get the rightful rewards for his acting in the age-old struggle

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between capital and labour. There was always a strong class dimension to Connery’s activism as there was to his Scottishness. Connery engaged in various form of ‘actorvism’, Paul McDonald’s useful portmanteau term for the political role played by film stars, which has been the subject of increasing attention in celebrity studies more generally.24 In his influential account, P. David Marshall has documented the powerful ‘affective function’ of celebrity activism, which can galvanise emotion and sentiment towards a particular political agenda.25 John Street has distinguished between two main forms of political intervention by stars. Some seek elected office, for instance Glenda Jackson, Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger.26 When approached by the SNP to run as MP for West Fife in 1968, Connery declined, commenting, ‘I would not be so presumptuous to sit for any political candidacy without sufficient work, the background and the knowledge.’ 27 Connery’s actorvism therefore forms part of Street’s second and much broader grouping of stars who espouse causes, movements or issues, or who work towards changing specific public policy decisions. However, as Street discusses, celebrities who attempt to speak for a wider public about issues and events always confront questions of legitimacy: by what right do they represent those causes?28 Celebrities, notably film stars, are frequently criticised as having superficial knowledge that trivialises problems. Their interventions into an explicitly political arena are often resented as part of the invasive power of celebrity culture with its potential to distort democratic processes, which reinforces a strong current of opinion that is deeply suspicious of modern mediated politics as the triumph of style over substance.29 My discussion should be seen in the context of a number of accounts of individual star activism, including Richard Dyer’s exploration of the ambiguities, tensions and contradictions of Jane Fonda’s activism, which took a number of forms but was most closely associated with her anti-Vietnam War stance (‘Hanoi Jane’).30 Dyer discusses the ways in which Fonda’s activism was perceived and often vilified in the American media, which illustrates a more general problem that stars’ political interventions tend to be seen as highly individualised rather than part of wider collective struggles for change and become absorbed into stars’ biographical discourses, which is precisely why I decided to devote a separate chapter to Connery’s Scottishness. Actorvism has become increasingly prevalent in contemporary Hollywood. In his discussion of George Clooney, one of the more prominent current actorvists, Paul McDonald delineates the tensions and contradictions that surround Clooney’s activities as a star who, like many on the Hollywood Left, has been caricatured as a ‘limousine liberal’.31 Connery’s problems were analogous but different, constantly dogged by the stigma of being a tax exile.



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Political awakening: The Bowler and the Bunnet In both of Connery’s most extended interviews in the mid-1960s – in Playboy and with Oriana Fallaci – he makes no mention of politics; in the latter Connery explicitly states he is apolitical. All his actions are driven by ambition and money.32 However, by 1972 Connery is espousing Scottish nationalism: ‘I want the Scots … to promote their own future in their own land.’ 33 The catalyst for this change can be dated quite precisely to April 1967 when he interrupted his busy filming schedule for a month without pay to make The Bowler and the Bunnet, a thirty-six-minute documentary about Clydeside shipbuilding that he helped write, and which he directed, co-produced and narrated.34 Scottish Television placed a film crew at his disposal and a station programme director was on hand throughout the production. Connery proclaimed, ‘It was a thrill to produce the documentary. I’ve been given the complete freedom of the shipyard for searching talks with the men, the shop stewards and the management.’ 35 This documentary was Connery’s most explicit attempt to align himself with an alternative cultural tradition to the ‘Highland Romance’, one that depicted Scotland as modern, urban, industrial and proletarian. The Bowler and the Bunnet contributes to a strong tradition of documentary filmmaking in Scotland, shaped by John Grierson, the founder of the Documentary Movement, who was proud of his Scottish identity.36 It fulfils Grierson’s idea of documentary as the creative treatment of actuality, an instrument of ‘civic enlightenment’ that enables citizens to participate actively in democratic processes.37 The Bowler and the Bunnet also forms part of the highly politicised discourse of Clydesideism that has itself become mythologised.38 Clydeside’s political activism was linked to its status and success as the ‘engine room of the Empire’, which, at its height, employed over 300,000 workers to produce one-third of all British shipping tonnage and one-fifth of the global total.39 Grierson personally contributed to this mythology through his Oscar-winning documentary Seawards the Great Ships (1960).40 However, Grierson’s paean to heroic Scottish labour – the film is a symphony of purposeful activity – failed to acknowledge Clydeside’s post-war decline. Between 1954 and 1968 Scotland’s share of world shipbuilding fell from 12 per cent to 1.3 per cent, caused by its inability to modernise and develop, the result of structural weaknesses in what was a set of quite small familyowned firms. By the 1960s Clydeside had been overtaken by competitors in Germany, Sweden and Japan.41 By contrast, Connery’s film directly engages with this parlous historical context: ‘We begin here. It’s October 1965. The receivers are in at the Fairfields Shipyard. Bankrupt. The ninth yard to go bust on the Clyde.’ The hope for a better future, the documentary argues, is to improve the key problem, labour relations, the entrenched divisions

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8.1  Scots activist: Connery gazing round the abandoned shipyard of Harland and Wolff on the Clyde in The Bowler and the Bunnet (1967), the documentary Connery helped write, and which he directed, co-produced and narrated

between capital and labour, symbolised by the management’s bowler hats and the workers’ bunnets – reinforced flat tweed caps. The Bowler and the Bunnet’s specific focus is on the ‘Fairfields Experiment’, a new form of industrial relations that involved a partnership between management and labour. This initiative was pioneered at Fairfields on the upper Clyde by Iain Stewart, a Scottish Tory industrialist who was one of Connery’s golfing partners. Stewart led the consortium that rescued the yard from receivership in 1965 and initiated the new system. He was also on the board of Scottish Television that had broadcast Fairfields – Keel of Industry to profile the consortium’s work, for which Connery had supplied the voice-over.42 Connery seems visually to be on the side of the bunnets – he wears a flat cap, tours the yards on a grocer’s bicycle and joins in the workers’ lunchtime game of football. However, his documentary is even-handed, examining the urgent problem of Scottish shipbuilding through a historical perspective that contextualises the Fairfields Experiment within the longer tradition of Scottish inventiveness, industrial entrepreneurialism, and Clydeside’s position as a world leader in ship design and construction. Connery’s narration acknowledges the role of the great entrepreneurs (‘hard-faced dreamers’) – including Sir William Pearce, who converted John Elder & Co. into the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Co., ‘second only to James Watt as an engineering genius’ – but refuses to gloss over labour relations: ‘They sound like saints, but you can bet they weren’t. They made a pile of money and some got to the workers.’ The Fairfields Experiment

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involved a new partnership between management and labour through which working practices and industrial relations were redefined to enable bosses and workers to co-operate in making the yard more modern, efficient and competitive. The emphasis falls on a three-way partnership between workers, management and the Labour government, which supported the initiative. The Bowler and the Bunnet is not glibly utopian – ‘It isn’t all fine. We shot the film in April and in May there was a strike’ – but ends with shots of the launch of Fairfield’s latest ship, Atlantic City, on time and on budget, as proof of the value of the experiment and its wider relevance as progressive pragmatism; Connery intones, ‘A fair deal for the worker isn’t only a nice idea, it’s good business.’ The Bowler and the Bunnet, laced with Connery’s ironic humour, embodies his core values of hard work, ambition and self-help, and the importance of progressive, if paternalistic, social change as the way forward for working-class people to better themselves and help create the wealth Scotland needs. However, his hopes that it might be a force for change were undermined when the documentary was broadcast, on 18 July 1967, only on Scottish Television rather than the whole ITV network. It also received mixed reviews in the Scottish press. The Scotsman pronounced, ‘Showmanship spoils Clyde documentary’, and the film was not reviewed at all by the Glasgow Herald.43 The experiment itself petered out because of the government’s nationalisation plans announced only a few months later, the result of the Geddes Report’s recommendation that shipyards in the main centres merge to create more viable units. Fairfields became part of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) in 1968.44 In a candid interview with Bernard Braden made in 1967 but never broadcast,45 Connery admitted that he had ‘never considered myself a particularly political animal’ and asserted that making this documentary had awakened his dormant political instincts and sharpened his sense of the value of labour and dislike of bosses, especially the Bond producers! He also claimed that making The Bowler and the Bunnet had reminded him of his roots and enabled him to realise that part of me belonged to that kind of background. I thought I’d left it all behind me. I thought I’d been liberated from that claustrophobic, John Knoxian narrow environment. Well, I had in a way, because of the lifestyle associated with the Bond films, but I know I just couldn’t turn my back on it completely.46

Campaigning for Scottish independence This political awakening led directly to Connery’s support for the SNP, whose profile had been raised by Winifred Ewing’s sensational victory in

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the Hamilton by-election also in 1967. The SNP’s appeal has been through its combination of nationalist sentiment and left-of-centre politics, espousing a ‘civic rather than ethnic nationalism, self-government for Scotland not “the Scots”, with an overriding belief in the efficacy of self-government and the desire for economic improvement’.47 This ideology, coupled with its international cosmopolitanism, whose supranational affiliations are European rather than imperial, has a particular appeal to Scots who are socially and geographically mobile, especially those from working-class backgrounds no longer engaged in manual occupations.48 Following their meeting after Connery had received the Freedom of Edinburgh in June 1991, Alex Salmond, the SNP Leader, persuaded the actor to take a more active role in SNP politics.49 Later that year, Connery agreed to appear in a party political broadcast urging Scots to support the SNP, the first of many public appearances for the party that made strategic use of his celebrity status. Salmond thought Connery ‘adds a certain gloss to a powerful message’.50 Ewen MacAskill claimed that Connery ‘substantially boosted’ the SNP’s poll ratings when he made two party political broadcasts in 1991 and 1992.51 With tabloid headlines proclaiming ‘James Bond votes for the SNP’, Connery became the party’s most high-profile campaigner, supporting it financially through the monthly interest accruing to a $1.2 million bank deposit in 1995.52 Salmond considered Connery’s support decisive in the SNP becoming the majority party in Scotland.53 However, it was the campaign for a separate Scottish parliament in which Connery’s role was most influential. He swallowed his contempt for New Labour when he supported the devolution movement in which the SNP, Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party put aside their differences to conduct a joint campaign for a devolved Scottish government.54 At a meeting at New Parliament House on 30 August 1997, Connery recited inspiring passages from the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 when around fifty noblemen sent a letter to the Pope confirming Scotland’s independence: ‘For so long as there shall be one hundred of us alive, we will never consent to subject ourselves to the dominion of the English. For it is not for glory, riches or honours that we fight but for liberty alone, which no good man relinquishes but with his life.’ 55 This uplifting sentiment helped secure an overwhelming victory for the alliance, and the occasion became known as ‘Connery Day’.56 As the ceremonial figurehead for an independent Scotland, Connery appeared at the inauguration of the Scottish Parliament on 1 July 1999 and formed part of the procession along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile when the Queen opened the new Scottish Parliament building in October 2004. Although securing Scotland’s first parliament for three hundred years was a major victory, Connery continued to support the SNP’s quest for full independence. He commented, ‘I am for a Scotland that makes her own

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decisions, a sovereign state that will be a voice in Europe and around the world.’ Independence, he posited, would create Scots who are ‘mentally different’ and thus unleash the country’s talent.57 He continued to support the party through high-profile public appearances. He went with Salmond to America in 2001 on a fund-raising mission and in 2007 helped organise a screening of the documentary Black Watch: A Soldier’s Story about Scottish soldiers serving in Iraq, in order to draw attention to the importance of Scotland having control over its foreign affairs. This event was timed to support the election in which the SNP was able to form a minority government with Salmond as Scotland’s First Minister. Even though he was not eligible to vote, as a non-resident, nor by then well enough to make any personal appearances, Connery supported the ‘Yes’ campaign in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, describing it as a historic occasion that would afford ‘an unparalleled opportunity to promote our heritage and creative excellence’.58 The outcome was defeat for the SNP with 44.7 per cent of Scots voting to leave the UK as opposed to 55.3 per cent wishing to remain.59

Creating the Scottish International Education Trust and promoting Scotland In additional to offering political support, Connery also made economic and cultural contributions to Scotland’s cause. The most long-lasting was his establishment of the Scottish International Education Trust (SIET) on 4 December 1970. He used his entire salary, $1.25 million, for starring in his sixth Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, as a founding donation, which was used to leverage additional funds. At its launch Connery opined, ‘Make no mistake, Scots abroad owe their country something and I’m after at least £1 per head from émigrés. There’s obviously something wrong if Scots keep abandoning their country. What we’re trying to do is improve the country so that people will not be so ready to move.’ 60 SIET was Connery’s Scottish version of the American Dream, an ambitious project designed to encourage young Scots ‘who have shown ability and promise’ to use their talents for the national good, by paying for further study or professional training where public funds were not available, thus encouraging them to remain in Scotland. He persuaded other Scottish luminaries to become trustees – including industrialist Iain Stewart already mentioned; the Formula 1 racing driver Jackie Stewart; Alastair Dunnett, editor of the Scotsman; and Sir Samuel Curran, the principal of Strathclyde, the UK’s first technological university, who became its first chairman. Connery continued to fund SIET’s activities through the proceeds from occasional Scottish premieres of his films and from celebrity golf tournaments. He also gave SIET half of his $500,000

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fee for a day’s filming on Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991); the other half was donated to Scottish universities: St Andrews, Dundee, Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt.61 By the late 1990s SIET was distributing £70,000–80,000 annually to individual and group projects including to persons from deprived areas.62 SIET continues to support projects that would help the cultural, economic and social development of Scotland or improve its environment.63 Connery also promoted Scottish culture through starring in Sean Connery’s Edinburgh (1982), written and directed by Murray Grigor.64 Connery urged Grigor to accentuate the ‘quirky’ aspects of Edinburgh, and Connery’s narration is replete with his customary ironic scepticism that eschews sentimentality in what is a multifaceted and engaging tribute to Connery’s birthplace.65 Connery focuses on the famous Caledonian antisyzygy – the union of opposites – often argued to be characteristic of Scots’ identity: ‘A living, working city of contrasts. On almost every street corner the ancient past rubs shoulders with the up-to-the-minute present.’ Having examined these contrasts, including Edinburgh’s architectural fusion of the romantic and the classical, the split between the Old and New Town architectures with that of his birthplace Fountainbridge being somewhere between the two, Connery’s narration concludes that Edinburgh is a city that ‘provides everything … It’s still a city of industrial innovation and for a place to live it’s generously endowed.’ There are many knowing allusions to Connery’s own background and career. He is shown delivering milk to the famous public school, Fettes College, a reference to his first job and to James Bond as it is the school to which Bond was sent having been expelled from Eton for a flirtation with a chamber maid.66 Connery donated his fee for appearing in the documentary to an Edinburgh hospital.67 This knowing, ironic but nevertheless deeply appreciative depiction of Scotland’s quirks and quiddities pervades Being a Scot (2008), co-authored with Grigor.68 Connery had been offered a huge sum, £2 million, by HarperCollins to write an autobiography.69 However, Being a Scot is in many respects more representative of his attitude and values, eschewing the egotistical self-regard so characteristic of the celebrity autobiography in favour of what might be called an extended meditation on what it means to be a Scot: historically, culturally and politically, encompassing ‘the real, the unreal and the surreal’.70 The occasional comment about his career, mainly the early years, such as his 1961 performance as Macbeth, are always contextualised as part of a wider discussion about Scottish culture.71 Being a Scot forms a detailed and wide-ranging celebration of the achievements (and oddities) of a country that ‘[f]or centuries has punched well above its weight in the world’.72 It depicts a nation of imagination and innovation, exemplifying the creative fusion of arts and sciences, forming a testament to Connery’s lifelong reverence for knowledge and culture.

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8.2  Connery takes a helicopter up to Fettes College, where he used to deliver milk, in Sean Connery’s Edinburgh (1982)

Supporting Scottish cinema Part of Connery’s support of an independent Scotland was his desire to contribute to the development of Scottish cinema. For many years he hoped to star in and direct a version of Macbeth – ‘to be made in Scotland with Scottish actors’. There were plans for this to be the second film funded by UA on the strength of his return as Bond in 1972, but those plans were shelved when Roman Polanski’s version was released.73 Connery was keen to direct and play the lead in an adaptation of William McIlvanney’s Glasgowset detective novel Laidlaw (1977), commissioning the author to write a screenplay. However, Connery found that Hollywood studios judged it ‘too

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8.3  Connery discusses the conception and content of Being a Scot (2008) with Murray Grigor in 2007

Scottish to be of worldwide interest’; by 1983 that project had been abandoned.74 There were rumours that Connery would star in a biopic about Thomas Blake Glover, the nineteenth-century Scottish entrepreneur and adventurer, known as the Scottish Samurai, who founded Mitsubishi and to whom he bore a superficial resemblance. However, in this instance too, funding could not be found.75 In all three cases, Connery was constrained by his position as a tax exile, which meant that he could only film in Britain for ninety days in any one year. Later stillborn projects included playing Archibald Hall, a real-life Scottish con man, and two projects mooted by Gareth Wardell of Jam Jar Films in 1988: a biography of Scottish-born detective Allan Pinkerton and an adaptation of John Prebble’s recounting of the Glencoe massacre of 1692. Either production might have given the Scottish film industry a significant boost but Wardell claims that the projects may not even have reached Connery because his agent did not consider either to be sufficiently commercial.76 Although he claimed not to be ‘an advocate of film-making in Scotland as a spur to tourism’,77 Connery’s choice of Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull as the home of ‘Mac’ MacDougal in Entrapment poured money, temporarily,

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into the west coast region. Connery came out of retirement to provide the voice-over for Sir Billi, a computer animated adventure comedy for children released in 2012. Set in the Scottish Highlands, Sir Billi tells the story of a retired veterinarian who, with the help of local villages, saves the life of a young beaver and her adopted family of rabbits from the predations of obsessive animal-catchers. Sir Billi includes allusions to Connery’s career, most obviously in the final scene in which he drives off with a glamorous blonde (representing Ursula Andress) in a James Bond Aston Martin DB5 murmuring, ‘Oh, the things I do for Scotland.’ Connery’s participation, as both star and executive producer, was designed to support the attempt by the husband-and-wife team of Sascha and Tessa Hartmann – who had set up a Glasgow-based company, Glasgow Animation, in 2000 – to make Scotland’s first computer-generated animated feature. It was financed by a leading Scottish industrialist, John Fortune-Fraser, and has a mainly Scottish cast, including Alan Cumming, cast as Sir Billi’s sidekick, Gordon the Goat. Connery’s participation was crucial to the project’s viability and he persuaded Dame Shirley Bassey to sing the theme song. The Hartmanns incorporated artwork by Connery’s wife, Micheline Roquebrune, into the interior of Sir Billi’s cottage and created a special Sir Billi tartan for the film.78 Unfortunately, despite the good intentions, Sir Billi was universally excoriated by reviewers on its release for its confusing and unimaginative storyline and sub-standard animations; Variety’s reviewer thought it ‘lacks the looks or charm of even the most rudimentary CG offerings being made today’.79 Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian thought that Connery’s involvement as star and executive producer had ‘blown this very moderate idea out of all proportion’.80 Another critic surmised that he had been seduced into being the centrepiece of such a mediocre film ‘by the fact that the production claims to be Scotland’s first animated feature, and promotes the country at every opportunity’.81 Despite the protestations of the Hartmanns that the Scottish national government should have promoted their home-grown film rather than Disney–Pixar’s The Brave, also set in the Scottish Highlands, which was released at the same time, Sir Billi, which looked amateurish by comparison, had a limited release and performed very poorly at the box-office. It did not spearhead a major Scottish animation industry, which remains small and struggles to sustain itself in the face of global competition.82 In addition to arranging several premieres of his films to be held in Scotland, Connery also attempted to set up a Scottish film studio. In 1998 he became part of a consortium – alongside Sony Pictures, Glasgow Rangers’ chairman David Murray, financier Sir Angus Grossart, chairman of an Edinburgh-based mercantile bank, and other leading Scottish businessmen, and with the support of Scottish Screen – to develop proposals to build a

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£60 million film studio at Hermiston, near Edinburgh airport, capable of making twenty films over five years. Connery agreed to star in some of the films, to bring ‘A list credibility to what, by Hollywood standards, will be a relatively small studio’.83 The planned films to be made included one about the Lockerbie bombing and another about the Scottish conservationist John Muir. Connery was set to invest some of his own money in a venture he thought could be the apex of a triangle connecting it with Shepperton and Pinewood.84 The dissolution of Fountainbridge Films, discussed in Chapter 6, signalled an end to Connery’s lobbying for a Scottish studio, with the star claiming that the then Labour government had refused to back his plans because of his support for the SNP.85 Connery was patron of the Edinburgh Film Festival from 1991 to 2006 – honorary from 2007 – the world’s oldest continually running film festival, founded by Grierson in 1947, using this involvement to lobby for Edinburgh to become an important international cinematic centre. Elaborate plans were unveiled in 2004 by Richard Murphy Architects to build a luxurious cinema, the Sean Connery Filmhouse, in Festival Square in the heart of the capital as the venue for the Festival. However, this ambitious scheme was rejected in 2005.86

Scots icon Connery’s fame as an international film star and his tireless championing of the cause of Scotland made him a Scottish icon but of a particular kind, ‘an alternative Scottishness – uncompromising, unsentimental and never forgetful of the past’.87 It was an alternative to the dominant form of an exportable, internationally recognisable Scottishness, a romanticised Celtic identity, what left-wing commentators characterise as ‘the fabulous Highland fairy tale’, a ‘Highland Romance’ that constructs an image of Scotland as a wild, untamed wilderness replete with ‘purple heather, kilted clansmen, battles long ago, an ancient and beautiful language, claymores, bagpipes and Bonnie Prince Charlie’.88 This evocation of a mystical, elegiac Caledonia – deriving from Sir Walter Scott’s novels, perpetuated and further simplified by Hollywood – reimagines Scotland as a Highland wilderness whose history is the struggle for liberty through an apostolic succession of martyr heroes: William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Bonnie Prince Charlie, champions of an oppressed people struggling to throw off the ‘English yoke’. As Jeffrey Richards argues, this may be an invented, inauthentic and often riotously inaccurate image, but it is one that has been immensely popular in Scotland and internationally.89 Connery never played any of the major legendary Scots, though Sir Billi is the ‘Guardian of the Highlands’! Highlander’s

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extended joke was to have a French actor play the eponymous mythic Scottish hero, mentored by Connery as an Egyptian immortal, but the film’s visual style exploits all the clichés of the ‘romance’. However, although Connery’s characterisations and his public persona project an alternative Scottish identity, the function of iconicity, as argued in the previous chapter, is to efface contradictions. Connery was partially incorporated, as the ‘world’s most famous Scot’, into the promotion of Scotland by the Scottish Tourist Board in its construction of ‘brand Scotland’ to entice visitors to ‘Europe’s last, untouched wilderness’, a land of mountains, lochs and waterfalls, wild, spectacular and empty save for iconic wildlife.90 In an instance of his ubiquity, Visit Scotland’s ‘Homecoming Scotland 2009’ featured Connery as one of several Scottish celebrities singing parts of Dougie MacLean’s ‘Caledonia’.91 Connery led the 2002 American National Tartan Day parade in New York City, which formed part of the exploitation of the ‘Highland Romance’ (Tartanry) as a major global export for Scotland. It has a particular appeal to Americans seeking an ancestral anchorage: there are now over 3,000 clan societies in the USA. National Tartan Day, inaugurated in 1998, was held on 6 April to commemorate the Declaration of Arbroath.92 The conferment of Connery’s Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Film Institute in 2006 was accompanied by kitsch Tartanry in which high-kicking chorines dressed in short kilts paraded to the sound of a bagpipe rendering of the theme tune from Thunderball. Many commentators see the ‘tartan monster’ as a serious obstacle to the development of a progressive Scottish culture that had become detached from ‘the dynamic of its own history’ and therefore separated from a nationalist political project.93 Others have contended that this mythology and tradition can be used for progressive purposes because it contains a generalised appeal for national freedom, personal liberty and egalitarianism.94 The SNP used Braveheart and the myth of William Wallace as a rallying cry for an independent Scotland.95 In the run-up to the April 2005 election, the SNP opened its party political broadcast with an establishing shot of Eilean Donan Castle, a romantic Highland ruin, accompanied by Connery’s voice-over, ‘thereby conjoining Scotland’s two most internationally recognisable aspects’.96 The SNP’s deployment of Connery as a Scottish icon as well as a supporter is typical of the ways in which celebrities are used by organisations, political parties and governments because their fame and charisma are considered to be highly effective in appealing to audiences, particularly in a now highly dispersed media ecology and the struggle to compete for ‘eyeballs’ in the ‘attention economy’.97 One journalist argued, ‘To people in need of a passionate rallying call to independence, his very existence is worth a hundred Bravehearts.’ 98

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The uncrowned king of Scotland? Connery’s global stardom, the activities of SIET in helping young Scots, and his active campaigning for Scotland’s cultural and political independence all contributed to his being regarded in many quarters until his death in 2020 as the ‘greatest living Scot’ or the ‘king across the water’. On 11 June 1991 Connery was awarded the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh. The Lord Provost, Eleanor McLaughlin, argued that he was given the honour for his ‘distinguished contribution to world cinema’ and his ‘largely unpublicised’ work in founding SIET as well as ‘the respect and high esteem in which he is held by the people of Edinburgh’.99 Nine of out ten callers to the Edinburgh Evening News were in favour of the honour. South of the border, a House of Commons Early Day Motion applauded the award for Connery’s ‘tremendous achievements as an ambassador for Edinburgh … his long-standing commitment to the education of young people in Scotland and … his outstanding contribution to motion pictures’.100 This celebration of Connery’s activities and achievements was the tenor of Billy Connolly’s salute when Connery received the 1998 BAFTA Fellowship dressed in a kilt. Connolly praised the man who had ‘done extraordinary things for Scotland, unbelievably wonderful’. He felt privileged as a fellow Scot to celebrate ‘the biggest star ever’ with a ‘bigness that Scotland’s never had from a single person’. Connolly joked, ‘He hovers over Scotland like a great colossus … from the Bahamas’, alluding to Connery’s position as a ‘tax exile’ since 1974, which, as noted, made his support for the SNP and Scottish independence highly controversial. Connery argued that he always paid taxes when working in Britain and that ‘I can do more for my country outside it, speaking to people, promoting its interest on the global scene.’ 101 However, these justifications did not protect Connery from repeated attacks about preaching the benefits of a separate Scottish nation whilst living abroad – ‘the view from a Marbella saloon bar’; he was regarded by some Scots as a hypocritical ‘stay away’ who should be hounded for millions in back taxes.102 The footballer Denis Law was subject to the same attacks as an ‘Anglo’, a fiercely patriotic Scot who nevertheless spent almost his entire career (1956–75) playing for English clubs, most famously Manchester United.103 One journalist contended that this resentment stemmed from the Scots’ ‘envious ambivalence towards those who leave and prosper’.104 At the same time Connery was being praised when he was given the Freedom of Edinburgh, the Scotsman took the occasion to remind its readers that Connery only set foot in Scotland for as long as the taxman allowed.105 However, attacks on Connery often had an explicitly political dimension. He was criticised repeatedly by Scottish Labour MPs for proselytising Scottish independence

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from abroad, and there were several attempts to ensure that only those living in Scotland should be allowed to donate funds to SNP election campaigns.106 In January 2013 Ian Davidson, then Chairman of the Commons Scottish Affairs Select Committee, named Connery in his attack on the SNP for accepting ‘foreign gold’.107 Political wrangling dogged Connery’s award of a knighthood. After Labour came to power in 1997, the then Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar vetoed the honour that had been approved by the defeated Conservative administration. When this became public, the Labour Party claimed the reason was Connery’s objectionable views about women – the notorious 1965 Playboy article already discussed in which he advocated giving women an ‘open-handed slap if all alternatives fail’ – rather than his position as a tax exile, or, as Connery claimed, because of his support for the SNP.108 On this occasion, the Scottish press rallied uniformly in Connery’s support; the Scottish Mirror, for instance, devoted over five pages to campaign for his knighthood.109 Spurning Connery was seen as a snub to Scotland itself, a denial of its national identity and another instance of a Westminster government out of touch with the wishes of the Scottish people, with Dewar vilified as ‘Dr. NO’.110 However, even when Connery was finally knighted by the Queen at the Palace of Holyroodhouse on 5 July 2000, dressed in full tartan, some members of the SNP thought he should not accept honours from an English monarch.111 Connery’s patriotism was neither simple nor sentimental. As Jackie Stewart commented in an obituary for his friend, ‘He loved his country but realised its limitations … He understood why people moved away for new opportunities, given he was from a very ordinary background himself and had done that, but he wanted Scotland to thrive from within.’ 112 As a globally recognised Scottish icon, Connery performed a valuable function as a soft power ambassador for the nation abroad and a promoter of tourism, lending Scotland an enhanced international status. His espousal of devolution became politically acceptable in the 1990s but campaigning for Scotland to become a separate nation divided opinion and courted political controversy. Although his stature and achievements were recognised and appreciated, within Scotland itself he never managed to overcome fully the stigma of being an exile, which, for some, undermined the legitimacy of his opinions and actions. Whatever his status, it is difficult to overestimate Connery’s iconic presence within modern Scottish culture. The famous discussion of his career between Renton (Ewan McGregor) and Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) in Trainspotting (1996), one of the most influential films of the Scottish cinematic ‘revival’, was an indication of the power and ubiquity of his image and his importance for young Scottish males’ self-conceptions. Connery’s demonstration of how to succeed without abandoning his national roots has been highly significant for a succeeding generation of Scottish actors, what Brian Pendreigh dubs

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the ‘Scot Pack’, a loose grouping that includes McGregor, and also Robert Carlyle, John Hannah, Douglas Henshall, Kevin McKidd and Dougray Scott.113 Carlyle and Scott in particular have testified to his importance in giving them the belief they could succeed as film actors.114 Paul McDonald argues that the acid test of actorvism is to evaluate what actions or change occurred as a result of a star’s activism.115 By this measure, Connery’s was highly successful. Hundreds of Scots have benefitted from grants provided by SIET over its forty-eight-year history, which, coupled with his endowments to various Scottish universities, has given tangible substance to his belief in the importance of learning and self-betterment, providing the opportunities he lacked, representing an attempt to enable Scotland to ‘thrive from within’. Connery was a significant factor in galvanising the campaign for a separate Scottish parliament that has played a decisive role in shaping modern Scottish politics and gone a long way towards ending Scotland’s subaltern status, even if Connery’s dream of full independence has not yet been realised. There were limitations to Connery’s activism. He was not able to support Scottish cinema in the ways he wanted and failed to create a Scottish studio, but the range, extent and longevity of Connery’s activism command respect. In these various ways, Connery’s Scottishness forms a significant aspect of his stardom. Although I have separated out this aspect in order to give its importance due weight and provide a coherent discussion, its significance needs to be folded back into his portrayal of Bond and evolving iconicity as the father-mentor already discussed. Connery’s Scottishness gave both constructions an added dimension, providing a vital component in his transnationalism that made it a distinctive alternative to a hegemonic Englishness.

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Conclusion

What was the significance of Connery’s career and what can it tell us about the nature of stardom? Perhaps most obviously, certainly the lead in all Connery’s obituaries, was his creation of the screen Bond, thus helping to initiate the film industry’s most enduring franchise, whose twenty-fifth materialisation, No Time to Die, was released in October 2021. This study has emphasised Connery’s value to the collaborative process of producing the Bond series, in creating, from Fleming’s blank slate, a charismatic character around which the other elements could cohere. Although conventionally discussed as a screen icon, Connery’s Bond was a significant acting achievement, one he developed over the course of six films and intelligently reworked in Never Say Never Again, which presented the superspy as an ageing hero carefully husbanding his energies. Connery’s incarnation was a particular interpretation of Bond – ironic rather than Byronic – but one which proved to be hugely successful, creating a modern folk hero that became a core component of the enduring myth of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. Although the franchise proved capable of surviving his departure, by then the series had its own momentum and audience loyalty, which subsequent actors respected, acknowledging their debt to Connery’s original. Connery’s success as Bond came at a high price: as Peter Bradshaw remarked, ‘Perhaps only Daniel Radcliffe has experienced the same utter immersion or self-annihilation.’ 1 This made Connery’s creation of a second iconic figure, the father-mentor, all the more remarkable, enabling him to ‘age successfully’ and enjoy a second period of superstardom. The fathermentor was not a figure unique to Connery, but his was the most varied and extensive embodiment, ranging from the comic to the magisterial, which, even more than his creation of Bond, revealed the depth and range of his acting talent. His father-mentors are at once astute character studies and mythic archetypes which Connery imbued with sardonic humour, irony and abrasive independence, becoming the epic actor for a sceptical age. This construction gradually evolved into the screen icon, an epithet, if

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used accurately, reserved for the select few stars whose enduring personae have a mythic dimension. From 1989 onwards, the Connery myth displaced but did not fully erase the Bond myth in governing Connery’s significance. Connery’s drive for success was matched by his determination to become as good an actor as he could be, an artist rather than ‘just’ a star. His creation of Bond and the father-mentor are central to but do not fully encompass his enduring body of films, whose range stands comparison with that of any other major star, to say nothing of his television and theatre roles that should be better known. His achievement was recognised by the critics and his fellow professionals, including Sidney Lumet, who opined, ‘Most actors, if they are lucky, stay as good as they are. Sean is one of the rare ones. He got better.’ 2 The nuanced subtlety of his depiction of the calculating cruelty of the alpha male in Marnie should be recognised much more widely than it has been, as should his portrayal of late-blossoming love in The Russia House, or the understated way in which he invests Major General Urquhart in A Bridge Too Far with a credibility that gives strength and substance to a film otherwise replete with ‘star turns’. Perhaps the high watermark of Connery’s achievements as an actor came in the great mid-1970s ‘trilogy’ – The Wind and the Lion, The Man Who Would Be King and Robin and Marian – in which he combined strength and power with strong innocence, vulnerability, the need for friendship or love and the desire for reassurance. Here was an actor who took risks, who was prepared to appear bald, older than his age and out of condition as a creaking, over-the-hill Robin Hood, naively infatuated with his own legend. However, if he took fewer risks as the father-mentor and rather settled into that part, Connery rarely coasted and remained an eminently watchable actor who could still surprise as well as delight both critics and the public. Connery brought to all his roles an incisive intelligence, a sardonic wit that rarely palls, a graceful control of movement, gestures, intonation, timing, and above all the creative command of space. Although Connery took roles – The Hill or The Offence are obvious examples – that were challenging and demanding, for some his gifts as an actor were underused. The traditional lament comes from Robert Hardy: ‘It is such a pity, in some ways, that the theatre didn’t hold on to him, because the method of his approach is not lightweight or conventional and it befits quality drama.’ 3 One critic deplored Connery’s decision to confine himself to mainstream cinema, appearing in ‘popcorn hits’.4 These comments deny the central aspect of Connery’s career: he was not a character actor who sinks himself into a spectrum of roles, but an action star who was a major box-office draw. Thus, in my view, one of his greatest achievements was to create engaging, compelling characters of some depth and shading

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Conclusion 247 – such as Henry Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or John Patrick Mason in The Rock – in films that are fundamentally plot-driven spectacles. As an icon Connery was, as Pauline Kael remarked, a ‘wonderful object of contemplation’ but his later performances, like Bond, were the work of a professional actor who had appeared in Euripides and Shakespeare, one who brought to their realisation all the resources Hardy associates with the stage actor; Connery’s approach to even his most fantastical figures was neither lightweight nor conventional. Connery’s admirers, notably Kael, thought him the ‘mostly richly masculine’ of any actor of his generation; another critic, praising the exceptional way in which Connery recreated himself after Bond, considered he represented ‘perhaps the most satisfying expression of masculine force in the history of the movies’.5 Connery’s performances helped redefine masculinity for the second half of the twentieth century. As Bond he incarnated the epitome of insolent sexual assurance, cool, commanding, irresistible. As he matured, Connery’s embodiment of masculinity became more diverse. The fathermentor’s masculinity retained the strength, sex appeal and sardonic wit, but added wisdom, compassion and understanding. Although his projection of masculinity was capacious and varied – he constructed what is arguably the richest body of work we have delineating the ageing male action star – as discussed in Chapter 7, his male image never lost its association with a retrograde traditional patriarchy, compounded by evidence of his sexist attitudes that condoned violence towards women and revelations by his ex-wife who suffered physical injury. This has meant, as Geoffrey Macnab’s obituary acknowledged, ‘why a certain wariness remains when discussing Connery’s achievements as an actor’.6 Connery formed an integral part of a post-war generation of British and Irish male actors who redefined not only how masculinity was represented on screen but the profession of acting itself. Their truculent rebelliousness, hostility to convention and determination to retain the accents that revealed their origins helped open out the acting profession to working-class talent; their on-screen roles and off-screen behaviour exhibited a confident, upwardly mobile working class whose hour had come. In the process these actors became trailblazers for the wider social and cultural changes that were transforming British society. John Boorman argues that Connery personified ‘the best qualities that came out of the post-war upheavals in Britain … an archetype of what was best in those times’.7 This understanding of his significance informed several obituaries.8 It was an achievement that took courage and was hard won: Connery was ignored by the Royal Court and was not considered by the BBC for many roles he could easily have played. Resituated in its historical context, being a working-class actor in the 1950s was not an easy route to professional success or stardom.

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Connery’s rugged physical attractiveness and working-class virility became part of a post-war redefinition of Britishness. Connery’s Bond was a decisive break with the dominant image of a refined, restrained, middle-class gentlemanly Englishness that had been the international currency of previous generations of British actors. Connery-Bond was cosmopolitan, classless but not blandly mid-Atlantic, refined but not restrained, and with the direct physicality, sexual attractiveness and unsporting ruthlessness that had been largely absent in British male stars. Central to Connery’s reconfiguration of national identity was his Scottishness, his unwavering Edinburgh burr acting as an insistent marker of his allegiance. As a Scottish star, Connery represented an alternative Scottishness, uncompromising and unsentimental, not the romantic heroes of the Highland myth. Though part of much broader social and cultural processes, the scale of Connery’s stardom gave him a high-profile prominence and influence. From 1967 onwards this was translated into direct public activism in the cause of an independent Scotland. He founded the Scottish International Education Trust, which continues its support of indigenous talent; made a material contribution to devolution and the establishment of a separate Scottish parliament; enhanced the popularity and profile of the SNP; and championed the, as yet unrealised, movement for an independent Scotland. Although some considered that Connery’s activism was always compromised by his exile status, these were substantial achievements. Connery achieved stardom on a scale that eclipsed any other post-war British actor in popularity and longevity. In the process, he redefined stardom, at least for a British actor. It was not simply the magnitude of his success – the Quigley poll ratings, the box-office figures and the salary levels – but its nature as an occupation. Nonconformist by temperament and upbringing, Connery embodied what many deemed a commendable scepticism towards the trappings of stardom, constantly struggling against commodification and corporate greed. He was a star who retained his integrity, uncorrupted by fame, showing it was possible to succeed through talent rather than privilege, nepotism and networking. These values, coupled with his notorious but always tactical litigiousness, made him a noteworthy part of a generation of freelance actors who thought of themselves as autonomous artists with a right to make their own choices and to carve the careers they wanted rather than the ones most convenient for the studios. Connery may have had the old-fashioned glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age stars, but he played a prominent role in helping to create a more independent and arguably more self-confident profession, able to exercise greater creative control. Reviewing the various facets of Connery’s achievements offers a number of insights into the nature of stardom as a complex and mutable phenomenon. Through its political economy approach, this account has foregrounded the

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Conclusion 249 importance of attending closely to the material exigencies of a star’s career as a professional actor, analysing the specificities of the particular projects with which Connery was involved, positioned within the broader industrial contexts within which they took place. A central preoccupation has been the nature and extent of the agency Connery was able to exercise over his career. As with any analysis of stardom, this enquiry has a dual aspect: how he attempted to control his choice of role, performative labour and the production process; and his ability to manage his image or persona. Like every star, Connery’s agency was dependent on the way in which he entered the industry, and I have emphasised the importance of attending to the important, if unorthodox, training he received, an aspect of stardom that is often neglected or marginalised in star studies. My argument here has been that only by understanding the conventional expectations of the acting profession in 1950s Britain – the training norms, the customary routes to professional success and the favoured type of actor – can Connery be understood fully as an oppositional force. I argued for recognising the integrity and importance of his television and theatre work, crucial for his development as an actor and providing the long-term basis for his career, shaping his attitudes and values and his commitment to acting as an art. Although he was perceived in the press as an American-style actor – ‘Britain’s Brando’ – it was nevertheless the BBC that gave him his breakthrough role and his most prestigious and challenging parts. Rather than anticipate Bond, I argued that Connery’s early roles pointed in a very different direction and had little, if any, relevance to his becoming a film star, which was based on a different set of criteria – his good looks and sex appeal. These disjunctions highlight the scrambled logic that often attends an actor’s passage into stardom, which, in Connery’s case, was neither inevitable nor anticipated. They also alert us that the plurality – and instability – of image is a core characteristic of stardom; there were always different ideas about Connery that were in circulation, which competed for dominance at particular moments. Although Bond was the role that made Connery an international star, I have emphasised that it was a specific form of stardom: the serial star, in which the role was deemed more important than the actor, a form of industrialised authorship where the producers were in command. Connery’s early stardom was shaped by a system that not only denied his accomplishments as an actor but demanded his whole identity be subordinated to that of a particular character. Eon Productions had ‘bought the body’, a man who looked good in suits and moved well but was ultimately interchangeable. Bond might be an icon of modernity but Connery, meshed in a binding contract, was an old-fashioned star, glamorous, feted, wealthy and on display. The consequences of being ‘in Bondage’ were more far-reaching than being under contract. As Bond, Connery had no star persona beyond

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that figure, hence this represented a particularly intense and all-absorbing form of the typecasting and commodification that is a condition of stardom. In Connery’s case that commodification had profound consequences. For the next twenty years what constituted a ‘Connery role’ became the major battleground between the studios that thought he was solely marketable as Bond, directors or independent producers who saw other possibilities, and a star who sought acting challenges that would prove his ability to be other than Bond. Connery’s determination to appear in roles from which any vestige of Bond was expunged – in The Hill or The Offence – positioned him as a realistic character actor, not a fantasy figure, challenging audiences rather than expecting to be admired or even liked. These films satisfied Connery as an actor and won critical approval but alienated the cinemagoing public. Paradoxically, their financing was only made possible because of his star status as Bond, revealing another of the major fault-lines or contradictions of stardom: the creative power to perform differently is predicated on continuing to be a box-office draw in other films that contain the type of role audiences anticipate and expect. The Bond mantle shaped Connery’s ability to exploit the major change in the occupation of stardom: the shift from contracted to freelance labour that was complete by around 1965. Considered as a set of practices rather than an abstraction, this change delivered less than it promised in terms of star autonomy. Studios retained their control over financing, distribution and promotion; audiences retained a stubborn preference to see stars playing similar roles. The tyranny of the box-office remained undiluted, if anything accentuated because so much depended on the success of each particular film. However, this study has shown the importance of analysing the ‘poststudio’ system in detail because it was a system subject to industrial fluctuations. In the early part of the 1970s, as the power of the studios waned through severe financial losses, Connery was able to collaborate with auteur directors who had a significant degree of autonomy. As noted, several of the great Connery parts date from this period, forged through highly productive collaborations with auteur directors – Boorman, Milius, Huston and Lester – to create an understanding of the ‘Connery role’ that was epic and mythic. When the power and control of studios and producers increased in the second half of the decade as the industry re-stabilised, Connery struggled to find suitable roles, hence his return as Bond in Never Say Never Again. This was at once a shrewd bid to restore his star status and the opportunity to take his conception of Bond to its logical conclusion. Only by embedding stars in their commercial industrial contexts can these constraints on their agency and the reasons for the decisions they take be understood. My discussion of Connery’s connection with his agents, the new power brokers, indicated the importance of examining that relationship in as much detail as sources

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Conclusion 251 will permit and of situating the agent–actor relationship within specific historical moments. To identify the importance of the actor–agent relationship is not to presume its sovereign control over the trajectory of post-studio stars’ careers. The crucial change in Connery’s fortunes, his ability to ‘age successfully’ and enjoy a second period of superstardom from the mid-1980s onwards, was fortuitous rather than strategic. He stumbled into a succession of parts playing the father-mentor, which then became identified as the ‘Connery role’ and the basis for a post-Bond persona. To describe this process as fortuitous avoids ascribing it to some grand design, a level of agency it does not possess, and thus to re-embed the occupation of stardom as contingent and pragmatic. Connery’s great strength, here as throughout his career, lay in his ability to exploit adroitly his new persona, using all his resources to try to intervene in the production process and create characters that were distinctive and memorable. Playing the father-mentor afforded Connery a vehicle through which he could negotiate very successfully one of the great challenges to stardom: ageing. The terms of his later stardom were strikingly different from his earlier incarnation as Bond. The father-mentor was a persona that enabled Connery to close the gap between his off- and on-screen selves and thus became part of the longer-term and more deep-seated development through which he became iconic. In contradistinction to the conventional understanding of iconicity as a state, this study shows it to be a complex process that unfolded gradually, taking a more definite shape and assuming greater prominence in the 1990s. Using Edgar Morin’s insights into the specific nature of cinematic iconicity – the dialectic between actor and role – I argue for the circumspect use of icon to identify the select few stars who have a mythic nature. Its origins were in Connery’s own ‘heroic’ body that was developed though his screen and theatrical roles. As his career lengthened, the cumulative weight of his mythic presence became ever more dominant. Finding a ‘Connery role’ meant choosing one in which that epic, iconic presence could be accommodated, the most successful of which absorbed elements of the Bond persona, presenting the older Connery as a ‘man you could cheer’. My discussion of iconicity extended to encompass the further dimension permitted to a select few stars: the status of ‘screen legend’. I showed the ways in which this process derives from an evolving set of intersecting discourses – critics’ evaluations, peer approbations and a succession of public accolades and awards – all of which constructed and promoted legendary status. This construction was the outcome of cultural and symbolic processes rather than commercial ones, forming part of the ‘prestige economy’ over which neither producer, studio nor star has much control.

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However, this acceptance was the corollary to Connery’s continued active, occasionally litigious, struggle to maintain his economic status. Analysing his later career affords insights into the ways in which stars attempt to exert creative and financial control by becoming a producer or executive producer and establishing a production company. Fountainbridge Films was a dream nurtured during the Bond days but only capable of fulfilment thirty years later, a reminder that the occupation of stardom is tougher for non-American actors who lack the clout, and the financial conditions, to effect that degree of agency. Connery still needed to deal with the studios and remained a CAA client, but as company founder and CEO, Connery was able to initiate projects as well as try to adjust existing ones. The three films he produced and starred in for Fountainbridge Films provide a unique insight into how Connery regarded his own stardom. In Just Cause he plays the man of integrity who espouses moral ideals; Entrapment was his attempt to be a sexy, desirable romantic action hero at the age of sixty-nine; Finding Forrester essays the outsider/recluse who refuses fame. The last was a low-key character study, autobiographical and elegiac, but it was followed by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Bond in another guise, the gesture of a still-active entrepreneurial star searching for the next enduring franchise. As a contrasting pair they epitomise the central duality of Connery’s career: the insider-outsider, the character actor and the serial star, working within a system he is desperate to repudiate. Connery’s career offers a rich opportunity to explore identity politics, both the gender politics of his versions of masculinity already discussed and the interaction between stars and the projection of national identity. Connery was never a straightforwardly national star. Bond was cosmopolitan and international, a break with the hegemonic middle-class Englishness that was inflected by a sceptical, rugged working-class Scottishness. Working in Hollywood for the most part, Connery’s Scottishness became subsumed into a polyglot identity in which he essayed a wide variety of nationalities: the occasional ersatz American in The Anderson Tapes or an Irish-American in The Untouchables, Arab sheiks, a Scandinavian security officer, and above all various characters from myth and legend. Connery’s Celtic Britishness came to represent, as Andrew Rissik remarked, a ‘kind of international language for epic and romance’.9 This fluidity enabled Connery to take roles that had been earmarked for European actors such as his Lithuanian submarine commander Marko Ramius in The Hunt for Red October, or ones in European productions that were judged problematic for American actors such as William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose. Connery was therefore a transnational star in two senses: a migrant British star, temperamentally and geographically separate, who worked across British, European and American productions; and one who could represent symbolically a

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Conclusion 253 transcendent identity that became mythic and timeless. His career thus problematises conventional analytical frameworks and provides a different perspective on transnational stardom. Although Connery’s mobile, geographically fluid stardom made him part of the long history of diasporic Scots seeking their fortune abroad, he remained anchored by his espousal of Scottish independence. Retaining the music of his ‘home tune’ enabled Connery to invest even the most absurdly fantastical roles with an emotional authenticity, and they acted as a constant reminder of the importance he attached to his birthplace, as did the name of his production company. It provided the foundation for the other important dimension to his stardom: his espousal of an independent Scotland. The objective of Connery’s ‘actorvism’ was specific, but I demonstrate how it shared both the advantages and the attendant scepticism that surrounds the activist star. My account of Connery’s social, educational and political activism provides a coherent examination of an aspect of his career that is often invoked but not given extended treatment, and exemplifies the importance of attending to stars’ public and social role. Connery was a singular star, never associated with particular movements. He was not part of the British New Wave nor one of the anti-hero stars of the Hollywood Renaissance. He is rarely mentioned – only, on occasions, parenthetically – in histories of stardom that remain dominated by American stars. Connery’s assimilation into the pantheon of great Hollywood stars was a measure of his status but failed to capture his distinctiveness as a transitional as well as transnational star, the product of a particular period in the history of stardom in which the shift from contract to freelance labour was being worked through. My aim has been to capture his uniqueness but also to understand what his career reveals about the multifaceted occupation of stardom.

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Film, television and theatre roles

Films (UK release dates) Spike, No Road Back, Gibraltar Films, February 1957. Johnny Kates, Hell Drivers, Rank, July 1957. Welder #1, Time Lock, Romulus, August 1957. Mike, Action of the Tiger, Claridge Productions, August 1957. Mark Trevor, Another Time, Another Place, Paramount British, May 1958. O’Bannion, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, Paramount British, July 1959. Michael McBride, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Disney, March 1960. Paddy Damion, The Frightened City, Anglo-Amalgamated, August 1961. Pedlar Pascoe, On the Fiddle, Anglo-Amalgamated, October 1961. Private Flanagan, The Longest Day, Twentieth Century-Fox, October 1962. James Bond, Dr. No, Eon Productions, October 1962. James Bond, From Russia with Love, Eon Productions, October 1963. Tony Richmond, Woman of Straw, Relph-Dearden Productions/United Artists, April 1964. James Bond, Goldfinger, Eon Productions, September 1964. Mark Rutland, Marnie, Universal, November 1964. Joe Roberts, The Hill, MGM, June 1965. James Bond, Thunderball, Eon Productions, December 1965. Samson Shillito, A Fine Madness, Warner Bros., July 1966. James Bond, You Only Live Twice, Eon Productions, June 1967. Self, The Bowler and the Bunnet, Scottish Television/Sean Connery Productions, July 1967. Shalako, Shalako, Palomar Pictures International, December 1968. Jack Kehoe, The Molly Maguires, Tamm Productions/Paramount Pictures, May 1970. John ‘Duke’ Anderson, The Anderson Tapes, Columbia Pictures, June 1971. James Bond, Diamonds Are Forever, Eon Productions, December 1971. Roald Amundsen, The Red Tent, Mosfilm/Vides Cinematografica, June 1972. DS Johnson, The Offence, Tantallon/United Artists, January 1973. Zed, Zardoz, John Boorman Productions/Twentieth Century-Fox, March 1974. Colonel Arbuthnot, Murder on the Orient Express, EMI, November 1974.

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255

Colonel Nils Tahlvik, Ransom, Lion International/Twentieth Century-Fox, February 1975. El Raisuli, The Wind and the Lion, Columbia Pictures/MGM, June 1975. Daniel Dravot, The Man Who Would Be King, Columbia Pictures, December 1975. Robin Hood, Robin and Marian, Columbia Pictures, May 1976. Khalil Abdul-Muhsen, The Next Man, Allied Artists, UK: not released; US: November 1976. Major General Urquhart, A Bridge Too Far, Joseph E. Levine Productions, June 1977. Pierce, The First Great Train Robbery, Dino De Laurentiis Company, December 1978. Paul Bradley, Meteor, Palladium Productions/Shaw Bros/AIP, December 1979. Major Robert Dapes, Cuba, United Artists, December 1979. King Agamemnon/Fireman, Time Bandits, Handmade Films, July 1981. Marshal William T. O’Niel, Outland, The Ladd Company, August 1981. Patrick Hale, The Man with the Deadly Lens, Columbia Pictures, November 1982. Douglas Meredith, Five Days One Summer, The Ladd Company, UK: not released; US: November 1982. James Bond, Never Say Never Again, Warner Bros., December 1983. The Green Knight, Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Golan-Globus Productions, November 1984. Ramirez, Highlander, Thorn EMI, August 1986. William of Baskerville, The Name of the Rose, Neue Constantin Film/ Cristaldi Film/Les Films Ariane, January 1986. Jim Malone, The Untouchables, Paramount Pictures, September 1987. Lieutenant Colonel Alan Caldwell, The Presidio, Paramount Pictures, August 1988. Professor Henry Jones, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Paramount Pictures/Lucas Films, June 1989. Jessie, Family Business, Tristar Pictures, February 1990. Marko Ramius, The Hunt for Red October, Paramount Pictures, April 1990. Barley Blair, The Russia House, Pathé Entertainment/MGM, February 1991. Ramirez, Highlander II: The Quickening, Davis-Panzer Productions/Harat Investments/Lamb Bear Entertainments, April 1991. King Richard, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Warner Bros., July 1991. Dr Robert Campbell, Medicine Man, Hollywood Pictures, May 1992. John Conner, Rising Sun, Twentieth Century-Fox, October 1993. Dr Alex Murray, A Good Man in Africa, Capitol Films, November 1994. Paul Armstrong, Just Cause, Fountainbridge Films/Warner Bros., March 1995. King Arthur, First Knight, Columbia Pictures, July 1995. John Patrick Mason, The Rock, Hollywood Pictures, June 1996.

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Draco [voice], DragonHeart, Universal Pictures, October 1996. Sir August De Wynter, The Avengers, Warner Bros., August 1998. Paul, Playing by Heart, Hyperion, August 1998. Robert MacDougall, Entrapment, Fountainbridge Films/Twentieth CenturyFox, July 1999. William Forrester, Finding Forrester, Fountainbridge Films/Columbia Pictures, February 2000. Allan Quatermain, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Twentieth Century-Fox, October 2003. Sir Billi [voice], Sir Billi, Billi Productions/Glasgow Animation, September 2013.

Television Driver [uncredited], Epitaph, BBC, 27 May 1956. Joe Brasted, Dixon of Dock Green, Season 2, Episode 1, ‘Ladies of the Manor’, BBC, 9 June 1956. Prisoner, The Condemned, BBC, 21 August 1956. Various roles, The Terror, ITV [Play of the Week: Granada], 27 August 1956. Achmed, Sailor of Fortune, Season 2, Episode 13, Mid-Ocean Films (Canada), 7 December 1956. Harlan ‘Mountain’ McClintock, Requiem for a Heavyweight, BBC, 31 February 1957. Mat Burke, Anna Christie, ITV [Play of the Week: Granada], 29 August 1957. Johnnie, ‘The Return’, Women in Love, ITV [ITV Playhouse: Associated Rediffusion], September 1958. [Cast member], The Boy with the Meat Axe, ITV [Armchair Theatre: ABC Weekend], 23 November 1958. Rick Martell, The Square Ring, ITV [Play of the Week: Granada], 2 June 1959. John Proctor, The Crucible, ITV [Play of the Week: Granada], 3 November 1959. Julien, Colombe, BBC, 17 January 1960. Bartley, Riders to the Sea, BBC [Schools Programme], 16 February 1960. Harry Percy/Hotspur, An Age of Kings, BBC, April–November 1960. Innes Corrie, Without the Grail, BBC, 14 September 1960. Connolly, The Pets, ITV [Play of the Week: Granada], 11 October 1960. Macbeth, Macbeth, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 22 January 1961 [Canada]. Alexander the Great, Adventure Story, BBC, 12 June 1961. Count Alexis Vronsky, Anna Karenina, BBC, 3 November 1961. MacNeil, The Male of the Species [part 1], ITV, 1 February 1969.



Film, television and theatre roles

257

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Theatre Extra, The Glorious Days, Edinburgh Empire, January 1953. Chorus line, later Lieutenant Buzz Adams, South Pacific, various theatres [provincial tour], 1953–55. Court usher, Witness for the Prosecution, Q Theatre, 1955. Matthias, Point of Departure, Q Theatre, 1955. Robert Callendar, A Witch in Time, Q Theatre, 1955. O’Daniel, The Good Sailor, Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, April 1956. King Pentheus, The Bacchae, Oxford Playhouse, May 1959. Frank Kitteridge, The Sea Shell, various theatres [provincial tour], October– November 1959. Mat Burke, Anna Christie, Oxford Playhouse, March 1960. Grotti, Italian Consul, Naked, Oxford Playhouse, November 1960. Holofernes, Judith, Her Majesty’s Theatre, June 1962.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Arguably Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant were more famous and successful, hence the qualification. 2 This poll has appeared annually in the International Motion Picture Almanac since 1932. The Quigley rating has long been regarded as one of the most reliable barometers of a film star’s box-office power because it is based on a poll of exhibitors asked to name the ten stars guaranteed to bring patrons to the cinema. 3 In ‘Hail the Connery Hero’, Hollywood Reporter, 5 May 1997, Ray Bennett argued that ‘Any career as a genuine leading man that lasts more than ten years is astonishing.’ He noted that Connery’s stardom had outlasted those of the great Hollywood male stars of the ‘Golden Age’ – he mentions Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, James Stewart and John Wayne. He might have included Cagney; see Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 271–2. 4 Anthony Barnes, ‘Survey Ranks Sir Sean as Top British Star’, Independent, 29 January 2001, p. 9. 5 See Ben Child, ‘Sir Sean Connery Tops Influential Poll of America’s Favourite British Actors’, Guardian, 28 October 2013; and www.theguardian.com/film/2013/ oct/28/sean-connery-poll-favourite-british-actor, accessed 2 November 2021. Q scores were created by Market Evaluations Inc., with Q standing for ‘quotient’ – an established measure based on familiarity, appeal, likeability and popularity; see Barrie Gunter, Celebrity Capital: Assessing the Value of Fame, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 20–1. 6 Quoted in Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, New York: The Citadel Press, 2001, p. 25, original emphasis. 7 Quoted in Andrew Rissik, The James Bond Man: The Films of Sean Connery, London: Elm Tree Books, 1983, p. 121. 8 Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 5 January 1976. 9 Sklar, City Boys, p. ix. 10 Paul McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 12–13. For the impulse of conventional accounts to reveal the star’s ‘authentic self’ see Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, London: Macmillan, 1986, p. 2.

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Notes 259 11 www.seanconnery.com, accessed 24 August 2020, my emphasis. 12 Quoted in Andrew Yule, Sean Connery: Neither Shaken Nor Stirred, London: Sphere, 2008 [1992], p. 68. 13 Michael Billington, The Modern Actor, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973, p. 96. 14 Quoted in Jeff Rovin, The Films of Charlton Heston, Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1977, p. 21. 15 Barry King, Taking Fame to Market: On the Pre-History and Post-History of Hollywood Stardom, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, p. 12. 16 Richard DeCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1990], p. 12. 17 Barry King, ‘Stardom as an Occupation’, in Paul Kerr (ed.), The Hollywood Film Industry, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986, p. 159. 18 Adrienne L. McLean, Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005, p. 85. 19 Paul McDonald, ‘Supplementary Chapter: Reconceptualising Stardom’, in Richard Dyer, Stars, rev. edn, London: BFI Publishing, 1998 [1979], p. 200. 20 King, ‘Stardom as an Occupation’; McDonald, Hollywood Stardom; McLean, Being Rita Hayworth; Danae Clark, Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors’ Labor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. See also Sean P. Holmes, ‘The Hollywood Star System and the Regulation of Actors’ Labour, 1916–1934’, Film History, 12 (2000), pp. 97–114. 21 Gorham Kindem, ‘Hollywood’s Movie Star System: A Historical Overview’, in Kindem (ed.), The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, p. 79. 22 Cathy Klaprat, ‘The Star as Market Strategy: Bette Davis in Another Light’, in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976, p. 354; McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, p. 18. 23 Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, p. 5. 24 See Barry King, ‘The Star and the Commodity: Towards a Performance Theory of Stardom’, Cultural Studies, 1: 2 (1987), pp. 145–61. 25 Quoted in Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995, p. 252. 26 Variety and The Hollywood Reporter regularly compile (subscription-only) ‘Star Power’ information detailing the economic muscle wielded by Hollywood’s acting elite, and publish an annual ranking; see Philip Drake, ‘Jim Carrey: The Cultural Politics of Dumbing Down’, in Andy Willis (ed.), Film Stars: Hollywood and Beyond, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, p. 77. For economic perspectives on the power of stars to ensure box-office success see, for instance, Sherwin Rosen, ‘The Economics of Superstars’, The American Economic Review, 71: 5 (December 1981), pp. 845–58; W. Timothy Wallace, Alan Seigerman and Morris B. Holbrook, ‘The Role of Actors and Actresses in the Success of Films: How Much Is a Movie Star Worth?’, Journal of Cultural Economics, 17: 1 (1993), pp. 1–27; Arthur S. De Vany and W. David Walls, ‘Uncertainty in the

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260 Notes Movie Industry: Does Star Power Reduce the Terror of the Box Office?’, Journal of Cultural Economics, 23: 4 (1999), pp. 285–318; and Randy S. Nelson and Robert Glotfelty, ‘Movie Stars and Box Office Revenue: An Empirical Analysis’, Journal of Cultural Economics, 36: 2 (2012), pp. 141–66. 27 David F. Prindle, The Politics of Glamour: Ideology and Democracy in the Screen Actors Guild, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, p. 13. 28 Alexander Walker, Stardom: The Hollywood Phenomenon, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974 [1970], p. 32. 29 Gerben Bakker, ‘Stars and Stories: How Films Became Branded Products’, in John Sedgwick and Michael Pokorny (eds), An Economic History of Film, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 71. 30 For a general discussion of stars’ rights, or lack of them, see Jane M. Gaines, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice and the Law, London: BFI Publishing, 1992, pp. 143–74. 31 See Barry King, ‘Embodying the Elastic Self: The Parametrics of Contemporary Stardom’, in Thomas Austin and Martin Barker (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Stardom, London: Arnold, 2003, pp. 45–61; and Paul McDonald, ‘The Star System: The Production of Hollywood Stardom in the Post-Studio Era’, in Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (eds), The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 167–81. 32 There are two book-length overviews of Hollywood talent agents: Tom Kemper, Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010; and Violaine Roussel, Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017. See also David Zelenski, ‘Talent Agents, Personal Managers, and Their Conflicts in the New Hollywood’, Southern California Law Review, 76: 4 (May 2003), pp. 979–1002. A study of talent agents in the UK is yet to appear; at present there are only gossipy accounts such as Michael Whitehall’s Shark-Infested Waters, London: Timewell Press, 2007. 33 Patrick McGilligan, Cagney: The Actor as Auteur, London: Tantivy Press, 1975. James Cagney was one of the stars who battled most consistently and effectively against the constraints of the Hollywood studio system. See also Sklar, City Boys; and Emily Carman, Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016. 34 McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, pp. 5–6. 35 Cynthia Baron and Sharon M. Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008, p. 17. 36 Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, p. 97; Clark, Negotiating Hollywood, pp. 7–8. 37 Quoted in Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 120. 38 James Naremore’s seminal Acting in the Cinema, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988, provides a general framework alongside sophisticated analyses of individual star performances. See also the essays in Aaron Taylor (ed.), Theorizing Film Acting, New York and London: Routledge, 2012; Philip Drake, ‘Reconceptualising Screen Performance’, Journal of Film and Video, 58: 1–2 (2006), pp. 84–94; and Baron and Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance.

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Notes 261 39 Daniel Smith-Rowsey, Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: Representing Rough Rebels, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 27. 40 Julie Levinson, ‘The Auteur Renaissance’, in Claudia Springer and Julie Levinson (eds), Acting, London: I.B. Tauris, 2015, p. 116. Levinson analyses the 1960s and 1970s but the other essays in this collection, which spans the history of American screen acting, show the different valuations that are operative in particular periods. 41 Paul McDonald, ‘Story and Show: The Basic Contradictions of Film Star Acting’, in Taylor (ed.), Theorizing Film Acting, p. 170. 42 Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, pp. 250–5. 43 Drake, ‘Jim Carrey’, p. 77. 44 Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine, New York: Vintage Books, 2009, pp. 75–6. 45 John Boorman, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery: His Life and Films, London: W.H. Allen, 1984, p. 1. See also Boorman’s DVD commentary on Zardoz, Twentieth Century-Fox Home Entertainment, 2015, F1-SGB 01208. 46 For general discussion see Andrew Britton, ‘Stars and Genre’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 198–206; Richard DeCordova, ‘Genre and Performance: An Overview’, in Jeremy Butler (ed.), Star Texts, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991, pp. 115–24; and Christine Cornea, ‘Introduction’, in Cornea (ed.), Genre and Performance: Film and Television, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, pp. 1–17. 47 Yvonne Tasker, The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film, Chichester: John Wiley, 2015. See also her Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema, London: Routledge, 1993; and Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 46–54. 48 Tasker, The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film, p. 75. 49 Duncan Petrie, ‘The Eclipse of Scottish Cinema’, Scottish Affairs, 23: 2 (2014), p. 220. 50 Gary Wills, John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. 51 Stephen Gundle, ‘Sophia Loren: Italian Icon’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 15: 3 (August 1995), pp. 367–86. 52 Tytti Soila, ‘Introduction’, in Soila (ed.), Stellar Encounters: Stardom in Popular European Cinema, New Barnet: John Libbey, 2009, pp. 4–5, 9. 53 Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001. See also Geoffrey Macnab, Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in the British Cinema, London: Cassell, 2000; Bruce Babington, ‘Introduction: British Stars and Stardom’, in Babington (ed.), British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, pp. 1–28; and Jonathan Stubbs, Hollywood and the Invention of England: Projecting the Past in American Cinema, 1930–2017, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 5–6. 54 Quoted in Benedict Nightingale, ‘Bottled in Bond, He’s Vintage Connery’, New York Times, 7 June 1987, p. 24.

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262 Notes 55 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, p. 19. 56 Connery’s stardom had certain similarities to that of Alain Delon, at once French and an international cosmopolite; see Mark Gallagher, ‘Alain Delon, International Man of Mystery’, in Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron (eds), Alain Delon: Style, Stardom, and Masculinity, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 91–109. 57 See Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Film Trade, Global Culture and Transnational Cinema: An Introduction’, in Phillips and Vincendeau (eds), Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood, London: BFI Publishing, 2006, pp. 3–18. 58 See Vanessa R. Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007; and Russell Meeuf and Raphael Raphael (eds), Transnational Stardom: International Celebrity in Film and Popular Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Valuable studies of single stars that discuss their transnational dimensions include: Sarah Thomas, Peter Lorre: Face Maker – Stardom and Performance Between Hollywood and Europe, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012; Russell Meeuf, John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013; and Agata Frymus, Damsels and Divas: European Stardom in Silent Hollywood, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 59 Quoted in the Hollywood Pictures Studio Production Notes for Medicine Man, British Film Institute Library, London (hereafter BFI), microfiche, p. 3. 60 Quoted in Geoffrey Macnab, ‘I Had Drive from the Beginning’, Guardian, 13 December 2004, p. 2. See also Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery, London: Virgin, 2002, p. 16. 61 Scene by Scene: Sean Connery, BBC Scotland, 1997. 62 Sean Connery, Being a Scot, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008. 63 There is almost nothing on Connery’s British agents, Richard Hatton then Dennis Selinger, beyond a few autobiographical anecdotes. Several accounts of his American agent Michael Ovitz and the Creative Artists Associates (CAA) exist, including Ovitz’s autobiography, but they lack the specific information that could provide a detailed account of Ovitz’s relationship with Connery and decision-making processes. I have used the trade press for information about Fountainbridge Films in the absence of any company records. 64 Gaines, Contested Culture, p. 146. 65 George Feiffer, ‘Hard Man Behind the Tough Image’, Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 12 April 1981. 66 Albert Broccoli (with Donald Zec), When the Snow Melts, London: Boxtree, 1998. 67 It would be particularly interesting to trace Connery’s reception in East Asia, given the different conceptions of masculinity and muscularity that obtain in the cultures there; see Mark Gallagher, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, London: BFI/ Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, especially pp. 24–6. In his study Chow Yun-fat and

Notes 263 Territories of Hong Kong Stardom, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, Lin Feng discusses the way Chow’s star image differs across local, regional and international markets (pp. 108–21), providing a methodology through which to explore these issues. 68 Edgar Morin, The Stars, trans. Richard Howard, London: John Calder, 1960.

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1  Forging an actor, 1953–61 1 Quoted in Gordon Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, Films and Filming, March 1974, p. 13. 2 This overview is based on Connery’s own account in Being a Scot, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008, supplemented by material from the other sources cited and also William McIlvanney’s Almost a Book About Sean Connery, which began to be published in instalments online from May 2013 but was curtailed by McIlvanney’s ill health and death on 15 December 2015. 3 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 18. 4 Quoted in Michael Freedland, Sean Connery: A Biography, London: Orion, 1994, p. 30. 5 Quoted in Richard Gant, Sean Connery: Gilt-Edged Bond, London: MayflowerDell, 1967, p. 16. 6 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 25. 7 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, Playboy, November 1965, p. 84. This interview gained notoriety because it contained a passage in which Connery contended that he didn’t ‘think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman’ in certain circumstances (p. 76). I discuss this in detail in Chapter 8. 8 Quoted in Oriana Fallaci, ‘Sean Connery: The Superman’, in The Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews, Chicago, IL: H. Regnery, 1968, p. 36. 9 Gant, Sean Connery, pp. 48–9. 10 Quoted in Fred Moss, Warner Bros. Studio Production Notes for A Fine Madness, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (hereafter MHL), microfiche. 11 Henry Gris and Sheldon Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number … the Personal File on Sean Connery’, in Sheldon Lane (ed.), For Bond Lovers Only, London: Panther, 1965, p. 151. 12 Connery’s third place has been contested. See Clinton L. Emshoff, ‘The Sean Connery Mr Universe Lie’, Enduring Aesthetics, 29 May 2019, www.enduringaesthetics.com/post/the-sean-connery-mr-universe-lie, accessed 10 September 2021. 13 Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, p. 14; Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery: His Life and Films, London: W.H. Allen, 1984, p. 52. 14 The portrait and another painted in 1952 by Al Fairweather, who became a jazz musician, were included in a centenary exhibition at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh, October 2007–January 2008.

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264 Notes 15 Quoted in John Hunter, Great Scot: The Life of Sean Connery, London: Bloomsbury, 1993, p. 37. 16 Quoted in Kurt Loder, ‘Great Scot’, Rolling Stone, 27 October 1983, p. 18. 17 Gant, Sean Connery, p. 20. 18 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 29. 19 Nik Cohn, Today There Are No Gentlemen: The Changes in Englishmen’s Clothes since the War, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971, pp. 60–4; Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! Swinging London and the Invention of Cool, London: Fourth Estate, 2003, pp. 117–18. 20 Connery, Being a Scot, pp. 30–1. 21 Richard Dyer, ‘Don’t Look Now: The Instabilities of the Male Pin-Up’, in Only Entertainment, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 104. 22 See Kenneth R. Dutton, The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development, New York: Continuum, 1995. 23 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 148–53. 24 Michael Williams, Film Stardom, Myth and Classicism: The Rise of Hollywood’s Gods, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 1–11, 45–9, 61–4. See also Anna Alexandra Carden-Coyne, ‘Classical Heroism and Modern Life: Bodybuilding and Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century’, Journal of Australian Studies, 23: 63 (1999), pp. 138–49. 25 It was filmed as Lilacs in the Spring (1954). 26 ‘Job-Hunting on a Rusty Bike then Fame!’, Sunday Express, 8 August 1965. 27 Andrew Rissik, The James Bond Man: The Films of Sean Connery, London: Elm Tree Books, 1983, p. 5. 28 Gant, Sean Connery, p. 25. 29 See ‘Bon-Accord Gossip’, Edinburgh Evening Express, 26 February 1954, p. 3. 30 Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, p. 13. 31 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 6. 32 Kate Dunn, Exit Through the Fireplace: The Great Days of Rep, London: John Murray, 1998, pp. 106–7. 33 Quoted in Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, p. 14. 34 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 34. 35 Quoted in Hunter, Great Scot, p. 58. 36 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 31. 37 Quoted in Christopher Bray, Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 26. 38 Quoted in the Paramount Studio Production Notes for The Untouchables (MHL); ‘I think it’s better to be one thing and reveal something else. It’s always more interesting’, quoted in Iain Blair, review of The Untouchables, The Reporter, 18 March 1988; ‘I like it when an actor looks one thing and conveys something else, perhaps something diametrically opposite’, quoted in Benedict Nightingale, ‘Bottled in Bond, He’s Vintage Connery’, New York Times, 7 June 1987, p. 24; ‘You have to be a bit of a contrast to what you are.

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Notes 265 You have to look as though you could work in a mine and have read Proust’, in Mark Cousins, Scene by Scene: Sean Connery, BBC Scotland, 1997. 39 Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 112. 40 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 91. 41 John Boorman’s remarks are part of his DVD commentary on Zardoz, Twentieth Century-Fox Home Entertainment, 2015, F1-SGB 01208; Diane Cilento’s are in her autobiography, My Nine Lives, London: Michael Joseph, 2006, p. 266. 42 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 31. 43 Quoted in Gris and Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number’, p. 152. 44 Connery, Being a Scot, pp. 31–2. 45 For his admiration for Lancaster see Nightingale, ‘Bottled in Bond’, p. 28; for Mitchum see William McIlvanney, ‘The Big Man’, Sunday Times, 11 August 1996, p. 4. For an overview of the influence of American culture on British working-class tastes see Duncan Webster, Looka Yonder!: The Imaginary America of Populist Culture, London: Routledge, 1988. 46 Quoted in Andrew Yule, Sean Connery: Neither Shaken Nor Stirred, London: Sphere, 2008 [1992], p. 64. On another occasion Connery, reflecting on the difference between his generation and its predecessors – he names Ronald Colman, Rex Harrison and Leslie Howard – observed, ‘It wasn’t until the rebellion against class distinction, which revealed life as it really is, that things began to change’; quoted in John Parker, Arise Sir Sean Connery, London: John Blake, 2005, p. 168. 47 Hal Burton, ‘Preface’, in Burton (ed.), Acting in the Sixties, London: BBC, 1970, p. 9. 48 Quoted in Freedland, Sean Connery, p. 69. 49 See Margaret Hinxman, ‘The Man No One Wanted Is Going Places Now’, Picturegoer, 8 June 1957, p. 7. 50 Gris and Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number’, p. 154. 51 John French, Robert Shaw: The Price of Success, London: Dean Street Press, 2016 [1993], p. 34. 52 Michael Billington, The Modern Actor, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973, pp. 20–4. 53 French, Robert Shaw, p. 35. Hatton was one of the 117 ‘Agents and Artists’ Managers’ listed in the 1957/58 edition of Peter Noble’s British Film and Television Yearbook, London: British and American Press, pp. 452–5. 54 French, Robert Shaw, p. 121. 55 Michael Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier: A Social History of the Acting Profession 1880–1983, London: Athlone Press, 1984, p. 279. 56 John Caughie, ‘Before the Golden Age: Early Television Drama’, in John Corner (ed.), Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History, London: BFI Publishing, 1991, p. 37. 57 Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier, pp. 280, 285. 58 Caughie, ‘Before the Golden Age’, p. 26.

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266 Notes 59 See, in particular, Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. 60 Douglas McNaughton, ‘“Constipated, Studio-Bound, Wall-Confined, Rigid”: The Influence of British Actors’ Equity on BBC Television Drama, 1948–1972’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 11: 1 (2014), pp. 1–22; Richard Hewett, ‘The Changing Determinants of UK Television Acting’, Critical Studies in Television, 10: 1 (2015), pp. 73–90; Tom Cantrell and Christopher Hogg, ‘Returning to an Old Question: What Do Television Actors Do when They Act?’, Critical Studies in Television, 11: 3 (2016), pp. 283–98; Richard Hewett, The Changing Spaces of Television Acting: From Studio Realism to Location Realism in BBC Television Drama, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017; Stephen Lacey and Simone Knox, ‘Acting on Television: Analytical Methods and Approaches’, Critical Studies in Television, 13: 3 (2018), pp. 257–61. 61 Caughie, ‘Before the Golden Age’, pp. 23–34. 62 Roger Manvell, The Film and the Public, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1955, p. 279. 63 Don Taylor, writing in Contrast, quoted in Caughie, ‘Before the Golden Age’, p. 33. 64 Michael Barry, From the Palace to the Grove, London: Royal Television Society, 1992, p. 40. 65 I am uncertain about Escaper’s Club. It is mentioned in Paramount Pictures’ Studio Production Notes for Another Time, Another Place (MHL), but I can find no details about this production. 66 Much of what follows derives from my interview with Alvin Rakoff on 26 February 2019. Any unacknowledged quotations are from this source. Rakoff’s autobiography, I’m Just the Guy Who Says Action!, independently published, 2021, contains a detailed account of the circumstances of this production. 67 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 72. 68 Caughie, Television Drama, p. 73. 69 There were detailed exchanges between Rakoff and Serling in February and March 1957 about dialogue, staging and interpretation. I am grateful to Rakoff for letting me see this correspondence. 70 Quoted in Hunter, Great Scot, p. 54. 71 Quoted in Hunter, Great Scot, p. 53. 72 Alvin Rakoff gives a detailed description of Requiem’s opening in a promotional piece for the Radio Times, 31 March 1957, p. 7. 73 This review was presented as a duologue between John and Roy Boulting, but this judgement is Roy’s; see Evening Standard, 1 April 1957. 74 Peter Black, Daily Mail, 1 April 1957. 75 Harold Conway, Daily Mirror, 1 April 1957. 76 Daily Sketch, 1 April 1957. 77 J.C. Trewin, The Listener, 4 April 1957, p. 573. 78 The Times, 1 April 1957, p. 5. 79 VR/57/181, 30 April 1957, BBC Written Archives Centre (hereafter WAC).

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Notes 267 80 Freedland, Sean Connery, p. 78. 81 See Angus Hall, ‘Girls Shoulder Out this Tough Guy’, Picturegoer, 28 June 1958, p. 5. 82 Hinxman, ‘The Man No One Wanted Is Going Places Now’, p. 7. 83 Geoffrey Macnab, Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in the British Cinema, London: Cassell, 2000, pp. 203, 207; Steve Chibnall, ‘“Above and Beyond Everyday Life”: The Rise and Fall of Rank’s Contract Artists of the 1950s’, in I.Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith (eds), The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 170–9. 84 Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, New York: The Citadel Press, 2001, p. 13. 85 Billington, The Modern Actor, p. 34. 86 Garry O’Connor, Paul Scofield: An Actor for All Seasons, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2002, p. 86. 87 Hugh Samson, ‘Connery Shuns a Steady Date’, Picturegoer, 12 March 1960, p. 3. 88 Brian Neve, The Many Lives of Cy Endfield, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015, pp. 123–9. 89 Morris Bright and Robert Ross, Mr Carry On: The Life and Work of Peter Rogers, London: BBC Books, 2000, p. 72. 90 Quoted in Freedland, Sean Connery, p. 71. 91 The Longest Day cost $7.75 million and made $17.5 million in domestic rentals alone; see Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate and Financial History, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1980, pp. 229, 253. 92 Peter Lev, Twentieth Century-Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935–1965, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp. 167–8. 93 Quoted in Hunter, Great Scot, p. 61. 94 Solomon, Twentieth Century-Fox, pp. 119–38. 95 Callan, Sean Connery, pp. 84, 104. 96 See the Studio Production Notes for Another Time, Another Place (MHL). The roles are not specified. 97 Quoted in Parker, Arise Sir Sean Connery, p. 96. 98 Studio Production Notes for Another Time, Another Place (MHL). 99 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 39. 100 Quoted in Hunter, Great Scot, p. 63. 101 Anthony Carthew, Daily Herald, 9 May 1958. 102 Quoted in Hall, ‘Girls Shoulder Out this Tough Guy’. 103 Godfrey Morgan, Picturegoer, 21 March 1959, p. 7. 104 ‘Probable Domestic Take’, Variety, 6 January 1960, p. 3. Darby O’Gill was re-released in 1969, grossing a further $2,300,000; see ‘Big Rental Films of 1969, Variety, 7 January 1970, p. 15. 105 Quoted in Robert Sellers, Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down: How One Generation of British Actors Changed the World, London: Preface Publishing, 2011, p. 160.

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268 Notes 106 See Variety, 3 June 1959, p. 3. The film did quite well with a ‘Probable Domestic Take’ of $1,000,000, in the US; see Variety, 6 January 1960, p. 34. 107 Andrew Spicer, ‘The “Other War”: Subversive Images of the Second World War in Service Comedies’, in Stephen Caunce, Ewa Mazierska, Susan Sydney-Smith and John K. Walton (eds), Relocating Britishness, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 167–82. 108 Monthly Film Bulletin, Autumn 1961, p. 157. 109 Steve Chibnall, ‘Ordinary People, “New Wave” Realism and the British Crime Film 1959–1963’, in Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds), British Crime Cinema, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 108. 110 Robert Koehler, ‘A Once and Future Star’, Variety, 5 May 1997. 111 Claire Cochrane, Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 207. 112 Roger Moore (with Gareth Owen), My Word Is My Bond, London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2008, p. 40. 113 Billington, The Modern Actor, p. 3. 114 Brits Go to Hollywood: Sean Connery, ITN Factual, 2003. 115 Cilento, My Nine Lives, pp. 125, 127. 116 Cilento, My Nine Lives, p. 135. 117 Cicely Berry, The Actor and the Text, rev. edn, London: Virgin Books, 2000, p. 11. 118 See Connery, Being a Scot, p. 38; and Cilento, My Nine Lives, p. 124. A number of other British male stars attended Malmgren’s classes and implemented his techniques, including Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy and Anthony Hopkins. 119 Callan, Sean Connery, p. 90. 120 Janys Hayes, ‘The Knowing Body: Meaning and Method in Yat Malmgren’s Actor Training Technique’, PhD thesis, University of Western Sydney, 2008, p. 90. 121 Vladimir Mirodan (n.d.), ‘Acting the Metaphor: The Laban–Malmgren System of Movement Psychology and Character Analysis’, http://ualresearchonline. arts.ac.uk/7855/, accessed 17 February 2019, p. 6. 122 Brits Go to Hollywood: Sean Connery. 123 For an account of Laban’s importance and the significance of his writings to the analysis of performance see Cynthia Baron and Sharon M. Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008, pp. 188–207. 124 Christopher Fettes, The Histrionic Sense: An Analysis of the Actor’s Craft, London: GFCA, 2015, pp. 5–7. 125 Hayes, ‘The Knowing Body’, pp. 36, 45. 126 Mirodan, ‘Acting the Metaphor’, p. 25. 127 Mirodan, ‘Acting the Metaphor’, p. 17. 128 Hayes, ‘The Knowing Body’, p. 8. 129 Alan Hirschberg, interview with Connery, undated (MHL). 130 See David Shirley, ‘Stanislavsky’s Passage in to the British Conservatoire’, in Jonathan Pitches (ed.), Russians in Britain: British Theatre and the Russian

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Notes 269 Tradition of Actor Training, Oxford: Routledge, 2012, pp. 38–61. David McCallum observed that ‘The Method’, ‘didn’t really cross over into Britain’ at this point; quoted in Sellers, Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down, p. 235. See also Kenneth Rea, ‘Drama Training in Britain Part 1’, Theatre Quarterly, 10: 39 (Spring–Summer 1981), pp. 47–58; and Vladimir Mirodan, ‘The First Class: Harold Lang and the Beginnings of Stanislavskian Teaching in the British Conservatoire’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 11: 1 (2020), pp. 60–75. 131 Shirley, ‘Stanislavsky’s Passage in to the British Conservatoire’, p. 55. The English Stage Company, and especially Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, encouraged actors to engage with the ideas of Stanislavski; see Robert Leach, Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005, pp. 78–96. 132 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 38. 133 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 90. 134 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 89. 135 Quoted in Zoë Heller, ‘Great Scot’, Vanity Fair, June 1993. 136 See Melvin Bragg, Rich: The Life of Richard Burton, London: Coronet Books, especially pp. 61, 69, 185. 137 It had been made as a film by Ealing Studios in 1953 with Robert Beatty in the main role, renamed ‘Kid’ Curtis. 138 Eugene O’Neill, Anna Christie, London: Nick Hern Books, 2011 [1921], p. 6. 139 Arthur Miller, The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, London: Penguin, 2000, p. 13. 140 Hunter, Great Scot, p. 65. 141 Sydney Newman, Head of Drama: The Memoir of Sydney Newman, Toronto: ECW Press, 2017, p. 304. 142 Newman, Head of Drama, p. 305. 143 Newman, Head of Drama, p. 305. 144 French, Robert Shaw, p. 52. 145 Robert Shaw, The Hiding Place, London: Panther, 1965, p. 15. 146 The Hiding Place was made into a – lamentably poor – film, Situation Hopeless but not Serious (1965), with Michael Connors and Robert Redford as the two American airmen and Alec Guinness as Frick. 147 ‘Lost Connery TV Footage Found in US’, BBC News, 14 September 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11295247, accessed 15 January 2018. 148 Naomi Capon, Radio Times, 15 January 1960, p. 2. 149 VR/60/34, 11 February 1960 (WAC). 150 5064 7C, n.d. (WAC). See the article about the play, Radio Times, 9 September 1960, p. 3. 151 VR/60/539, 5 October 1960 (WAC). 152 Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 95–6. See also Emma Smith, ‘Shakespeare Serialized: An Age of Kings’, in Robert Shaughnessy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 134–49.

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270 Notes 153 T5/610/1 – An Age of Kings general file (WAC). The same point was emphasised in Barry’s piece for the Radio Times, 22 April 1960, p. 3. 154 Contract offer, 23 March 1960, included in T5/611/1 (WAC). 155 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 105. 156 Quoted in Parker, Arise Sir Sean Connery, p. 98. 157 The Times, 29 April 1960; Philip Purser, News Chronicle, 4 August 1960. An Age of Kings was also broadcast in America in October 1961, repeated in 1962 and sold to over fifty American education stations; see Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom – Volume 5: Competition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 144. Winning the American ‘television Oscar’, the Peabody award, An Age of Kings had a major critical impact in the US where it ‘was singled out for some of the highest critical praise’; 150,000 booklets on the programme were published and distributed; see Douglas Allen, 1 December 1961, R120/7/1 (WAC). 158 Quoted in Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Before Bond’, Sight and Sound, 2: 6 (October 1992), p. 33. 159 Tobias Hochscherf, ‘From Refugee to the BBC: Rudolph Cartier, Weimar Cinema and Early British Television’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 7: 3 (2010), pp. 401–20. 160 Interview with Norman Swallow, BECTU History Project, January 1991, p. 3. 161 Interview with Swallow, p. 12. 162 Quoted in Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work, London: Quartet, 1979, p. 169. 163 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 13. 164 Darlow and Hodson, Terence Rattigan, p. 176; Geoffrey Wansell, Terence Rattigan: A Biography, London: Fourth Estate, 1995, pp. 191–2. 165 ‘Study of Alexander the Great’, The Times, 13 June 1961, p. 15. 166 There was an accompanying double-page feature, pp. 18–19. 167 VR/61/321, 3 July 1961 (WAC). 168 ‘Lost BBC Period Drama of Anna Karenina Found Starring Sean Connery’, Daily Telegraph, 17 August 2010, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/7947501/ Lost-BBC-period-drama-of-Anna-Karenina-found-starring-Sean-Connery.html, accessed 13 November 2016. 169 Radio Times, 26 November 1961, p. 59. 170 Norman Rutherford, Assistant Head of Drama, Memo to Cartier, 21 April 1961; T5/611/1 (WAC). 171 T5/611/1 (WAC). See also Claire Bloom’s autobiography, Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983. 172 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 17. 173 Macnab, ‘Before Bond’, p. 33. 174 VR/61/585, 20 November 1961 (WAC). 175 The Times, 4 November 1961. 176 T5/611/1 (WAC). 177 T5/611/1, 23 August (WAC).

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Notes 271 178 T5/611/1 (WAC). 179 Wuthering Heights was transmitted on May 1962 with Keith Michell as Heathcliff. 180 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, p. 83. 181 See Callan, Sean Connery, pp. 99–100. 182 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 41. 183 After his work at Q Theatre already discussed, Connery had appeared in Frith Banbury’s The Good Sailor at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith in April 1956, an adaptation of Melville’s Billy Budd. He was not in the main cast of what was judged a rather lacklustre production. See the review in the Spectator, 13 April 1956, p. 20. 184 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 62. 185 Don Chapman, Oxford Playhouse: High and Low Drama in a University City, Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2008, p. 161. 186 Quoted in Hunter, Great Scot, p. 58. 187 Hunter, Great Scot, p. 58. 188 Frank Dibb, ‘Plays and Players’, in Robert Tanitch, Sean Connery, London: Chapmans, 1992, p. 32. 189 Cilento, My Nine Lives, pp. 135–7. 190 Jon Hartridge, ‘Oxford Mail’, in Tanitch, Sean Connery, p. 33. 191 Chapman, Oxford Playhouse, p. 170. 192 Cilento, My Nine Lives, p. 137. 193 Fettes, The Histrionic Sense, p. 324. 194 David Morgan, ‘New Statesman’, in Tanitch, Sean Connery, p. 28. 195 Hunter, Great Scot, p. 60. Connery had also performed with Thorndike as Bartley in the BBC schools production of Synge’s Riders to the Sea in February 1960. 196 Quoted in Yule, Sean Connery, p. 75. 197 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 106. 198 Although Connery never returned to the stage after Judith, he retained his interest in the theatre and remained keen to either produce or direct. He continued his connection with the Oxford Playhouse, to which he gave £3,500 in 1967, a considerable sum, to enable Volpone to transfer to the Garrick and thus help the theatre’s survival; see Chapman, Oxford Playhouse, p. 195. 199 Patricia Lewis, News Chronicle, 24 October 1957. 200 Andy Medhurst, ‘Can Chaps Be Pin Ups?, The British Male Film Stars of the 1950s’, Ten-8, 17 (February1985), pp. 3–8. 201 Andrew Spicer, ‘Male Stardom in 1960s British Cinema’, in Duncan Petrie, Melanie Williams and Laura Mayne (eds), Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, pp. 11–28. 202 Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier, p. 292. 203 Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier, Appendix 1, p. 331. 204 Cochrane, Twentieth-Century British Theatre, pp. 85–6. 205 See Stephen Lacey, British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in Its Contexts, 1956–65, London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 43–54.

272 Notes 206 Quoted in Ann Kent, ‘Sean Connery’s Escape to a New Life’, Daily Mail, 14 October 1974. 207 Sean Connery Close Up, Lifetime Productions, 1997. 208 Hunter, Great Scot, p. 61.

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2  Being Bond, 1962–72 1 Connery, quoted in Andrew Rissik, The James Bond Man: The Films of Sean Connery, London: Elm Tree Books, 1983, p. 87. The comment was made at the release of Diamonds Are Forever in 1971. 2 Quoted in Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987, p. 55. 3 Quoted in Gordon Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, Films and Filming, March 1974, p. 14. 4 Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Harrap, 1986 [1974], pp. 181–90; James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, rev. edn, London: I.B. Tauris, 2007, pp. 39–48; Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry – Volume 2, 1951–1978, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009, pp. 253–74; Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films, Stroud: The History Press, 2015, pp. 19–52; Robert Sellers, When Harry Met Cubby: The Story of the James Bond Producers, Cheltenham: The History Press, 2019, pp. 73–81. 5 See James Fenwick, ‘The Eady Levy, “The Envy of Most Other European Nations”: Runaway Productions and the British Film Fund in the Early 1960s’, in I.Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith (eds), The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 191–9. Fenwick argues (p. 193) that this fund, paid in proportion to cinema admissions, rather than ‘creating a distinct national cinema … contributed toward Anglo-American collaboration and the establishment of a transnational cinema that persists to this day’. In 1965, UA received $2.1 million from the levy for Thunderball, 15 per cent of the funds available that year; see Jonathan Stubbs, ‘The Eady Levy: A Runaway Bribe? Hollywood Production and British Subsidy in the Early 1960s’, British Journal of Cinema and Television, 6: 1 (2009), p. 7. By 1974 the franchise had drawn over $3 million from the fund; see Chapman, Licence to Thrill, p. 150. 6 Charles Drazin, A Bond for Bond: Film Finances and ‘Dr No’, London: Film Finances, 2011, p. 25. James Chapman gives a figure of £317,359; see ‘The Trouble with Harry: The Difficult Relationship of Harry Saltzman and Film Finances’, Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 34: 1 (2014), p. 58. UA had decreed Dr. No had to be a ‘low-budget item’; see Balio, United Artists, p. 257. 7 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 188, n. 1; Paul Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, Cologne: Taschen, 2012, p. 32.

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Notes 273 8 Sellers, When Harry Met Cubby, pp. 53–5. 9 Roy Pierce-Jones, ‘The Men Who Played James Bond’, in Robert G. Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield and Jack Becker (eds), James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films Are Not Enough, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, p. 359. Fleming was paid a fee of $100,000 per film plus a percentage of the profits; see Chapman, Licence to Thrill, p. 43. 10 Albert Broccoli (with Donald Zec), When the Snow Melts, London: Boxtree, 1998, p. 164. Grant was a close friend and had been best man at Broccoli’s marriage to Dana Wilson in June 1959. 11 This was the fee Grant received for North by Northwest; see Mark Glancy, Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, p. 373. 12 Drazin, A Bond for Bond, p. 22. 13 Quoted from an interview in Sellers, When Harry Met Cubby, p. 84. 14 Sellers, When Harry Met Cubby, p. 84. For Johnson’s claims see ‘Richard Johnson on Declining the Role of James Bond’, Cinema Retro, 9 October 2009, https://cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/1524-RICHARD-JOHNSONON-DECLINING-THE-ROLE-OF-JAMES-BOND.html, accessed 16 November 2021. 15 Quoted in Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 184. 16 Interviewed in Brits Go to Hollywood: Sean Connery, ITN Factual, 2003. 17 John Cork and Bruce Scivally, James Bond: The Legacy, London: Boxtree, 2002, pp. 7, 31. 18 Cork and Scivally, James Bond, p. 31. 19 Cork and Scivally, James Bond, p. 31. 20 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 187. 21 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 27; Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 60. 22 Quoted in Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 9. 23 See Rupert Booth, Not a Number: Patrick McGoohan – A Life, Twickenham: Supernova Books, 2011, pp. 106–13. Apparently McGoohan also considered the script he was sent quite flawed although he found the character fascinating; see Robert Langley, Patrick McGoohan: Danger Man or Prisoner?, Sheffield: Tomahawk Press, 2007, pp. 84–5, 97. Both Johnson and McGoohan would have made interesting Bonds. Johnson, who had the dark, rather cruel but classically English good looks that accorded with Fleming’s description, went on to make some Bond spin-offs: as an updated Bulldog Drummond in Deadlier than the Male (1967) and Some Girls Do (1969) and as a ruthless hitman working undercover for HMG in Danger Route (1967). He had the urbanity and slightly sinister charm that suited Bond, but never quite convinces as an athletic action hero. McGoohan was a more credible tough guy and, like Connery, had brooding, Celtic good looks. His performance style evinced a tense, watchful quality, a sense of anger, resentment and unpredictability that would have made him a compelling, if humourless, Bond.

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274 Notes 24 Broccoli with Zec, When the Snow Melts, p. 165. In his autobiography, Roger Moore stated that he was not aware of being on any shortlist, nor was he approached directly at this point; see My Word Is My Bond, London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2008, p. 172. 25 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 28. Sopel claimed that twenty ‘hopefuls’ were screen tested. 26 Quoted in Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 60. 27 Drazin, A Bond for Bond, p. 24. 28 Broccoli with Zec, When the Snow Melts, p. 165. 29 Quoted in Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 187. 30 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 28; Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 60. 31 Interviewed by Sellers, When Harry Met Cubby, p. 85. 32 Interviewed in Brits Go to Hollywood: Sean Connery. 33 Quoted in Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 33. 34 Quoted in Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 187. Malmgren had told Connery to think about large cats – ‘lions, tigers and panthers’ that are ‘very loose’; in Brits Go to Hollywood: Sean Connery. 35 Broccoli with Zec, When the Snow Melts, p. 165. 36 Quoted in Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 33. As Llewella Chapman points out, Broccoli’s remark colludes in the myth that Bond wore Savile Row suits whereas Fleming was at pains to point out that he did not; see Fashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender and Identity in the World of 007, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, p. 12. I am grateful to Dr Chapman for sending me the pre-publication proofs of this important work. 37 John Osborne, Almost a Gentleman, Faber and Faber, 1991, p. 169. 38 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 187. 39 Balio, United Artists, p. 258. 40 Christopher Bray, Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 55. 41 Quoted in Adrian Turner, Goldfinger, London: Bloomsbury, 1998, p. 97. 42 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 187. 43 Quoted in Henry Gris and Sheldon Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number … the Personal File on Sean Connery’, in Sheldon Lane (ed.), For Bond Lovers Only, London: Panther, 1965, p. 164. 44 Gris and Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number’, p. 162. 45 Drazin, A Bond for Bond, p. 23. 46 Stubbs, ‘The Eady Levy’, p. 10. 47 Quoted in Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, New York: The Citadel Press, 2001, p. 59. The Jamaican shooting was trimmed from thirty-two days to twenty-six; see James Robertson, ‘Rewriting Dr. No in 1962: James Bond and the End of British Empire in Jamaica’, Small Axe, 19: 2 (July 2015), p. 63. 48 Quoted in Patrick McGilligan, Cagney: The Actor as Auteur, London: Tantivy Press, 1975, p. 197. Christopher Reeve complained that in casting the role of Superman, the producers auditioned athletes rather than actors and hired

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Notes 275 him for his physique rather than acting abilities; see Roderick Mann, ‘“Superman” Reeve a Born, Born Flyer’, Los Angeles Times, 19 November 1978, p. 35. 49 Quoted in Gris and Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number’, p. 164. 50 In Oriana Fallaci, ‘Sean Connery: The Superman’, in The Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews, Chicago, IL: H. Regnery, 1968, p. 27. 51 See, for instance, the Eon Studio Production Notes for Dr. No (BFI). 52 Quoted in Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 163. 53 ‘Playboy Interview: Ian Fleming’, Playboy, December 1964, p. 100. 54 Ian Fleming, Moonraker, London: Pan Books, 1959, pp. 116–17. 55 Ian Fleming, Thunderball, London: Pan Books, 1963, p. 23. 56 Quoted in Jack Fishman, ‘007 and Me by Ian Fleming’, in Lane (ed.), For Bond Lovers Only, p. 18, original emphasis. 57 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, pp. 44–5. Chapman also mentions Dick Barton as a British prototype. 58 ‘Playboy Interview: Ian Fleming’, p. 103. 59 Quoted in Bill Desowitz, James Bond Unmasked, http://jamesbondunmasked.com, 2012, p. 161. 60 Quoted in Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 51. 61 Quoted in Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 42. 62 Quoted in Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 33. 63 Diane Cilento, My Nine Lives, London: Michael Joseph, 2006, p. 205. 64 Quoted in Michael Braun, ‘Mr Connery Has a Tilt at Bond’, News of the World, 16 April 1965. 65 Quoted in Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood, 19 January 1964. 66 Quoted in Susan Barnes, Sunday Express, 31 December 1961. 67 Bennett and Woollacott, Bond and Beyond, p. 241. 68 For further discussion on the Bond women apart from the texts cited see, inter alia, Christine Bold, ‘“Under the Skirts of Britannia”: Re-reading Women in the James Bond Novels’, in Christoph Lindner (ed.), The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, 2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009, pp. 205–19; the essays in Lisa Funnell (ed.), For Her Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond, New York and Chichester: Wallflower Press, 2015; and Claire Hines, ‘The Bond Women’, in The Playboy and James Bond: 007, Ian Fleming and ‘Playboy’ Magazine, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018, pp. 122–58. Hines (p. 123) observes that the actors who played the Bond girl were the subject of numerous articles and pin-up photo-shoots, becoming popular culture icons in their own right. 69 Richard Maibaum, ‘James Bond’s Girls’, Playboy, November 1965, p. 144; quoted in Hines, The Playboy and James Bond, p. 132. 70 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, p. 76. 71 Although, as Llewella Chapman notes, he had worn stylish suits and overcoats in The Frightened City; see Fashioning James Bond, pp. 9–10. 72 Chapman, Fashioning James Bond, pp. 10–14. 73 Quoted in Richard Gant, Sean Connery: Gilt-Edged Bond, London: MayflowerDell, 1967, pp. 87–8.

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276 Notes 74 Llewella Chapman, ‘Fashioning the Bond Vivant: Dressing for the Fans of James Bond’, in Claire Hines (ed.), Fan Phenomena: James Bond, Bristol: Intellect, 2015, p. 110. 75 Cork and Scivally, James Bond, p. 36. 76 Gris and Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number’, p. 161. 77 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, p. 78. 78 Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 34. 79 S6500 Dr. No – Fourth Draft Screenplay (Richard Maibaum, Wolf Mankowitz), 12 December 1961; S18574 Dr. No – Fifth Draft Screenplay (Richard Maibaum, Wolf Mankowitz and J.M. Harwood), 8 January 1962 (BFI). 80 Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 34. 81 Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 35. 82 Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 38. Screenwriter Richard Maibaum recalled, ‘Sean would come up with pretty witty lines at times. Sean is a witty man’; quoted in Turner, Goldfinger, p. 132. 83 Quoted in Nigel Andrew, ‘A Pin-Up Who Acts His Age’, Financial Times Weekend, 6 April 1991, p. 34. 84 Quoted in Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 39. 85 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, p. 64. 86 One reviewer summed up Bond’s magnetism: ‘Any girl with a pretty face and a large bust automatically drools as soon as she hears his name and upon rising from the nearest bed looks supremely satisfied’; see Holly Alpert, Saturday Review, 18 April 1963. 87 Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 70. 88 New York Times, 1978; quoted in Desowitz, James Bond Unmasked, p. 20. 89 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 56. 90 In the DVD commentary on Dr. No, Warner Home Video, 2012, B008OEYAFU, Maxwell recalled how she and Connery discussed their backstory – a brief affair when he was a junior operative and she worked in the typing pool, which ended with a recognition that any attempt at a lasting relationship would break her heart and compromise his position. As with other elements in Bond’s creation, the apparent effortlessness of the scenes belies the hard work and thoughtfulness involved in their creation. 91 See his commentary on the DVD release of Dr. No. M epitomises an ‘imperial archetype’, the colonial district officer; see Jeffrey Richards, Visions of Yesterday, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, especially pp. 114–22. 92 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 75. 93 John Parker, Arise Sir Sean Connery, London: John Blake, 2005, p. 125. 94 Pam Cook and Claire Hines, ‘“Sean Connery Is James Bond”: Re-fashioning British Masculinity in the 1960s’, in Rachel Mosley (ed.), Dress, Culture, Identity, London: BFI Publishing, 2005, pp. 149–51. 95 Balio, United Artists, p. 259. 96 Quoted in Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 189. 97 The Los Angeles Examiner, 3 February 1963, noted that Connery had travelled 14,000 miles in eighteen days to promote the film.

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Notes 277 98 Balio, United Artists, pp. 259–60. 99 Dilys Powell, for instance, thought Dr. No ‘has the air of knowing what it is up to, and that has not been common in British thrillers since the day when Hitchcock took himself off to America’; see Sunday Times, 7 October 1962. Penelope Gilliatt considered that the film’s submerged self-parody and self-conscious irony, its refusal to take itself literally, helped to make a two-dimensional character three-dimensional; see Observer, 7 October 1962. Although Connery’s interpretation of Bond became immensely popular, it was not to everyone’s taste. Kingsley Amis disliked the jokey, parodic elements of the films, which, he thought, destroyed the power of Fleming’s Bond as a Byronic figure, ‘lonely, melancholy, of fine natural physique, which has become ravaged, of similarly fine but ravaged countenance, dark and brooding in expression, of a cold or cynical veneer, above all enigmatic, in possession of a sinister secret’; see The James Bond Dossier, London: Jonathan Cape, 1965, p. 36, original emphasis. Reviewing You Only Live Twice, Gilliatt reflected, ‘I don’t see what more they can possibly do with this Bond; the really adventurous thing might be to reverse the trend and bring back Fleming’s own frayed romantic, the would-be Byron of the Secret Service, dissatisfied and vulnerable’; see Observer, 14 June 1967. However, it is very unlikely that Bond would have achieved anything like the same impact had that interpretation become dominant. 100 Alexander Walker, Evening Standard, 4 October 1962. 101 Stephanie Jones, ‘A Reception Study and Textual Analysis of Masculinities in the James Bond Films 1962–2008’, PhD thesis, University of Aberystwyth, 2012, p. 109. 102 Pat Williams, Daily Telegraph, 7 October 1962. 103 Margaret Hinxman, Daily Herald, 7 October 1962. 104 Donald Zec, Daily Mirror, 6 October 1962. 105 Felix Barker, Evening News, 4 October 1962. 106 Variety, 23 November 1962. 107 New Yorker, 1 June 1963. 108 Time, 31 May 1963. 109 The Times, 5 October 1962. 110 Walker, Hollywood, England, pp. 189–90. In his review of Dr. No, cited above, Walker thought Connery was Irish. 111 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 45. 112 Eunice Gayson recalled how nervous Connery was trying to nail his entrance line and that she was dispatched by Young to take Connery to lunch and make sure he had at least one stiff alcoholic drink; see The First Lady of Bond, Cambridge: Signum Books, 2012, pp. 150–2. Marshall’s comments are in the DVD commentary on Dr. No. 113 David V. Picker, Musts, Maybes and Nevers: A Book About the Movies, North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2013, p. 43. 114 Balio, United Artists, p. 260. A Board of Trade file lists Connery’s total remuneration as £24,325; see ‘Evidence of British Nature of a Film’, National Archives (BT 64/5262). I am grateful to Professor James Chapman for this reference.

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278 Notes 115 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, p. 74. 116 DVD commentary on From Russia with Love, MGM Ultimate Edition, 2006, B000FIKUAM. 117 Walker, Evening Standard, 10 October 1963; Esquire, September 1963. 118 Felix Barker, Evening News, 10 October 1963. 119 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, p. 77. 120 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 80; Bray, Sean Connery, p. 105. Barry Norman suggests a higher figure, reporting that Connery had joined a very exclusive group of British actors – Peter Sellers was the only other member – who can command £100,000 per film; see ‘Bond’s Exclusive Too … at £100,000 a Film’, Daily Mail, 8 May 1964. 121 Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 88. 122 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 76. 123 Quoted in Turner, Goldfinger, p. 188. 124 Quoted in Lee Pfeiffer and David Worrall, The Essential Bond: The Authorized Guide to the World of 007, London: Pan Macmillan, 2003, p. 13. 125 Quoted in Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 102. 126 Derek Prowse thought Bond’s ‘pre-credit arrival was as beautifully calculated as Garbo’s through the train smoke in Anna Karenina’; see Sunday Times, 20 April 1964. 127 In the screenplay Bond’s reply to her question is ‘Doctor’s orders’, a much flatter line, which suggests the ways in which Connery and Hamilton were always looking to sharpen the dialogue; see S6508 Goldfinger – Final Draft Screenplay (Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn), 26 February 1964 (BFI). 128 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 107. 129 Elisabeth Ladenson, ‘Pussy Galore’, in Lindner (ed.), The James Bond Phenomenon, p. 222. 130 Blackman recalled that her ‘strong female persona … substituted for the lesbian aspect of the heroine Pussy, which it had been decided would be understated in the movie’; quoted in Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery: His Life and Films, London: W.H. Allen, 1984, p. 144. 131 Hines, The Playboy and James Bond, p. 149. The partial exception is the Bond Girl Villain, Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi) in Thunderball, who is unrepentantly immune to Bond’s seductive charm, for which, of course, she must die. See Tony W. Garland, ‘“The Coldest Weapon of All”: The Bond Girl Villain in James Bond Films’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 37: 4 (2009), pp. 179–88. How far the later Bond films display a more progressive attitude towards sexual politics is debatable; for an incisive analysis see Estella Tincknell, ‘Double-O Agencies: Femininity, Post-Feminism and the Female Spy’, in Christoph Lindner (ed.), Revisioning 007: James Bond and ‘Casino Royale’, London: Wallflower Press, pp. 99–113. 132 Balio, United Artists, 2009, pp. 262–4. The Jack the Giant Killer comment occurs in Penelope Huston, ‘007’, Sight and Sound, 34: 1 (Winter 1964–65), p. 15. 133 Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 33.

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Notes 279 134 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 58. 135 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 50. 136 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 89. 137 Anthony Carthew, ‘James Bond? No, Sean Connery’, New York Times, 10 May 1964. 138 Quoted in Robert Sellers, Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down: How One Generation of British Actors Changed the World, London: Preface Publishing, 2011, p. 118. 139 Quoted in Ben Fong-Torres, ‘Connery. Sean Connery’, American Film, May 1989. 140 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 119. 141 One should qualify the term ‘global’ because the James Bond films, considered ‘decadent’ and ideologically pernicious, were not released in the Soviet bloc countries until after 1988. 142 See Peter Chambers’s account in the Sunday Express, 18 September 1963. 143 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, pp. 90–2. 144 Sarah Street, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA, New York and London: Continuum, 2002, p. 185. 145 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, p. 45. For other territories see Cork and Scivally, James Bond, pp. 79, 81. 146 Bennett and Woollacott, Bond and Beyond, p. 16. 147 Balio, United Artists, p. 262. 148 Cork and Scivally, James Bond, pp. 82–3. See also Daily Telegraph, 1 March 1965; and Andrew Mulligan, ‘A France Fit for 007s to Live in’, Observer, 28 May 1965. 149 Quoted in Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 145. 150 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, pp. 90–1. 151 See Brian Patton, ‘Derek Flint, Matt Flint, and the Playboy Spies of the 1960s’, in Michele Brittany (ed.), James Bond and Popular Culture: Essays on the Influence of the Fictional Superspy, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014, pp. 209–29. 152 John Parker, Sean Connery, London: Victor Gollancz, 1993, pp. 171–88. 153 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 116. Shelagh Graham gives the figure as $750,000; see ‘Sean Connery Ups the Bond Ante’, Hollywood Citizen News, 25 June 1965. 154 Parker, Arise Sir Sean Connery, pp. 192–3. 155 Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 145; Cilento, My Nine Lives, p. 221. 156 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 132. 157 Variety, 3 January 1971. 158 Quoted in Barry Norman, ‘My Terms for Staying … by 007 James Bond’, Daily Mail, 8 August 1964. 159 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 72. 160 Although You Only Live Twice is shorter, 117 minutes, its running time had been reduced from an original length of four hours, which had delayed the

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280 Notes London premiere by two months; see Cecil Wilson, Daily Mail, 29 December 1965. 161 Bennett and Woollacott, Bond and Beyond, p. 199. 162 Dilys Powell, Sunday Times, 2 January 1966. 163 David Robinson, Financial Times, 31 December 1965. 164 Margaret Hinxman, Sunday Telegraph, 18 June 1967; Ann Pacey, Sun, 13 June 1967. Their judgements were echoed forlornly by Dilys Powell: ‘The machines have taken over at last’, Sunday Times, 18 June 1967. 165 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 193. 166 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, p. 80. 167 Quoted in Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 154. 168 Dahl, brought in after the producers had rejected several treatments by other hands, commented that he had ‘a few script conferences with the producers and Gilbert’ but not Connery and that he was given ‘a precise formula. They said there had to be three women in Bond’s life. The first two get killed and the third one he goes off with’; quoted in Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 152. 169 Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, pp. 154–5. 170 Quoted in Roderick Mann, Sunday Express, 14 February 1965. 171 The producers’ figure is given in James Greenwood, Daily Mail, 29 December 1965. Connery’s takings are my calculation of his salary for each film plus his 5 per cent of Goldfinger’s grosses. 172 Quoted in Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 153. 173 Balio, United Artists, p. 270. 174 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, p. 80. 175 Quoted in Kenneth Passingham, Sean Connery, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983, p. 83. Connery directed Diane Cilento and Robert Hardy in the first production of Ted Allan Herman’s play I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons at the Oxford Playhouse in November 1969, followed by a short provincial tour. For details see Robert Sellers, Sean Connery: A Celebration, London: Robert Hale, 1999, pp. 200–1. 176 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 85. Sellers interviewed the high-ranking UA executive Eric Pleskow, who commented that the ‘Bonds kept us from going bankrupt’; see When Harry Met Cubby, p. 148. 177 Quoted in Andrew Yule, Sean Connery: Neither Shaken Nor Stirred, London: Sphere, 2008 [1992], p. 231. 178 See Balio, United Artists, p. 271. 179 Balio, United Artists, p. 270; Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 153. 180 Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine, New York: Vintage Books, 2009, pp. 140–1. 181 Parker, Sean Connery, p. 225. In 1984 Connery brought a $225 million lawsuit against the Bond producers and UA (now MGM/UA), alleging he had not been paid profit participation money from his outings as Bond in the first five films; he also alleged ‘fraud, deceit, conspiracy, breach of contract’ and ‘infliction

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Notes 281 of emotional distress’; see Hollywood Reporter, 4 September 1984. The final settlement was never made public. 182 Lewis Gilbert, All My Flashbacks, London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2010, pp. 264–5; see also the documentary ‘Bond Wants a Woman They Said … But Three Would Be Better’, Whicker’s World, BBC 2, March 1967. 183 Quoted in Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 142. 184 See Andrew Spicer, ‘Male Stardom in 1960s British Cinema’, in Duncan Petrie, Melanie Williams and Laura Mayne (eds), Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, pp. 11–28. 185 Quoted in Gris and Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number’, p. 165. 186 Quoted in Roderick Mann, Sunday Express, 1 December 1968. 187 Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, p. 15. 188 Quoted in Sellers, When Harry Met Cubby, p. 127. 189 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 136. 190 Richard DeCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1990], p. 89. 191 Andrew Shail, ‘The Series Character and the Star System’, in The Origins of the Film Star System: Persona, Publicity and Economics in Early Cinema, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 259–322. 192 Shail, ‘The Series Character’, p. 310. 193 Shail, ‘The Series Character’, pp. 280, 288, 332. 194 Shail, ‘The Series Character’, pp. 280–1. 195 Shail, ‘The Series Character’, p. 310. 196 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, p. 76. 197 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, pp. 45–6, argues that this decision was influenced by the recent Hollywood trend to ‘upscale’ popular genres, thus producing a series that might have been a ‘B’ feature a decade earlier as a main ‘A’ feature production. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) had demonstrated the potential of spy fiction to become glossy entertainment. 198 Bennett and Woollacott, Bond and Beyond, p. 273. 199 Cook and Hines, ‘“Sean Connery Is James Bond”’, p. 148. 200 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 90. 201 Daily Mail, 16 June 1967. 202 Broccoli with Zec, When the Snow Melts, p. 203; Jaap Verheul, ‘This Never Happened to the Other Fellow: The Fluctuating Stardom of James Bond and George Lazenby’, in Lucy Bolton and Julie Lobalzo Wright (eds), Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 223. 203 Quoted in Mark Edlitz, The Many Lives of James Bond: How the Creators of 007 Have Decoded the Superspy, Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2019, p. 158. 204 Margaret Bilbow, Daily Mirror, 16 December 1969. 205 Ian Christie, Daily Express, 16 December 1969, p. 13. 206 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, p. 121.

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282 Notes 207 Commenting on Connery’s treatment in Brits Go to Hollywood: Sean Connery, David Picker recalled that Broccoli and Saltzman had renegotiated their contract with UA several times because of Bond’s phenomenal success. 208 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, pp. 130–1. Gavin had appeared as a muscular but rather wooden Julius Caesar in Spartacus (1960), another instance of ‘buying the body’. 209 Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 200; Cork and Scivally, James Bond, pp. 126, 131. 210 Picker, Musts, Maybes and Nevers, p. 54. 211 Balio, United Artists, p. 264. 212 Quoted in Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 201. 213 Quoted in Sydney Edwards, Evening Standard, 25 June 1971. 214 Duncan (ed.), The James Bond Archives, p. 196. 215 Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 210. The screenplay in the BFI special collections, a revised first draft, contains substantial sections that were subsequently revised again, possibly in collaboration with Connery or proceeding from his notes. 216 Hamilton’s word was ‘zany’; quoted in Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 204. 217 Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 210. 218 Quoted in Cork and Scivally, James Bond, p. 136. 219 Rissik, The James Bond Man, pp. 67, 109. 220 Chapman, Licence to Thrill, p. 134. 221 Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 19 December 1971. 222 Thomas Berger, Esquire, June 1972; Madeline Harmsworth, Sunday Mirror, 21 July 1972; John Simon, The New Leader, 7 February 1972. 223 Monthly Film Bulletin, 1 January 1972, p. 29. 224 Edgar Morin, The Stars, trans. Richard Howard, London: John Calder, 1960, p. 141. 225 Bennett and Woollacott, Bond and Beyond, pp. 273–4. See also Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987, p. 91. 226 Bennett and Woollacott, Bond and Beyond, p. 42. 227 Bennett and Woollacott, Bond and Beyond, p. 28. 228 Bennett and Woollacott, Bond and Beyond, pp. 57, 29. 229 Bennett and Woollacott, Bond and Beyond, pp. 34–5. 230 Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern America, Oxford: Berg, 2001, p. 159. I have argued elsewhere that Bond was a modern incarnation of the Man About Town, the unencumbered urban bachelor who could be legitimately fashion conscious and hedonistic without effeminacy or narcissism; see Andrew Spicer, ‘Prince Charming in a Top Hat: The Debonair Man-About-Town in British Romantic Musical Comedy’, in Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell (eds), Film’s Moments of Musical Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006, pp. 71–3. 231 ‘“So you’re the famous Simon Templar”: The Saint, Masculinity and Consumption in the Early 1960s’, in Bill Osgerby and Anna Gough-Yates (eds), Action TV:

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Notes 283 Tough-Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks, London: Routledge, 2001, p. 46, quoting H. Gans, ‘Who’s O-O-Oh in America’, Vogue, 15 March 1965, p. 108. 232 Hines, The Playboy and James Bond, especially chapter 3, pp. 58–83. 233 Life, 11 March 1964. 234 Vanessa R. Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 7. 235 Quoted in Patrick McGilligan, ‘Richard Maibaum: A Pretence of Seriousness’, in McGilligan (ed.), Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986, p. 286. 236 See Jay McInerney, Nicholas Foulkes, Neil Norman and Nick Sullivan (1996), Dressed to Kill: James Bond – The Suited Hero, Paris and New York: Flammarion. 237 Cook and Hines, ‘“Sean Connery Is James Bond”’, p. 158. 238 Richard Carpenter, ‘007 and the Myth of the Hero’, Journal of Popular Culture, 1 (Fall 1967), p. 89. 239 Quoted in Robert Ottway, TV Times, 10 August 1972. 240 Quoted in the Film Review Special on Sean Connery, 47, 1 July 2003, p. 17. 241 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 191.

3  In Bondage, 1964–73 1 Quoted in Henry Gris and Sheldon Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number … the Personal File on Sean Connery’, in Sheldon Lane (ed.), For Bond Lovers Only, London: Panther, 1965, p. 166. 2 Tom Hutchinson, Guardian, 28 December 1971. 3 Quoted in Andrew Rissik, The James Bond Man: The Films of Sean Connery, London: Elm Tree Books, 1983, p. 93. 4 Quoted in Dennis Bingham, Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994, p. 17. 5 Robert Sellers, When Harry Met Cubby: The Story of the James Bond Producers, Cheltenham: The History Press, 2019, p. 88. 6 Letter from Graubard and Moskovitz, ‘counsel to Danjaq’, to Geoffrey Stanley Inc. (representing Universal), 31 December 1963, Alfred Hitchcock Papers (hereafter AHP) (MHL). 7 George Cukor, attempting to persuade Connery to appear in Nine Tiger Man, discussed later, commented that Hatton had ‘very little influence over him’; see Cukor to Allan Davis, George Cukor Papers (hereafter GCP) (MHL), 30 March 1967. 8 The role was played with a dull kind of competence by Rod Taylor. It would also have been interesting to see Connery play opposite Julie Christie and Maggie Smith. Christie had been turned down for the role of Honey Rider in Dr. No.

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284 Notes 9 Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films, Stroud: The History Press, 2015, p. 57. Mather had been involved in the scripting of Dr. No. 10 Graham Burton and Tim O’Sullivan, The Cinema of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp. 287–94. 11 David V. Picker, Musts, Maybes and Nevers: A Book About the Movies, North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2013, p. 50. 12 Connery commented that ‘an audience is never safe with [Richardson], you don’t know where he is going next’; quoted in Hutchinson, Guardian, 28 December 1971. I have not uncovered Connery’s salary for this film. 13 This was the type of role played by Stewart Granger a generation earlier; see Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001, pp. 146–8. 14 Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery: His Life and Films, London: W.H. Allen, 1984, p. 131. 15 Eugene Archer, New York Times, 1 October 1964. 16 Wire from Harry Friedman to Hitchcock, 24 September 1963, AHP (MHL). 17 Quoted in Sunday Times, 27 October 1963. 18 Cable from Herman Citron on Hitchcock’s behalf to Saltzman, 14 October 1963, AHP (MHL). 19 Quoted in Gris and Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number’, p. 165. 20 Quoted in Tony Crawley, ‘Sean Connery Part Two’, StarBurst, 43 (1982), p. 39. 21 Quoted in Gordon Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, Films and Filming, March 1974, p. 17. 22 Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock and the Making of a Reputation, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 80. 23 Hitchcock made this remark in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich; see Tony Lee Moral, Hitchcock and the Making of ‘Marnie’, rev. edn, Lanham, MD and London: Scarecrow Press, 2013, pp. 195–6. Hitchcock had told Truffaut that he became interested in the ‘fetish idea, a man wants to go to bed with a thief because she is a thief’; see François Truffaut, Hitchcock, rev. edn, London: Grafton Books, 1986 [1966], p. 464. It is worth noting that Graham’s novel is set in England shortly after the war and has an entirely different social and class milieu. 24 Hitchcock temporarily abandoned making Marnie when his initial choice for the title role, Grace Kelly, pulled out; see Tony Lee Moral, Hitchcock and the Making of ‘Marnie’, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. 23–5. He made The Birds (1963), on the strength of which he felt Hedren could play the role. 25 Grant was mentioned in the initial press speculation about the film; see Denise Richards, ‘The Girl Princess Grace Will Play …’, Evening Standard, 22 March 1962. 26 Quoted in Moral, Hitchcock and the Making of ‘Marnie’ (2002), p. 59. 27 Dilys Powell, Sunday Times, 12 July 1964.

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Notes 285 28 Kapsis, Hitchcock and the Making of a Reputation, p. 84. 29 Moral, Hitchcock and the Making of ‘Marnie’ (2002), p. 159. 30 Kapsis, Hitchcock and the Making of a Reputation, pp. 97–8. 31 Quoted in Los Angeles Times, 10 July 1966, in Kapsis, Hitchcock and the Making of a Reputation, p. 98. 32 Rissik, The James Bond Man, pp. 98–9. 33 Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 464. 34 This is why Hitchcock’s remark to Truffaut that he ‘wasn’t convinced that Sean Connery was a Philadelphia gentleman’ seems oddly obtuse; see Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 301. Mark is clearly a new breed of meritocratic professional in contrast to his patrician father – ‘the old party’. 35 Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, London: Faber and Faber, 1989, p. 187. 36 Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, p. 189. 37 Rebecca Bailin, ‘Feminist Readership, Violence, and Marnie’, Film Reader, 5 (1982), p. 30. 38 Moral, Hitchcock and the Making of ‘Marnie’ (2002), pp. 36–9, 45–6. 39 Joseph Stefano, commentary to the DVD extra, The Trouble with Marnie – Making of, Universal Pictures, 2005, 823 620 4 11. 40 Ian Cameron, ‘The Other Side of Hitchcock’, Spectator, 14 August 1964. 41 Kapsis argues that critics’ annoyance over what was perceived as Hitchcock’s growing pretentiousness was a contributory factor in their hostility; see Robert E. Kapsis, ‘The Historical Reception of Hitchcock’s Marnie’, Journal of Film and Video, 40: 3 (Summer 1988), p. 51. As corroboration, one could cite John Coleman, ‘Seeing Red’, New Statesman, 10 July 1964, who thought the interview with Hitchcock by Huw Weldon for Monitor ‘unusually pontifical, as if he himself were rather in thrall to the startling image of him provided by a few influential French critics’. Coleman thought that in Marnie ‘a considerable entertainer’s talent appears to be wasting itself courting seriousness’. 42 Ann Pacey, Daily Herald, 10 July 1964, my emphasis. 43 Alexander Walker, Evening Standard, 9 July 1964. 44 Quoted in Moral, Hitchcock and the Making of ‘Marnie’ (2002), p. 167. 45 Joel W. Finler gives a figure of $2.3 million in US domestic rentals, against a budget of $2 million, only half the figure for The Birds. He does not give a total for foreign rentals; see Alfred Hitchcock: The Hollywood Years, London: B.T. Batsford, 1992, p. 167. 46 Writing in 1981, Neil Sinyard commented: ‘how many critics at the time acknowledged Connery’s sensational performance in Marnie one of the greatest in a Hitchcock film? How many noticed the skill with which its cool cruelty and wary fascination towards the woman implicitly commented on the chauvinistic attitudes of a creep like Bond? It is a wonderfully sleek, witty, disturbing display’; see ‘Heroic Irony’, Films Illustrated (October 1981), p. 18. Lack of recognition of Connery’s importance to the film still persists. There is, for instance, no discussion of Connery’s performance in Murray Pomerance’s monograph, Marnie, London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

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286 Notes 47 Connery had starred in another Rigby play, The Boy with the Meat Axe, in 1958 on ITV’s Armchair Theatre; see Chapter 1. 48 Christopher Bray, Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, pp. 111–12. 49 In the most moving tribute that followed Connery’s death, his close friend Jackie Stewart disclosed that near the end Connery had asked Stewart to watch The Hill with him, only to forget so that they watched it again the following day. It was obviously a film that Connery cared about deeply. 50 Quoted in Gris and Lane, ‘The Man Who’s Got 007’s Number’, p. 166. 51 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, Playboy, November 1965, p. 80. 52 Hyman’s title and a brief biography are given on the MGM Studio Production Notes for The Hill (BFI). 53 Evening Standard, 30 October 1964. See also Stephen E. Bowles, Sidney Lumet: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1979, p. 20. 54 Private correspondence, 3 December 2020. 55 See Frank R. Cunningham, Sidney Lumet: Film and the Literary Vision, Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. 56 Quoted in Kenneth M. Chanko, ‘Interview with Sidney Lumet’, Films in Review, 35 (1984), p. 451. 57 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, p. 78. 58 Quoted in Evening Standard, 30 October 1964. 59 Cunningham, Sidney Lumet, p. 201. 60 Quoted in ‘My View of “The Hill”’ (BFI microfiche for The Hill). 61 Harry Andrews, an experienced classical actor, won the American National Board of Review of Motion Pictures award for Best Supporting Actor. 62 Quoted in Bowles, Sidney Lumet, p. 20. 63 Quoted in Ann Pacey, Sun, 7 October 1964. 64 Quoted in ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, pp. 78–9. 65 Bowles, Sidney Lumet, p. 20. 66 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, p. 78. 67 Leonard Mosley, Daily Express, 18 June 1965. 68 Michael Thornton, Sunday Express, 20 June 1965. 69 Ann Pacey, Sun, 7 October 1964. 70 Quoted in Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, New York: The Citadel Press, 2001, p. 94. 71 It has several similarities to David Mercer’s Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment, released two months earlier in April 1966. 72 See Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 96; and Bray, Sean Connery, pp. 129–30. 73 A Fine Madness’s US domestic gross was $8,000,000; see ‘Big Rental Pics of 1966’, Variety, 4 January 1967, p. 8. 74 New York Times, 30 June 1966. 75 Leonard Mosley, Daily Express, 20 July 1966. 76 The Times, 21 July 1966. 77 Monthly Film Bulletin, 1 January 1966. 78 Patrick McGilligan refers to the project in his biography of Cukor but with Robert Shaw as the intended star and no mention of Connery; see George

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Notes 287 Cukor: A Double Life, London: Faber and Faber, 1991, pp. 293–4, 311. For a discussion of the importance of considering unmade films see the two collections: Dan North (ed.), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008; and James Fenwick, Kieran Foster and David Eldridge (eds), Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Context of Unmade Films, London: Bloomsbury, 2020. 79 Lesley Blanch, The Nine Tiger Man: A Tale of Low Behaviour in High Places, London: Collins, 1965, pp. 132–3. 80 Jeffrey Richards, ‘Imperial Heroes for a Post-Imperial Age: Films and the End of Empire’, in Paul Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 143. 81 For further discussion of this issue see Prem Chowdhry, Colonial India and the Making of Empire: Image, Ideology and Identity, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 258–66 and passim. 82 The film was a remake of Fox’s 1939 version, The Rains Came, in which the white American star Tyrone Power had played the role. 83 Unsigned notes, 12 March 1967, GCP (MHL). 84 Telex from Lyons to Owen McLean, 17 October 1966, GCP (MHL). 85 Cable from Zanuck to Hatton, 21 October 1966, GCP (MHL). 86 Lyons to McLean, 20 February 1967, GCP (MHL). 87 Cable from McLean to Lyons, 20 February 1967, GCP (MHL). 88 Letter from Cukor to Allan Davis, 30 March 1967, GCP (MHL). 89 These were William Howard Russell’s My Diary in India; Richard Collier’s The Great Indian Mutiny; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The First Indian War of Independence 1857–1859. 90 Letter from Cukor to Allan Davis, 30 March 1967, GCP (MHL). Cukor continued to nurture hopes that Nine Tiger Man would be made, with Shaw as the male lead, but the escalating budget projection of $12 million meant it was always considered too risky; see McGilligan, George Cukor, p. 311. 91 Three male actors had won Oscars playing in Cukor films: James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (1940), Ronald Colman in A Double Life (1947) and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1964). 92 This is mentioned several times in the Lyons–McClean correspondence though cursorily dismissed by Cukor – ‘they all want to be directors’; see letter to Davis, 30 March 1967, GCP (MHL). 93 Connery also turned down the role of Blow-Up (1966) but for script reasons as the one shown to him by Michelangelo Antonioni was ‘seven pages long and hidden in a Woodbine packet’; quoted in Lindsay Mackie, Glasgow Herald, 17 December 1983. 94 Beau L’Amour, ‘Postscript’, in Louis L’Amour, Shalako, New York: Bantam Books, 2019, pp. 213–14, 224. 95 Bob Herzberg, Shooting Scripts: From Pulp Western to Film, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2005, p. 123. Bardot was paid $400,000 and 12.5 per cent of the profits; see New York Times, 1 April 1968. 96 See Roderick Mann, Sunday Express, 30 July 1967. 97 Herzberg, Shooting Scripts, pp. 101–6.

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288 Notes 98 L’Amour, Shalako, p. 1. 99 See Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 106. 100 John Parker, Sean Connery, London: Victor Gollancz, 1993, p. 210. 101 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 103. 102 Roger Ebert, Chicago Tribune, 21 November 1968. 103 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 149. 104 Victor Davis, Daily Express, 21 September 1968. 105 T. Quinn Curtis, International Herald Tribune, 14/15 December 1968. 106 Variety, 31 May 1973, p. 3. 107 Variety, 21 January 1970, p. 18. 108 See letter from Ritt to Connery, 27 October 1967, Martin Ritt Papers (hereafter MRP) (MHL). 109 Letter from Hatton to Ritt, 17 November 1967, MRP (MHL). 110 See Carlton Jackson, Picking Up the Tab: The Life and Movies of Martin Ritt, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994, pp. 102–6; and Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 111 Gabriel Miller, The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2000, p. 122. 112 John Parker, Arise Sir Sean Connery, London: John Blake, 2005, p. 218. 113 Letter from Ritt to Connery, 27 October 1967, MRP (MHL). 114 Quoted in Miller, The Films of Martin Ritt, p. 112. 115 Miller, The Films of Martin Ritt, pp. 117–18. 116 It has to be said that although Harris had been a professional rugby player, Connery looks much the fitter of the two. 117 Communikon Audience Test Reports, MRP (MHL). 118 Miller, The Films of Martin Ritt, p. 121. 119 Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 20 November 1970. 120 The Molly Maguires was number sixteen in the list of forty major flops of the 1960s and 1970s; see David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970–1979, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000, p. 306. 121 Quoted in Miller, The Films of Martin Ritt, pp. 120–1. On another occasion Ritt lamented: ‘I should have made it simpler for them. They should have understood that Kehoe … was really the hero of the film, but they didn’t’; quoted in Lyn Goldfarb and Anatoli Ilyashov, ‘Working Class Hero: An Interview with Martin Ritt’, Cineaste, 18: 4 (January1992), p. 21. 122 Quoted in Margaret Hinxman, Sunday Telegraph, 15 May 1970. 123 Quoted in Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, p. 17. 124 Derek Malcolm, Guardian, 14 May 1970. 125 Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 7 February 1970. 126 Time, 23 February 1970. 127 Tom Milne, Observer, 17 May 1970. See also Hinxman, Sunday Telegraph, 15 May 1970; David Robinson, Financial Times, 22 May 1970; and Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times, 12 March 1970.

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Notes 289 128 The film forms part of Ritt’s exploration of the consequences of industrialisation and mechanisation on the formation of modern America; see Goldfarb and Ilyashov, ‘Working Class Hero’, p. 21. 129 Connery had taken a cameo role as Roald Amundsen in The Red Tent (1969), who appears as one of the witnesses in the trial of Umberto Nobile (Peter Finch). This ambitious and hugely expensive Italian–Soviet co-production recreated the tragic failure of Nobile’s 1928 Arctic expedition. Unfortunately the film was a box-office disaster that did little for the reputations of anyone involved. See Paula A. Michaels, ‘Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Red Tent: A Case Study in International Coproduction across the Iron Curtain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26: 3 (August 2006), pp. 311–25. 130 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 116. 131 Kim Newman, ‘The Caper Film’, in Phil Hardy (ed.), The BFI Companion to Crime, London: Cassell/BFI, 1997, p. 71. 132 Nina Hibbin, Morning Star, 17 December 1971. 133 George Melly, Observer, 19 December 1971. 134 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 117. 135 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 113. 136 Quoted in Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, p. 17. Hopkins conceived the play as his opportunity to probe a policeman’s psychology and the particular pressures that assail ‘those whom society designates as protectors’, more deeply than in an episode of Z Cars, the long-running television series on which he had honed his writing skills; quoted in Gordon Gow, ‘What’s Real? What’s True?’, in Joanna E. Rapf (ed.), Sidney Lumet Interviews, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2006, p. 151. 137 Quoted in CinemaTV Today, 8 April 1972, p. 8. 138 Hatton, in becoming a freelance producer, turned over his agency duties to Donald Bradley; see Hollywood Reporter, 24 January 1972. Before the deal with UA, Connery had announced his intention to form his own production company in partnership with Columbia to make four films; he was to have acted in two, directed one and produced the other; see Evening Standard, 14 April 1968. 139 Quoted in Cunningham, Sidney Lumet, p. 210. 140 Quoted in UA Studio Production Notes (MHL); Sydney Edwards, Evening Standard, 24 March 1972. 141 As Variety’s reviewer noted, 16 May 1973, one of the young boys who has been sexually abused ‘looks amazingly like Connery’, suggesting that Johnson is also a victim. 142 Paul Newland, British Films of the 1970s, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, p. 199. 143 Adrian Schober, ‘“The Thoughts in Your Head”: The Pedophile as “Other” in Sidney Lumet’s The Offence’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 35: 3 (2007), p. 139. 144 Quoted in Edwards, Evening Standard, 24 March 1972, original emphasis. 145 Alexander Walker, Evening Standard, 11 January 1973.

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290 Notes 146 David Robinson, Financial Times, 12 January 1973. 147 Edwards, Evening Standard, 24 March 1972. 148 Stephen Farber, New York Times, 3 June 1973, p. 11. 149 Farber, New York Times, 3 June 1973, p. 11. 150 Quoted in Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, p. 17. Connery greatly admired Ingmar Bergman and gave the example of Cries and Whispers because of its subject matter: the release of long-repressed emotions when two sisters visit their sibling who is dying of cancer. 151 Quoted in Cunningham, Sidney Lumet, p. 213. 152 Edwards, Evening Standard, 24 March 1972. Connery also expressed an interest in making a comedy, which failed to materialise; see John Robbins, ‘Connery Out of Bondage’, Evening News, 30 December 1972. 153 See Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography, New York: Simon Schuster, 1990. 154 Quoted in Andrew Yule, Sean Connery: Neither Shaken Nor Stirred, London: Sphere, 2008 [1992], p. 139. 155 Andrew Spicer, ‘Male Stardom in 1960s British Cinema’, in Duncan Petrie, Melanie Williams and Laura Mayne (eds), Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, pp. 22–4. 156 Another glimpse was provided by the first episode of the three-part The Male of the Species (ITV, 1969), whose proceeds went to the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, in which Connery plays a lying, self-centred and womanising working-class father who bullies his daughter (Anna Calder-Marshall). 157 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 116. 158 Tony Palmer, Spectator, 8 January 1972. 159 Christine Becker, ‘Paul Newman: Superstardom and Anti-Stardom’, in Pamela Robertson Wojcik (ed.), New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012, p. 30.

4  Freelance star, 1974–83 1 Marx, Karl, Theories of Surplus-Value, I, trans. Jack Cohen, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972 [1863], p. 410. 2 Quoted in Iain Johnstone, ‘A Tower of Power’, Sunday Times, 22 April 1990. 3 Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Harrap, 1986 [1974], pp. 441–51. For informative overviews see Andrew Higson, ‘A Diversity of Film Practices: Renewing British Cinema in the 1970s’, in Bart Moore-Gilbert (ed.), The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure?, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 216–39; and Justin Smith, ‘Glam, Spam and Uncle Sam: Funding Diversity in 1970s British Film Production’, in Robert Shail (ed.), Seventies British Cinema, London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 67–80. 4 David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970–1979, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000, pp. 3, 21.

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Notes 291 5 Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 47. See also Thomas Schatz, Old Hollywood/New Hollywood: Ritual, Art, and Industry, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983, pp. 191–2. 6 Cook, Lost Illusions, pp. 2–5, 15, 21, 25. 7 Cook, Lost Illusions, pp. 9–24; Thomas Schatz, ‘The Studio System and Conglomerate Hollywood’, in Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (eds), The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 13–42. 8 Denise Mann, Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover, Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, especially pp. 34–67. See also Paul McDonald, ‘The Star System: The Production of Hollywood Stardom in the Post-Studio Era’, in McDonald and Wasko (eds), The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, pp. 167–81; Paul McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 87–122; and Brooks E. Hefner, ‘Milland Alone: The End of the System, Post-Studio Stardom, and the Total Auteur’, Journal of Film and Video, 66: 4 (Winter 2014), pp. 3–18. 9 Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960–1969, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2001, p. 19. 10 Mann, Hollywood Independents, p. 23; Monaco, The Sixties, p. 26. 11 Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine, New York: Vintage Books, 2009, pp. 530–8. See also Martin Shingler, Star Studies: A Critical Guide, London: BFI/ Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 110. 12 Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 340; Mann, Hollywood Independents, p. 211. 13 Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 3. 14 Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 339. See also Monaco, The Sixties, pp. 20–3. 15 Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 348. 16 David Pirie, ‘The Deal’, in Pirie (ed.), Anatomy of the Movies, New York: Macmillan, 1981, p. 47. 17 Mann, Hollywood Independents, p. 10. 18 Mann, Hollywood Independents, pp. 20–1. 19 Mann, Hollywood Independents, p. 38; Pirie, ‘The Deal’, p. 40; McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, pp. 99–107. Both McDonald and Mann note that agents were only one in a range of intermediaries that included lawyers, personal managers and publicists. 20 Mann, Hollywood Independents, pp. 63–4. For detailed accounts of Wasserman see Dennis McDougal, Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood, New York: Da Capo Press, 2001; and Connie Bruck, When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence, New York: Random House, 2004. 21 Mann, Hollywood Independents, p. 23. 22 Basinger, The Star Machine, p. 526. 23 Walker, Hollywood, England, p. 93. For other British stars’ failed efforts to sustain production companies see Andrew Spicer, ‘Male Stardom in 1960s British Cinema’, in Duncan Petrie, Melanie Williams and Laura Mayne (eds),

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292 Notes Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, p. 24. 24 Richard Dyer MacCann, Hollywood in Transition, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962, p. 57. 25 Alexander Walker, Stardom: The Hollywood Phenomenon, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974 [1970], p. 320. 26 Quoted in Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery: His Life and Films, London: W.H. Allen, 1984, p. 217. 27 Andrew Yule, Sean Connery: Neither Shaken Nor Stirred, London: Sphere, 2008 [1992], p. 338. 28 See Diane Jacobs, Hollywood Renaissance: The New Generation of Filmmakers and Their Works, New York: Delta, 1980; David A. Cook, ‘Auteur Cinema and the “Film Generation” in 1970s Hollywood’, in Jon Lewis (ed.), The New American Cinema, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 11–37; Daniel Smith-Rowsey, Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: Representing Rough Rebels, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; and Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis (eds), The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting America’s Most Celebrated Era, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 29 Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 30 Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 251, 269, 317–19. 31 Quoted in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ’n’ Drugs ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, London: Bloomsbury, 1998, p. 22. 32 Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate and Financial History, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1980, p. 257. In Adventures of a Suburban Boy, London: Faber and Faber, 2003, p. 204, John Boorman gives the figure as $1 million. 33 Boorman, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, p. 207. 34 Quoted in Philip Strick, ‘Zardoz and John Boorman’, Sight and Sound, 43: 2 (Spring 1974), pp. 76–7. 35 Quoted in Gordon Gow, ‘A Secretive Person’, Films and Filming, March 1974, p. 11. The salary figure is taken from Boorman, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, p. 208, but in his DVD commentary on Zardoz, Twentieth Century-Fox Home Entertainment, 2015, F1-SGB 01208, Boorman mentions Connery’s salary as $200,000. 36 John Boorman, ‘Introduction’, in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 1. 37 Boorman, DVD commentary on Zardoz. 38 John Boorman with Bill Stair, Zardoz, London: Pan Books, 1974, p. 120. 39 Boorman, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, p. 208. 40 Boorman, ‘Introduction’, in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 1. 41 Quoted in Alexander Walker’s review of Zardoz, Evening Standard, 15 February 1974.

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Notes 293 42 Michel Ciment, John Boorman, London: Faber and Faber, 1986, p. 153. 43 Nora Sayle, New York Times, 18 February 1974; Marsha Kinder, ‘Zardoz’, Film Quarterly, 27: 4 (Summer 1974), p. 49, called it a ‘fascist coup’. 44 Jan Dawson, Monthly Film Bulletin, 1 January 1974, pp. 83–4. 45 Solomon, Twentieth Century-Fox, p. 257. 46 Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979; Cook, ‘Auteur Cinema and the “Film Generation” in 1970s Hollywood’. 47 Quoted in Richard Thompson, ‘Stoked – Interview with John Milius’, Film Comment, 12: 4 (July–August 1976), p. 3. 48 Alfio Leotta, The Cinema of John Milius, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019, pp. 15–16, 64. 49 Quoted in Christopher Bray, Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 191. For Sharif as cosmopolitan star see Vanessa R. Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 189–92. 50 Quoted in Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, New York: The Citadel Press, 2001, p. 140. 51 Thompson, ‘Stoked’, p. 11. 52 Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2nd edn, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 120–4. 53 Milius bases Raisuli’s sententious diction on Rosita Forbes’s account. For example: ‘Do you see the man at the well, and how he draws the water? When one bucket empties, the other fills. It is so with the world. At present you are full of power, but you are spilling it slowly and wastefully, and Islam is lapping up the drops that fall from your bucket’; see El Raisuli: The Sultan of the Mountains, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1924, p. 155. 54 Richard Barkeley, Sunday Express, 26 June 1975. 55 Kathleen Murphy, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, Film Comment, 33: 3 (May–June 1997), pp. 37–8. 56 Thompson, ‘Stoked’, p. 12. 57 Derek Elley, The Epic Film: Myth and History, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 163–4. 58 Alfio Leotta, ‘“I Love the Smell of Napalm in the Morning”: Violence and Nostalgia in the Cinema of John Milius’, Jump Cut, 57 (Fall 2016), n.p. 59 Jay Cocks, Time, 9 June 1975. 60 Derek Malcolm, Guardian, 26 June 1975. 61 Quoted in Roger Sterrit, ‘The Wind and the Lion – a Look Behind the MGM Epic’, Christian Science Monitor, 28 July 1976, p. 26. For a dismissal of Milius as a right-wing ‘romantic fascist’ see Cook, Lost Illusions, pp. 32–3. 62 Leotta, The Cinema of John Milius, pp. 68–9. 63 Andrew Rissik, The James Bond Man: The Films of Sean Connery, London: Elm Tree Books, 1983, p. 124.

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294 Notes 64 Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King, London: Penguin Books, 2011 [1888], p. 99. 65 Quoted in Jim Beckerman, ‘On Adapting “The Most Audacious Thing in Fiction”’, in Michael Klein and Gillian Parker (eds), The English Novel and the Movies, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981, p. 180. 66 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 146. 67 John Huston, An Open Book, London: Macmillan, 1980, p. 352. For a detailed account see James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull, Projecting Empire: Imperialism and British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris, 2009, pp. 153–67. 68 Cook, Lost Illusions, pp. 326, 368. 69 Variety, 25 January 1978. 70 Interview in Sean Connery: In His Own Words, produced and directed by Pete Stanton, BBC Scotland, 2015. 71 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 203. 72 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 146. 73 This trope has many similarities to The Molly Maguires; at one point direction was to be passed on to Martin Ritt; see Chapman and Cull, Projecting Empire, p. 160. 74 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 149. 75 Huston, An Open Book, p. 358. 76 Michael Caine, What’s It All About?, London: Arrow, 1992, pp. 397–8. 77 For the imperial models Kipling had in mind see Chapman and Cull, Projecting Empire, p. 154. Nigel Joseph argues that the most probable allusion is to Robert Clive, the most illustrious and audacious but also acquisitive and politically ruthless of the eighteenth-century East India Company ‘nabobs’; see ‘Robert Clive and Imperial Modernity’, Comparative Literature and Culture, 12: 2 (2010), pp. 1–8. 78 Quoted in Rolling Stone, 19 February 1981; reprinted in Robert Emmet Long (ed.), John Huston Interviews, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001, p. 104. 79 For Alexander’s self-fashioning see Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 32, 35, 38, 40. There is an additional irony in that playing Alexander in Adventure Story was one of Connery’s most prestigious television roles. 80 ‘[E]veryone was, in a consciously fanciful sense, a man who would be king … everyone in the British empire had half-acknowledged dreams of that sort’, Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, p. 284. 81 Nigel Andrews, Financial Times, 19 December 1975. 82 Margaret Hinxman, Daily Mail, 16 December 1975. 83 Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 5 January 1976, original emphasis. 84 Jeffrey Richards, ‘Imperial Heroes for a Post-Imperial Age: Films and the End of Empire’, in Paul Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 143. 85 Chapman and Cull, Projecting Empire, p. 164. 86 Variety, 25 January 1978.

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Notes 295 87 Variety, 8 March 1978. 88 Variety, 2 August 1978. 89 See John Parker, Arise Sir Sean Connery, London: John Blake, 2005, pp. 261–5. Parker gives a useful overview of studio sharp practices in this period. See also Ivor Davis and Sally Ogle Davis, ‘Hollywood’s New Star Wars and the Missing Millions’, New York Times, 27 October 1984. 90 Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 91 James Goldman, ‘Introduction’ to the published screenplay, Robin and Marian, New York: Bantam Books, 1976, p. 21, my emphasis. 92 See Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 158. Connery had earlier turned down the part of Little John; see Goldman, Robin and Marian, p. 41. 93 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 155, original emphasis; see Jeffrey Richards, ‘Sir Ridley Scott and the Rebirth of the Historical Epic’, in Andrew B.R. Elliott (ed.), The Return of the Epic Film: Genre, Aesthetics and History in the Twenty-First Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 32; and Stephen Knight, The Politics of Myth, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2015, p. 112. 94 Callan, Sean Connery, p. 218. 95 Quoted in Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 162. 96 Goldman, who was on set throughout the production, appreciated Lester’s mode of working because the actors ‘never know which way to look or if they’re on camera or not. It tends to raise the interior intensity of performance. It’s a bit like being surrounded by an invisible enemy: you have to be vividly alert and alive all the time’, Robin and Marian, p. 52. 97 Quoted in Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 163. 98 Frank Rich, New York Post, 20 April 1976. 99 Neil Sinyard, The Films of Richard Lester, London: Croom Helm, 1985, p. 124. 100 Gordon Gow, ‘Robin and Marian’, Films and Filming, June 1976, p. 28. 101 The characteristic economy Connery and Lester introduced can be gauged by comparison with Goldman’s screenplay where the passage runs: ‘We’ll have a fine time in the woods. You’ll tend me till I’m well again and then great battles, great days to come. We’ll have a life to sing about’, Robin and Marian, p. 182. 102 Sinyard, The Films of Richard Lester, p. 124. 103 Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, 29 March 1976. 104 Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 21 April 1976. 105 Rich, New York Post, 20 April 1976. 106 Spectator, 12 June 1976. 107 Scott Allan Noble, Robin Hood: A Cinematic History of the English Outlaw and His Scottish Counterparts, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2008, pp. 158–60. 108 Quoted in Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 165. 109 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 156. 110 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 208.

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296 Notes 111 The Numbers, www.the-numbers.com/movie/Robin-and-Marian#tab=summary, accessed 20 September 2020. Unfortunately the figures for its European gross are not available. 112 Margaret Hinxman, Daily Mail, 16 December 1975. 113 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 124. 114 Quoted in Michael Freedland, Sean Connery: A Biography, London: Orion, 1994, p. 290. 115 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 173. Selinger’s strategy had been formed whilst working with Lew and Leslie Grade before setting up his own agency. Very little has been written about Selinger; for a brief career overview see the obituary by Tom Vallance in the Independent, 6 February 1998, www.independent.co.uk/ news/obituaries/obituary-dennis-selinger-1143120.html, accessed 15 November 2020. 116 Quoted in Freedland, Sean Connery, p. 289. 117 It had a very substantial budget by British standards of $1,440,000; see Brian Bell, ‘Can Film-Makers Carry On?’, Observer, 11 August 1974, p. 11. 118 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 136. 119 Paul Moody, EMI Films and the Limits of British Cinema, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p. 137. 120 Quoted in Yule, Sean Connery, p. 205. 121 The other was Five Days One Summer (1982). 122 Yule, Sean Connery, p. 205. 123 Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 65, gives a figure of $4.2 million for the box-office returns as against negative costs of $21 million. This deficit of over $14 million made Meteor ‘one of the decade’s biggest losers’ (p. 257). For Connery’s salary details see Yule, Sean Connery, p. 224. For comparative star salaries at this time see Paul Kerr, ‘Stars and Stardom’, in Pirie (ed.), Anatomy of the Movies, pp. 110–11. 124 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 169. 125 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, pp. 169, 171. 126 Quoted in Roderick Mann, ‘Connery: Bonded for Life’, Los Angeles Times, 23 March 1980, p. 33. 127 Jeanine Basinger, The World War Two Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003, pp. 181–91. 128 See A.T. McKenna, ‘Joseph E. Levine and A Bridge Too Far (1977): A Producer’s Labour of Love’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 31: 2 (June 2011), pp. 211–27. 129 Quoted in Iain Johnstone, The Arnhem Report: The Story Behind ‘A Bridge Too Far’, London: Star Books, 1977, p. 120. 130 Johnstone, The Arnhem Report, p. 33. 131 Quoted in Parker, Arise Sir Sean Connery, p. 271. 132 Quoted in Johnstone, The Arnhem Report, p. 25. 133 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 210. Sally Dux, Richard Attenborough, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, p. 78, quotes a figure of $100,000 for Bogarde’s salary.

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Notes 297 134 McKenna, ‘Joseph E. Levine and A Bridge Too Far’, p. 215. 135 For the importance of the Japanese market see Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 21. For stars’ salaries see Victor Davis, ‘How the Bridge at Arnhem Came to Be Paved with Gold’, Daily Express, 7 February 1977. 136 Quoted in Ben Fong-Torres, ‘Connery. Sean Connery’, American Film, May 1989, quoted in Bray, Sean Connery, p. 321, n. 3. 137 Quoted in Alan Hirschberg, interview with Connery, undated (MHL). 138 Quoted in Johnstone, The Arnhem Report, p. 126. 139 In Johnstone’s account, Urquhart expresses his general satisfaction with Operation Market Garden: ‘I don’t think it was a folly at all. It was a very good idea that might easily have come off. But circumstances worked against it’; see The Arnhem Report, p. 171. 140 Dux, Richard Attenborough, pp. 73, 86–9. 141 Screen International, 24/31 December 1977, p. 1. 142 Quoted in Johnstone, The Arnhem Report, p. 142. 143 Philip French, Observer, 24 June 1977. 144 Alexander Walker, Evening Standard, 23 June 1977. 145 See Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 177. 146 Sinyard, The Films of Richard Lester, p. 146. 147 Alan Brien, Sunday Times, 10 February 1980. 148 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 178. 149 Quoted in John Brosnan, ‘Lester’s Progress’, Sight and Sound, 52: 3 (Summer 1983), p. 197. 150 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 177. 151 See Mann, ‘Connery: Bonded for Life’, p. 33. 152 Quoted in Tony Crawley, ‘Sean Connery Part Two’, StarBurst, 43 (1982), p. 40. 153 Arthur Thirkell, Daily Worker, 15 February 1980. 154 The Numbers, www.the-numbers.com/movie/Cuba-(1979)#tab=summary, accessed 14 December 2020. 155 Quoted in Robert Slater, Ovitz: The Inside Story of Hollywood’s Most Controversial Power-Broker, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997, p. 94. 156 Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 346. 157 Quoted in Frank Rose, The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business, New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 94. 158 Slater, Ovitz, p. 67. 159 Quoted in Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films, Stroud: The History Press, 2015, p. 18. See also Stephen Singular, Power to Burn: Michael Ovitz and the Business of Show Business, Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane Press, 1996, p. 214. 160 Slater, Ovitz, p. 95. 161 See Yule, Sean Connery, p. 241. 162 Michael Ovitz, Who Is Michael Ovitz?, London: W.H. Allen, 2018, p. 87. 163 Ovitz, Who Is Michael Ovitz?, p. 87. 164 Ovitz, Who Is Michael Ovitz?, p. 89.

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298 Notes 165 Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 336–40. 166 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 188. 167 Crawley, ‘Sean Connery Part Two’, p. 39. 168 Quoted in Crawley, ‘Sean Connery Part Two’, p. 39. 169 Quoted in The Ladd Company Studio Production Notes for Outland (MHL). 170 Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 26 June 1981. 171 Richard Corliss, Time, 1 June 1981. 172 Crawley, ‘Sean Connery Part Two’, p. 35. 173 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 8. 174 Quoted in Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 185. 175 Quoted in Yule, Sean Connery, p. 255. 176 Quoted in John Parker, Sean Connery, London: Victor Gollancz, 1993, p. 194. 177 Vincent Canby, New York Times, 16 April 1982. 178 Box Office Mojo, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0084920/?ref_=bo_ se_r_1, accessed 17 November 2021. Tom Milne in the Monthly Film Bulletin, 1 January 1982, p. 270, described it as a film ‘[a]pparently unable to decide whether it means to be a political tract, thriller, satire, documentary or plain disaster movie, and solving the problem by cramming everything in regardless’. 179 Quoted in Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 186. 180 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 197. 181 Letter from Peter Beale at the Ladd Company to Ray Kurtzman at CAA, 3 October 1981, Fred Zinnemann Papers (MHL). 182 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 197. 183 Variety, 31 December 1981. 184 Rissik, The James Bond Man, p. 187. 185 Quoted in Margaret Hinxman, ‘Connery Back to Bondage’, Mail on Sunday You Magazine, 21 November 1982, p. 10. 186 Robert Sellers, The Battle for Bond, Sheffield: Tomahawk Press, 2007, p. 118. 187 Sellers, The Battle for Bond, pp. 173–4. See also Kurt Loder, ‘Great Scot’, Rolling Stone, 27 October 1983, pp. 17–19. 188 Quoted in Roderick Mann, ‘The Snag that Could Kill off a New Bond Film’, Sunday Express, 11 March 1979. 189 Gordon Blair, ‘Battle of the Bonds’, Sunday Mirror, 17 December 1978. 190 Comments by McClory in Brits Go to Hollywood: Sean Connery, ITN Factual, 2003. 191 Sellers, The Battle for Bond, p. 180; Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 362. 192 Roger Parsons, ‘Muckraker’, Time Out, 10 June 1983. 193 Quoted in Tony Crawley, ‘Interview with Connery’, StarBurst, 42 (1982), p. 63. 194 See Aljean Harmetz, New York Times, 2 November 1980. 195 Parker, Sean Connery, pp. 313–14. 196 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 206.

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Notes 299 197 See Kerschner’s DVD commentary on Never Say Never Again, NSNA, 2010, M122211. Bond wears ordinary-looking sports jackets rather than the ‘devastating or arresting tailoring’ that characterised his 1960s incarnation; see Sellers, The Battle for Bond, p. 181. 198 Sellers, The Battle for Bond, p. 198. 199 Jon Nordheimer, New York Times, 20 January 1983. 200 Quoted in Lee Goldberg, ‘Bond vs. Bond’, Cinefantastique, April–May 1983. 201 For discussion of the initial screenplay see ‘The Big Gamble’, DVD extra for Never Say Never Again, NSNA, 2010, M122211. Connery had approached Tom Mankiewicz to write the screenplay, but out of loyalty to Broccoli, he declined. He did offer some suggestions once the production was under way; see Mark Edlitz, The Many Lives of James Bond: How the Creators of 007 Have Decoded the Superspy, Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2019, p. 57. 202 Quoted in Margaret Hinxman, ‘My Secret Bond’, Daily Mail, 17 October 1983. 203 See Edlitz, The Many Lives of James Bond, p. 66. 204 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 226. 205 Quoted in Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 365. 206 Hinxman, ‘My Secret Bond’. 207 Connery enlisted Peggy Spencer, Rudolph Nureyev’s choreographer, to hone the sequence; see Callan, Sean Connery, p. 222. 208 Nick Roddick, Times Educational Supplement, 23 December 1983, p. 16. 209 Variety, 1 October 1983. 210 John Coleman, New Statesman, 16 December 1983, p. 51. 211 William Russell, Glasgow Herald, 17 December 1983, p. 8. 212 Janet Maslin, New York Times, 18 October 1983, p. 13. 213 See, inter alia, ‘Sean Is Your Premium Bond’, a selection of readers’ responses, Daily Express, 8 December 1983, p. 7. 214 Sellers, The Battle for Bond, p. 200. 215 Weekly Variety, 12 October 1983; Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 372. 216 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 249. 217 Variety, 30 October 1985. 218 Variety, 14 January 1985, pp. 1, 72. 219 Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 373. 220 James Horowitz, ‘Sean Connery: Portrait in Raw Masculinity’, Cosmopolitan, January 1982, pp. 158, 160–1, 188–9. 221 Gilliam had originally included the line in the script, ‘when the Greek warrior removes his helmet he reveals himself to be none other than Sean Connery or an actor of equal but cheaper stature’, as something of a joke. He was amazed when producer Denis O’Brien persuaded Connery to take the role just before he began filming Outland; see Bob McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools: The Art and Films of Terry Gilliam, London: Orion, 1999, p. 90. 222 Rissik, The James Bond Man, pp. 119, 169. 223 Neil Sinyard, ‘Heroic Irony’, Films Illustrated (October 1981), p. 18.

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300 Notes 224 Sinyard makes a similar point; see ‘Heroic Irony’, p. 18. See also Rissik, The James Bond Man, pp. 133, 167–8, 171, 183. R. Barton Palmer comments that Heston often played roles ‘with divine sanction determining action’; see ‘Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck: Organization Men’, in Palmer (ed.), Larger Than Life: Movie Stars of the 1950s, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2010, p. 51. 225 Michael Wood, America in the Movies: Or ‘Santa Maria, It Had Slipped My Mind’, London: Secker & Warburg, 1975, p. 173. 226 Rich, New York Post, 20 April 1976. 227 James Morrison, ‘Introduction: Stardom in the 1970s’, in Morrison (ed.), Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010, p. 2. 228 See the table of ‘bankable stars 1970–79’, in Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 339. 229 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 184. 230 Cook, Lost Illusions, pp. 340–1.

5  Ageing star, 1984–90 1 Quoted in Nigel Andrews, ‘A Pin-Up Who Acts His Age’, Financial Times Weekend, 6 April 1991, p. 34. 2 Michael Crichton, ‘Sean Connery: A Propensity for Stylish Mayhem’, in Danny Peary (ed.), Close-Ups: Intimate Profiles of Movie Stars by Their Costars, Directors, Screenwriters, and Friends, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978, p. 408. 3 Sheila Johnston, ‘Rock of Ages’, Guardian, 13 June 1996. 4 William McIlvanney, Almost a Book About Sean Connery, 8 May 2013, p. 3, www.personaldispatches.com/dispatch007a.html, accessed 8 December 2016. 5 John Patterson, ‘The Wrong Stuff’, Guardian, 19 January 2001, section 2, p. 5. 6 In recognition that ‘old age’ occurs later than for previous generations, commentators have now begun to distinguish between two cultural imaginaries, a ‘third age’ of extended middle age, in which a person is physically and mentally active, able to enjoy the pleasures of consumption and increased leisure, and a ‘fourth age’ of senility and decay; see Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs, Contexts of Ageing: Class, Cohort and Community, Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005. Thus to ‘age successfully’ is to prolong the third age period well into the seventies. 7 Josephine Dolan, ‘Aging, Stardom and “The Economy of Celebrity”’, in Danan Gu and Matthew E. Dupre (eds), Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, Cham: Springer Nature, 2019, pp. 1–10. In what follows I am indebted to the work of my former and current colleagues, Josie Dolan and Estella Tincknell. See Josephine Dolan, Contemporary Cinema and ‘Old Age’: Gendering and the Silvering of Stardom, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; and Josephine Dolan, ‘Ageing Stardom: The “Economy of Celebrity”

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Notes 301 and the Gendering of the “Third Age Imaginary”’, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 21: 1 (2020). 8 Sally Chivers, The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema, Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2011; Dolan, Contemporary Cinema and ‘Old Age’, pp. 31–60. 9 Kathleen Woodward, ‘Introduction’, in Woodward (ed.), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generation, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998, p. x. 10 Susan Sontag, ‘The Double Standard of Ageing’, The Society Saturday Review, 23 September 1972, pp. 32, 31; Chivers, The Silvering Screen, pp. xi–xii. 11 Art Redding, ‘A Finish Worthy of the Start: The Poetics of Age and Masculinity in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino’, Film Criticism, 38: 3 (2014), pp. 2–23. 12 Virginia Wright Wexman, Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 143. 13 See, for instance, Glen Donnar, ‘Narratives of Cultural and Professional Redundancy: Ageing Action Stardom and the “Geri-Action” Film’, Communications, Politics and Culture, 49: 1 (2016), pp. 1–18; and Glen Donnar, ‘Redundancy and Ageing: Sylvester Stallone’s Enduring Star Image’, in Lucy Bolton and Julie Lobalzo Wright (eds), Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 245–58. 14 Donna Peberdy, Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 146–68. 15 William Beard, ‘Gran Torino: Clint Eastwood as Fallen Saviour’, CineAction, 85 (2011), pp. 34, 36. 16 Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2000, p. 185. 17 Stephen Singular, Power to Burn: Michael Ovitz and the Business of Show Business, Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane Press, 1996, pp. 86, 99. See also Prince, A New Pot of Gold, pp. 162–71; and J.D. Connor, The Studio after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970–2010), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015, pp. 126, 136–40. 18 Prince, A New Pot of Gold, p. 170. 19 Thomas Schatz, ‘The Studio System and Conglomerate Hollywood’, in Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (eds), The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 13–42. 20 Quoted in Steve Neale, ‘Hollywood Corner’, Framework, 19 (January 1982), pp. 37–8. 21 Michael Ovitz, Who Is Michael Ovitz?, London: W.H. Allen, 2018, p. 89. 22 Highlander cost a modest $13 million so Connery’s reported $1 million salary represented a very substantial proportion of the overall budget, indicating the importance attached to securing his services. See Russell Mulcahy, ‘How We Made … Highlander’, Guardian, 5 July 2016, p. 19. 23 Benny Green, Daily Mirror, 22 August 1986. 24 What songs these were is, alas, not revealed. There are, no doubt intentional, ironies in Connery playing an Egyptian with a pronounced Scottish accent opposite a Frenchman clearly struggling to adopt one.

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302 Notes 25 William Russell, ‘Heroics in the Heather’, 30 August 1986. 26 ‘Periodically manages to be entertaining’ was Tim Pulleine’s Olympian judgement for the Monthly Film Bulletin, 1 January 1986, p. 236. 27 All figures from The Numbers, www.the-numbers.com/movie/Highlander# tab=summary, accessed 2 November 2021. 28 Mulcahy, ‘How We Made … Highlander’, p. 19. 29 See Shawn Shimpach, ‘The Immortal Cosmopolitan’, Cultural Studies, 19: 3 (2005), pp. 338–71. 30 Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, New York: The Citadel Press, 2001, pp. 247–50. 31 Jean-Jacques Annaud, DVD commentary on The Name of the Rose, ZDF Enterprises, 2004, 5000137699. 32 See the interview in Elle, September 1986. 33 All quotations from Jean-Jacques Annaud are taken from his website, www.jjannaud.com/, accessed 8 August 2019. 34 For the film’s chequered production history see Brian Deming, ‘Neue Constantin Rescued “Rose” after Yanks, French Backed Out’, Variety, 13 November 1985. 35 Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate and Financial History, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1980, p. 260. 36 Quoted in Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery, London: Virgin, 2002, p. 231. 37 Christopher Bray, Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 255. 38 Quoted in Dan Yakir, ‘Making The Name of the Rose’, Rolling Stone, 23 October 1986, p. 43. 39 Quoted in Bray, Sean Connery, p. 255. 40 Nicci Gerrard, Women’s Review, February 1987, p. 45. 41 Paul Attanasio, Wall Street Journal, 17 September 1986. 42 Marina Warner, Independent, 22 January 1987, p. 18. 43 Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=nameoftherose.htm, accessed 17 November 2021. 44 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 218. 45 Peter Krämer, The New Hollywood: From ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ to ‘Star Wars’, London: Wallflower Press, 2005, p. 246. 46 Robin Buss, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 6 February 1987, p. 33. 47 Iain Johnstone, ‘A Tower of Power’, Sunday Times, 22 April 1990. 48 Art Linson, A Pound of Flesh: Perilous Tales of How to Produce Movies in Hollywood, New York: Grove Press, 1993, pp. 123–4. 49 Quoted in Sue Heal, ‘Where’s the Blood, Cries the Ketchup King’, Today, 11 September 1987, pp. 26–7. 50 Linson, A Pound of Flesh, p. 126. 51 Linson, A Pound of Flesh, pp. 128, 134. 52 Paramount Pictures Studio Production Notes for The Untouchables, p. 5 (MHL). 53 Quoted in Studio Production Notes for The Untouchables, p. 5 (MHL).

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Notes 303 54 DVD commentary on The Untouchables, Paramount Pictures, 2004, GB110402SV. 55 Studio Production Notes for The Untouchables, p. 3 (MHL). 56 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 220. 57 Quoted in Benedict Nightingale, ‘Bottled in Bond, He’s Vintage Connery’, New York Times, 7 June 1987, p. 28. 58 DVD commentary on The Untouchables. 59 Quoted in Richard Shickel, Time, 8 June 1987, p. 40. 60 The screenplay is available at www.scribd.com/doc/224809741/David-Mamet-sscreenplay-for-The-Untouchables-1986-05-05-NOTE-For-educational-purposesonly, accessed 13 July 2019. 61 Gaylord Brewer, David Mamet and Film: Illusion/Disillusion in a Wounded Land, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993, pp. 122–5. 62 Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 29 June 1987, p. 70. 63 Kael, New Yorker, 29 June 1987, p. 70. 64 Graham Fuller, Guardian, 16 July 1987, p. 13. 65 Nina Darnton, New York Times, 12 June 1987, p. 6. 66 Shickel, Time, 8 June 1987, p. 40. Kael thought The Untouchables was ‘an attempt to visualize the public’s collective dream of Chicago gangsters’; see New Yorker, p. 70. 67 Variety, 31 December 1986. 68 Kael, New Yorker, 29 June 1987, p. 70. 69 Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times, 7 July 1987, G1. 70 See Aaron Baker, ‘Robert De Niro: Star as Actor Auteur’, in Robert Eberwein (ed.), Acting for America: Movie Stars of the 1980s, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010, p. 34. 71 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 220. 72 Nightingale, ‘Bottled in Bond’, pp. 24, 28. 73 Dolan, Contemporary Cinema and ‘Old Age’, pp. 85–90. 74 Nightingale, ‘Bottled in Bond’, p. 24. 75 Quoted in Simon Banner, ‘Daddy Knows Best’, Guardian, 12 August 1989, p. 11. 76 Zoë Heller, ‘Great Scot’, Vanity Fair, June 1993. 77 For instance Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), or Bruce Willis in A Good Day to Die Hard (2013). 78 See Philippa Gates, ‘Acting His Age? The Resurrection of the 80s Action Heroes and Their Ageing Stars’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 27: 4 (2010), p. 288. 79 Michael Freedland, Sean Connery: A Biography, London: Orion, 1994, p. 315. 80 For a detailed account see Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, pp. 234–8. 81 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 233. 82 Kim Newman, Monthly Film Bulletin, 1 January 1989, pp. 25–6. 83 The Numbers, www.the-numbers.com/movie/Presidio-The#tab=summary, accessed 23 September 2020.

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304 Notes 84 James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull, Projecting Empire: Imperialism and British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris, 2009, pp. 170–3; Elizabeth Traube, Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 29. 85 Spielberg had wanted to make a Bond film with Connery but was unable to because only British directors were used; see Douglas Brode, The Films of Steven Spielberg, New York: The Citadel Press, 1995, p. 173. In the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ford wears a white tuxedo with a red carnation in homage to Connery’s attire in Goldfinger. 86 David Ansen, ‘Cracking the Bullwhip Again’, Newsweek, The Arts, Movies, p. 69. 87 Quoted in Andrew Yule, Sean Connery: Neither Shaken Nor Stirred, London: Sphere, 2008 [1992], p. 308. 88 Quoted in Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, p. 230. 89 Quoted in Banner, ‘Daddy Knows Best’. 90 See Freedland, Sean Connery, p. 318. 91 Quoted in Richard Corliss, ‘What’s Old Is Gold: A Triumph for Indy 3’, Time, 29 May 1989, p. 54. 92 Victoria Mather, ‘Indiana Jones, Armed with a Whip and a Quip’, Daily Telegraph, 26 June 1989, p. 16. 93 Quoted in Russell Miller, ‘No One Says No to Sean’, Sunday Times Magazine, 5 November 1989, p. 26. 94 DVD commentary on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lucasfilm, 2008, GI11397SV. 95 Quoted in Robert Woodward, ‘Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch’, New York Times, 21 May 1989, section 2, p. 16. 96 Quoted in David Heuring’s account, American Cinematographer, LXX: 6 (June 1986), pp. 57–66. 97 Anne Billson, Monthly Film Bulletin, 1 July 1989, p. 200. 98 Philip French, Observer, 2 July 1989, p. 41. 99 Joseph McBride, Variety, 24 May 1989. 100 Derek Malcolm, Guardian, 29 June 1989, p. 21. 101 Pauline Kael, ‘The Current Cinema’, New Yorker, 12 June 1989. 102 Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0097576/?ref_=bo_se_r_1, accessed 17 November 2021. 103 Banner, ‘Daddy Knows Best’, p. 37. The Last Crusade is one of the few of Connery’s films for which no salary details are available. 104 Russell Davies, ‘Clancy Calls the Shots’, Daily Telegraph Magazine, 14 April 1990, pp. 56, 58. 105 Mace Neufeld’s recollections are in ‘Beneath the Surface’, DVD extra on The Hunt for Red October, Paramount Pictures, 2003, GB109961SV; the salary figure is given in ‘Master of the Hunt’, Daily Mirror, 17 April 1990, p. 7. Today, 2 February 1990, p. 29, gives his salary as £2.7 million (approximately $4 million) on a budget of $38 million. 106 Richard Schickel, Time, 5 March 1999, pp. 54–5.

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Notes 305 107 Johnstone, ‘A Tower of Power’. 108 Connery had at first hesitated to accept the role because he felt its politics were dated. This was, however, because the script sent to him originally had not included the opening caption explaining that it was set in the pre-glasnost period; see Larry Taylor, John McTiernan: The Rise and Fall of an Action Movie Icon, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018, p. 73. 109 Alfio Leotta, The Cinema of John Milius, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019, p. 5. 110 Quoted in Daily Mirror, 17 April 1990, p. 7. 111 Quoted in Robert Koehler, Variety, 9 March 1999. 112 It was Paramount executives, nervous about the thawing of the Cold War, who insisted on an opening caption inserted stating that the film is set in 1984, thus pre-glasnost. However, as McTiernan comments, it was also a knowing wink of political correctness to the audience as Clancy’s account was supposedly based on an actual incident conveyed to him by Soviet naval commanders. See Christopher Bellamy, ‘Soviet Defector Who Spilled the Secrets’, Independent, 2 April 1990, p. 8. 113 For Ferguson’s, undated, screenplay see The Daily Script, www.dailyscript.com/ scripts/thehuntforredoctober.pdf, accessed 2 November 2021. It is unclear how many versions of the screenplay were written, nor the role of the co-writer, Donald Stewart, whose name does not appear on this draft. I presume, following Connery’s comments, that Milius’s role was confined to Ramius’s dialogue rather than any wider changes as the structure contained in this version is very close to the film as shot. 114 Georgina Brown, ‘Oh Captain, My Captain’, Village Voice, 3 June 1990, p. 61. 115 Quoted in Daily Mail, 17 April 1990, p. 7. 116 Paramount Pictures Studio Production Notes for The Hunt for Red October, p. 4 (BFI). 117 Quoted in Studio Production Notes for The Hunt for Red October, p. 2 (BFI). 118 Kevin Costner had been the first choice for the part but was unavailable; see Taylor, John McTiernan, p. 72. 119 Quoted in Nigel Floyd, ‘From Russia with Sub’, New Musical Express, 5 May 1990, p. 27. 120 Harrison Ford turned down the part of Jack Ryan because he recognised the subordinate role of that character. Ford had wanted the part of Ramius but an American actor was not considered suitable for that role; see Virginia Luzón-Aguado, Harrison Ford: Masculinity and Stardom in Hollywood, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, p. 170. Ford took the role of Ryan as the main lead in Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994). 121 The war film was a genre in which it was possible to depict intense male bonding. The relationship between Ramius and Ryan has echoes of those between the stern father and the ‘cadet’, the new officer recruit, in 1950s British films; see Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001, pp. 35–9. It is a proof of

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306 Notes Connery’s status and star power that he could extend this relationship across several genres. 122 Tom Hutchinson, Mail on Sunday, 22 April 1990, p. 53. 123 Johnstone, ‘A Tower of Power’. 124 Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0099810/?ref_=bo_se_r_1, accessed 21 March 2021. 125 Paul McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, p. 81. 126 Jeremy Clarke, ‘Outsider Turned Father Figure’, What’s On in London, 18 April 1990, p. 66. 127 See the moving tribute by Baldwin after Connery’s death, ‘Alec Baldwin Pays Tribute to Sir Thomas Sean Connery’, YouTube, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=71279QKqoq8, accessed 16 November 2021. 128 Laurence Coupe, Myth, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 13, 88, 173. 129 George Perry, ‘The Sleuth in the Cowl’, review of The Name of the Rose, Sunday Times Magazine, 21 September 1984, p. 42. 130 Marc Eliot, Charlton Heston: America’s Last Icon, New York: Newbury House, 2017, p. 358.

6  Star as producer: Fountainbridge Films, 1991–2003 1 Quoted in Hollywood Pictures Studio Production Notes for Medicine Man, p. 2 (MHL). 2 Quoted in George Perry, ‘The Man Who Is King’, The Times Saturday Review, 6 October 1990, p. 17. 3 Andrew Yule, Sean Connery: Neither Shaken Nor Stirred, London: Sphere, 2008 [1992], p. 296, original emphasis. 4 Quoted in Yule, Sean Connery, p. 171. 5 Connery in the Hollywood Press Association Transcripts, 1991 (MHL). 6 Yule, Sean Connery, p. 347. 7 Don Groves, Variety, 2 November 1989, p. 11. 8 Scott Murray, ‘Fred Schepisi: “Pushing the Boundaries”’, in Tom Ryan (ed.), Fred Schepisi: Interviews, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 99–101. 9 Quoted in Lee Pfeiffer and Philip Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, New York: The Citadel Press, 2001, p. 242. 10 Quoted in Oscar Moore, ‘Lighting the “Dark” Side with le Carré’, The Times, 21 December 1981, p. 21. 11 Murray, ‘Fred Schepisi’, p. 100. 12 Rennie Ellis, ‘The Man Meryl Streep Trusts’, in Ryan (ed.), Fred Schepisi, p. 73. 13 Pathé Entertainment Studio Production Notes for The Russia House, p. 2 (MHL). 14 For an overview analysis of the film see Brian McFarlane, The Films of Fred Schepisi, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2021, pp. 77–81. I

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Notes 307 am most grateful to Professor McFarlane for letting me see this book in manuscript. 15 Ellis, ‘The Man Meryl Streep Trusts’, p. 71. 16 Jill Jolliffe, ‘Why 007 Has Come in from the Cold’, Guardian, 30 November 1989, p. 29. 17 Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0100530/?ref_=bo_se_r_1, accessed 17 November 2021. 18 Hollywood Reporter, 6 August 1996, p. 4. 19 Included on the Fountainbridge Films Studio Production Notes for Finding Forrester, p. 2 (BFI). 20 Quoted in Variety, 5 May 1997, pp. 14, 21. 21 Hollywood Reporter, 6 August 1996, p. 4. 22 Hollywood Reporter, 6 August 1996, p. 4. 23 Serena Allott, ‘So, Mr Connery’, Daily Telegraph Weekend Magazine, 5 October 1996, p. 56. 24 Tino Balio, ‘“A Major Presence in All of the World’s Important Markets”: The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s’, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 59–60. 25 Studio Production Notes for Medicine Man, p. 5 (MHL). 26 Studio Production Notes for Medicine Man, p. 6 (MHL). 27 The description of Bracco’s character is McTiernan’s; see Studio Production Notes for Medicine Man, p. 5 (MHL). 28 Larry Taylor, John McTiernan: The Rise and Fall of an Action Movie Icon, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018, p. 83. McTiernan claimed: ‘It was a little art movie with Sean Connery that cost only $27 million. If the press hadn’t defined it as an action movie, it probably wouldn’t have been considered a disappointment’; see ‘The Extreme Sport of Being John McTiernan’, Movieline, 1 August 2001, http://movieline.com/2001/08/01/the-extreme-sport-of-beingjohn-mctiernan/2/, accessed 16 November 2021. I have found no corroboration of this figure for the film’s production budget and accept the $40 million figure quoted in the trade press. 29 Anthony Lane, Independent on Sunday, 3 May 1992, p. 16. 30 Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Green about the Gills’, Independent, 29 May 1992, p. 16. 31 Chris Roberge, The Tech, 112: 4 (11 February 1992), thought the ‘romance remains uninteresting, mainly due to the [stars’] strong lack of chemistry’; Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 11 February 1992, thought the relationship very predictable and dull, lacking surprise or subtlety. 32 Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0104839/?ref_=bo_se_r_1, accessed 17 November 2021. 33 Quentin Falk, Daily Telegraph, 14 September 1996, p. 3. For a detailed account of the film see Brian Locke, Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 83–96. 34 Time Out, 22–29 April 1998, p. 173. 35 Quentin Curtis, Independent on Sunday, 17 October 1993, p. 26. 36 Brian D. Johnson, Maclean’s, 106: 32 (August 1993), p. 52.

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308 Notes 37 US domestic box-office gross: $63,179,523 (58.9 per cent); foreign: $44,019,267 (41.1 per cent); overall: $107,198,790; see Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0107969/?ref_=bo_se_r_1, accessed 17 November 2021. 38 Quoted in Fountainbridge Films Studio Production Notes for Just Cause, p. 3 (BFI). 39 Quoted in Studio Production Notes for Just Cause, p. 3 (BFI). 40 See James Andrew Miller, Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency, New York: HarperCollins, 2016, pp. 417–18. 41 Quentin Curtis, Independent on Sunday, 2 April 1995, p. 20. 42 In the novel, Armstrong has orchestrated a newspaper campaign to have Bobby Earle freed, a much richer source of irony and manipulation than in the film. 43 Sheila Johnston, Independent, 30 March 1995, p. 31. 44 Variety, 12 February 1995. 45 Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0113501/?ref_=bo_se_r_1, accessed 17 November 2021. 46 Christopher Tookey, ‘Magnetic Connery the Rock on which this Movie Relies’, Daily Mail, 21 June 1996, p. 50. 47 For a judicious overview of their partnership see Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 208–10. 48 Martin A. Grove, Hollywood Reporter, 3 May 1996. 49 Jasper Rees, ‘Secret Writers’ Society’, Evening Standard, 16 July 1997, p. 27. 50 Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery, London: Virgin, 2002, p. 269. 51 DVD commentary on The Rock, Criterion Collection, 2001 Hollywood Pictures Studio Production Notes for The Rock, p. 3 (BFI). 52 Stephen Galloway, ‘Connery Deal “Rocks” Hollywood’, Hollywood Reporter, 7 August 1995. His salary was somewhat below the $20 million earned by stars at the top of the list such as Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. 53 Kevin Jackson, Independent on Sunday, 23 June 1996, p. 7. 54 Quoted in Drama-Logue, 6–12 June 1996. 55 Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, 27 June 1996. 56 Quoted in Time Out, 12–19 June 1996, p. 16. 57 Cynthia Baron, ‘The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present’, in Claudia Springer and Julie Levinson (eds), Acting, London: I.B. Tauris, 2015, pp. 162–7. 58 See Serena Allott, ‘So, Mr Connery’, Daily Telegraph Weekend Magazine, 5 October 1996, p. 56. 59 Travers, Rolling Stone, 27 June 1996. 60 Amy Taubin, Village Voice, 18 June 1996, p. 56. 61 Quentin Curtis, Daily Telegraph, 21 June 1996, p. 24. 62 US domestic box-office gross: $134,069,511 (40 per cent); foreign: $200,993,110; overall: $335,062,621; see Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/ tt0117500/?ref_=bo_se_r_1, accessed 17 November 2021.

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Notes 309 63 Christopher Bray, Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 291. 64 Quoted in Gill Pringle, ‘Sean’s Story’, Midweek, 26 April 1995, p. 5. 65 Warner Bros. Studio Production Notes for The Avengers, p. 7 (BFI). 66 David Gritten, Daily Telegraph, 14 August 1998, p. 6. 67 Philip French, Observer, 16 August 1998, p. 9. 68 The Numbers, www.the-numbers.com/movie/Avengers-The-(1998)#tab=summary, accessed 5 May 2021. 69 Kim Newman, ‘The Caper Film’, in Phil Hardy (ed.), The BFI Companion to Crime, London: Cassell/BFI, 1997, pp. 70–1. 70 Bob Flynn, ‘An Affair to Remember’, Guardian, 11 August 1999. 71 Daryl Lee, The Heist Film: Stealing with Style, London: Wallflower Press, 2014, pp. 4, 19, 21, 39, 96, 110, 114. 72 Quoted in Michael Rechtshaffen, ‘Lasting Bond’, Hollywood Reporter, 11 March 1999, pp. 8–9. 73 Quoted in Fountainbridge Films Studio Production Notes for Entrapment, p. 2 (MHL), original emphasis. 74 Studio Production Notes for Entrapment, p. 3 (MHL). 75 Studio Production Notes for Entrapment, p. 2 (MHL). 76 Interview with Sheila Johnston, Sunday Times, 27 June 1999, p. 8. All further comments from Amiel are from this source. Fuqua had been a rather surprising choice. Before Entrapment he had directed numerous video shorts and only one feature film, Replacement Killers (1998), a violent action thriller starring Chow Yun-fat as a hit-man. 77 For example, Anthony Quinn, Independent Review, 2 July 1999, p. 11. Kenneth Twan entitled his review for the Los Angeles Times, 30 April 1999, ‘Grampy Kissing the Girl’. The age gap is significantly wider than between Grant and his co-stars. In To Catch a Thief Grant was fifty-one, Kelly twenty-six, a difference of twenty-five years; in Charade (1963) Grant was fifty-nine, Hepburn thirty-four, twenty-one years’ disparity. 78 Andrew Anthony, Observer, 4 July 1999, p. 13. 79 Anne Billson, Sunday Times Review, 4 July 1999, p. 11. 80 Alexander Walker, Evening Standard, 1 July 1999, p. 29, thought that although Connery did not possess Eastwood’s vanity about sleeping with much younger screen partners, the film lacked ‘erotic chemistry’. 81 Antonia Quirke, Independent on Sunday, 4 July 1999, p. 5. 82 Peter Rainer, Time, 3 April 1999. 83 José Arroyo, Sight and Sound, 9: 7 (July 1999), pp. 41–2. 84 Robert Welkos, Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1999. 85 John Parker, Sean Connery, London: Victor Gollancz, 1993, p. 323. 86 Variety, 2 May 1999, p. 43. 87 US domestic box-office gross: $87,704,396 (41.3 per cent); foreign: $124,700,000 (58.7 per cent); overall: $212,404,396; see Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=entrapment.htm, accessed 17 November 2021.

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310 Notes 88 Hollywood Reporter, 4 May 1999. The opening night audience was male dominated, 56 per cent to 44 per cent, indicating Connery’s continuing appeal to male viewers. 89 Studio Production Notes for Entrapment, p. 14 (MHL). The company also claimed to be developing The Ghost and Mrs. Muir for Twentieth Century-Fox, Absolute Zero for Disney and MT. Weather for Intermedia, none of which came to fruition. 90 Pfeiffer and Lisa, The Films of Sean Connery, pp. 294–5. 91 Studio Production Notes for Finding Forrester, p. 5 (MHL). 92 Studio Production Notes for Finding Forrester, p. 5 (MHL). For a discussion of Salinger as an ‘anti-celebrity’ see Chris Rojek, Celebrity, London: Reaktion Books, 2001, pp. 159–60. 93 Studio Production Notes for Finding Forrester, p. 5 (MHL). 94 Variety, 15–21 January 2001, p. 70. 95 Studio Production Notes for Finding Forrester, p. 5 (MHL). 96 Studio Production Notes for Finding Forrester, p. 6 (MHL). 97 Nigel Andrews, Financial Times, 22 February 2001, p. 16. 98 Nigel Norlian, Evening Standard, 22 February 2001, p. 30. 99 Hollywood Reporter, 3 May 2001, p. 28. Finding Forrester grossed $51,804,714 in the US market but a rather disappointing $28,245,050 in foreign revenues; see Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0181536/?ref_=bo_se_r_1, accessed 17 November 2021. 100 See Dana Harris, Variety, 9 October 2002; and Evening Standard, 30 October 2003. 101 Discussed in Chapter 7. 102 ‘Connery Dumps Film Firm’, Scotsman, 12 May 2002, www.scotsman.com/ arts-and-culture/film-and-tv/connery-dumps-film-firm-2480722, accessed 17 November 2021. 103 Tino Balio, Hollywood in the New Millennium, London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 25–6. 104 John Horn, ‘Heroic Effort? Audiences Are the Last Hurdle for Beleaguered League’, Los Angeles Times, 14 July 2003, E1. Connery may have been motivated by press estimates that he lost $447 million by turning down the role of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings; see, inter alia, Jack Shepherd, ‘Here’s Why Sean Connery Turned Down the Role of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings’, GamesRadar+, www.gamesradar.com/sean-connery-lord-of-the-rings-rejection/, accessed 8 November 2020. 105 Quoted in Horn, ‘Heroic Effort?’. 106 Brian J. Robb, Steampunk: An Illustrated History of Fantastical Fiction, Fanciful Film and Other Victorian Visions, London: Aurum Press, 2012, p. 8. 107 Robbie McAllister, Steampunk Film: A Critical Introduction, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 1, 22, 33. 108 Twentieth Century-Fox Studio Production Notes for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, p. 10 (MHL). 109 Don Murphy, DVD commentary on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Twentieth Century-Fox Home Entertainment, 2004, FG-SGB24226.

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Notes 311 110 Ian Dawe, ‘The Moore Film Adaptations and the Erotic-Grotesque’, Studies in Comics, 2: 1 (2011), pp. 177–93. 111 Quoted in Studio Production Notes for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, p. 4 (MHL). 112 Studio Production Notes for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, p. 5 (MHL). 113 Quoted in York Membery, ‘Connery to Star as Victorian Superhero as the Empire Is Ordered to Strike Back’, Observer, 12 May 2002, p. 8. 114 See, for instance, Stuart Cameron, ‘Has Sean Made His Last Movie? Mystery as 007 Legend Quits Film Role’, Daily Mail, 30 September 2004, p. 9. 115 Philip French, Observer, 19 October 2003, p. 7. Equally typical was Robert Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, ‘just when it seems about to become a real corker of an adventure movie, [the film] plunges into incomprehensible action, idiotic dialogue, inexplicable motivations, causes without effects, effects without causes, and general lunacy. What a mess’; see www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ the-league-of-extraordinary-gentlemen-2003, accessed November 2020. 116 Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0311429/?ref_=bo_se_r_1, accessed 17 November 2021. 117 Shalimar Sahota, ‘What Went Wrong: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’, Box Office Prophets, 5 January 2011, www.boxofficeprophets.com/column/ index.cfm?columnID=13539&cmin=10&columnpage=3, accessed 16 November 2021. 118 Variety, 28 September 2004. 119 Connery supplied the voice-over for Electronic Arts’ video game James Bond 007: From Russia with Love in 2005; see Mark Edlitz, The Many Lives of James Bond: How the Creators of 007 Have Decoded the Superspy, Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2019, pp. 231–9. He also voiced Sir Billi in Sir Billi (2012), discussed in Chapter 8. 120 Jonathan Romney, Independent on Sunday, Culture section, 25 February 2001, p. 3. 121 The Times, 30 March 1995, p. 33.

7  Iconic star 1 Quoted in John Walsh, ‘Oh Yesh, He’s the Great Pretender’, Independent Review, 6 May 1999, p. 8. 2 Edgar Morin, The Stars, trans. Richard Howard, London: John Calder, 1960, pp. 105, 39. 3 James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 4. See also Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed’ and ‘The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’, in The Field of Cultural Production, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993, pp. 29–73, 74–111.

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312 Notes 4 Paul McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 33–4. 5 Quoted in Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery, London: Virgin, 2002, p. 264. For an illuminating discussion of Clint Eastwood’s iconicity see William Beard, Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood, Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2000. 6 Barry King, ‘Becoming Iconic’, International Journal of Communication, 12 (2018), p. 3390; see also Mike Parker, ‘Cultural Icons: A Case Study Analysis of Their Formation and Reception’, PhD thesis, University of Central Lancashire, 2012, especially pp. 35–7. 7 Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 41, 42, 45. See also David Scott and Keyan G. Tomaselli, ‘Introduction: Cultural Icons’, in Tomaselli and Scott (eds), Cultural Icons, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2009, pp. 19, 22; and Parker, ‘Cultural Icons’, p. 16. 8 Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking, p. 42. 9 Scott and Tomaselli, ‘Introduction’, p. 22. 10 Bishnupriya Ghosh, Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011. 11 Morin, The Stars, pp. 37–8, original emphases. 12 Morin, The Stars, p. 159. 13 Emily Truman, ‘Rethinking the Cultural Icon: Its Use and Function in Popular Culture’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 42: 5 (2017), p. 838. 14 Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘The Celebrity-Icon’, Cultural Sociology, 4: 3 (2010), p. 331. 15 See Jeffrey Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, London: Robert Hale, 2001. 16 See, for instance, Talking Pictures: John Wayne, BBC 2, 16 February 2013. 17 Mark Cousins, ‘King of the Hill’, Sight and Sound, 7: 5 (May 1997), p. 24. 18 Euan Ferguson, ‘Scotch Myth’, Guardian, 3 October 2004. 19 Alan Taylor, ‘He’s Sir to His Friends’, Observer Review, 1 March 1998, p. 20. 20 Jonathan Stubbs, Hollywood and the Invention of England: Projecting the Past in American Cinema, 1930–2017, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 89–92. 21 Stephen Knight, The Politics of Myth, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2015, pp. 12–13. 22 See Jean Markale, King of the Celts: Arthurian Legends and the Celtic Tradition, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1994, p. 136. For overview accounts see Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1983; and Michael Wood, In Search of Myths and Heroes, London: BBC Books, 2005, pp. 210–58. See also Peter Millar’s review of First Knight, Sunday Times, section 10, 2 September 1995, pp. 12–13. 23 Susan Aronstein, Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 24 Quoted in Columbia Pictures Studio Production Notes for First Knight, p. 3 (BFI).

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Notes 313 25 Gareth Parry, Guardian, 18 August 1994, p. 7; Neil Norman, Evening Standard, 26 September 1994, p. 12 (figures there converted to dollars for consistency). 26 Studio Production Notes for First Knight, p. 2 (BFI). For an analysis see Jacqueline Jenkins, ‘First Knights and Common Men: Masculinity in American Arthurian Film’, in Kevin J. Harty (ed.), King Arthur on Film: New Essays on Arthurian Cinema, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 1999, pp. 81–95. 27 Aronstein, Hollywood Knights, pp. 197–205. 28 Philip French, Observer, 9 July 1995, p. 7, thought it seemed like a parody with a feeble story, banal script and ‘costumes and sets that recall a pre-war touring production of Merrie England’. Others objected to the villain Malagant (Ben Cross) as a ‘pantomime ogre’, dwelling on his immortal line, ‘Nobody moves or Arthur dies’; see Geoff Brown, The Times, 6 July 1995, p. 33. 29 Anne Billson, Sunday Telegraph, 9 July 1995, p. 7. 30 Todd McCarthy, Variety, 26 June 1995, https://variety.com/1995/film/reviews/ first-knight-2-1200441849/, accessed 19 December 2019; Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 7 July 1995, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/first-knight-1995, accessed 19 December 2019. For an enjoyably merciless dissection of Gere’s narcissism see Tom Shone, Sunday Times, The Culture section, 9 July 1995, p. 7. 31 Quoted in Universal Pictures Studio Production Notes for DragonHeart, p. 9 (BFI). 32 The tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park (on which Tippett also worked) had 7,000–8,000 control vertices, Draco 280,000; see Studio Production Notes for DragonHeart, p. 14 (BFI). 33 Studio Production Notes for DragonHeart, p. 13 (BFI). 34 There were three recordings of Connery’s voice. One pre-shooting in the Bahamas; a second in Rome after filming but before the animation was completed; and a third also in Rome when all of the 180-degree shots of Draco had been finished; see Cohen’s DVD commentary on DragonHeart, Columbia Tristar Home Video, 1999, UDR 90029. 35 Studio Production Notes for DragonHeart, p. 6 (BFI), original emphasis. 36 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, pp. 263–4. 37 Studio Production Notes for DragonHeart, p. 13 (BFI). 38 Brian Case, ‘Playing with Fire’, Time Out, 7–14 December 1994, pp. 18–19. 39 Quoted in Drama-Logue, 6–12 June 1996. 40 DVD commentary on DragonHeart. 41 See, for instance, Jonathan Coe, New Statesman, 18 October 1996, pp. 37–8. 42 Derek Malcolm, Guardian, 12 August 1996, p. 2. 43 Nigel Andrews, Financial Times, 17 October 1996, p. 170. 44 Jon Coe, New Statesman, 18 October 1996, pp. 37–8. 45 First Knight’s worldwide gross was $127,600,435; DragonHeart’s was $115,267,375; see Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0113071/?ref_=bo_se_r_1 and www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0116136/?ref_=bo_se_r_1, accessed 17 November 2021. 46 Malcolm, Guardian, 12 August 1996. 47 Nigel Andrews, ‘Myth and Modernism’, Financial Times, 6 July 1995, p. 23.

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314 Notes 48 Michel Mourlet, ‘In Defence of Violence’, trans. David Wilson, in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinema, Volume 2, The 1960s: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul/BFI, 1986; first published in Cahiers du Cinema 107 (May 1960). 49 Quoted in Marc Eliot, Charlton Heston: America’s Last Icon, New York: Newbury House, 2017, pp. 206, 207. 50 James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. 51 Sheridan Morley, The Hollywood Raj: How Brits Reigned in the Golden Age of Movies, London: Dean Street Press, 2017, p. 82. 52 For an informative account of Olivier’s status as an English national icon see Jennifer Barnes, Shakespearean Star: Laurence Olivier and National Cinema, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 53 Philip Ziegler, Olivier, London: MacLehose Press/Quercus, 2013, p. 63. 54 Ziegler, Olivier, p. 129. 55 McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, pp. 219–30. 56 McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, pp. 224–30. 57 McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, pp. 236–8. 58 Quoted in Variety, 6 November 1996. 59 Quoted in Variety, 9 January 1996. 60 ‘Golden Globes 1996 Sean Connery Cecil B DeMille Award’, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmHaXJjZKL4, accessed 16 November 2021. 61 ‘Sir Sean Connery Accepts AFI Life Achievement Award in 2006’, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Z1BXALdwI, accessed 6 December 2021. 62 David Smith, ‘The Diamond Who Is Forever’, Independent, 6 October 1989, p. 16. 63 See Dawn Freeman, ‘Great Scot’, High Style, October–December 2000, p. 18. 64 Ginette Vincendeau, Stars and Stardom in French Cinema, London: Continuum, 2000, pp. 76–7; Gary Wills, John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 14; Russell Meeuf, John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp. 184–5. 65 Iain Johnstone, ‘A Tower of Power’, Sunday Times, 12 April 1990. 66 George Perry, ‘The Man Who Is King’, The Times Saturday Review, 6 October 1990, pp. 16–17. 67 Diane Shah, ‘All Together, Now: Sean Connery Is an Icon!’, GQ, July 1989, pp. 127–31, 182–3. 68 Alan Massie, ‘Expatriate Games’, Daily Telegraph, 6 October 1996, p. 57. 69 Shah, ‘All Together, Now’, p. 128. 70 Serena Allott, ‘So, Mr Connery’, Daily Telegraph Weekend Magazine, 5 October 1996, p. 56. 71 Smith, ‘The Diamond Who Is Forever’. 72 Sue Harris, ‘Toujours Delon: The Script of Aging’, in Nick Rees-Roberts and Darren Waldron (eds), Alain Delon: Style, Stardom, and Masculinity, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 159–74.

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Notes 315 73 Martin Shingler and Lindsay Steenberg, ‘Star Studies in Mid-Life Crisis’, Celebrity Studies, 10: 4 (2019), p. 446. 74 Quoted in Robert Sellers, Sean Connery: A Celebration, London: Robert Hale, 1999, p. 122. 75 Shah, ‘All Together, Now’, p. 128. 76 Sellers, Sean Connery, p. 123. 77 Quoted in Freeman, ‘Great Scot’, p. 18. 78 Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, p. 220. 79 Quoted in Eliot, Charlton Heston, pp. 376–7. 80 Pauline Kael, ‘The Man from Dream City’, The New Yorker, 7 July 1975, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/07/14/the-man-from-dream-city, accessed 4 May 2021. 81 Richard Dyer, Stars, rev. edn, London: BFI Publishing, 1998 [1979], p. 131 82 Russell Miller, ‘No One Says No to Sean’, Sunday Times Magazine, 5 November 1989, p. 29. 83 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 353. 84 Quoted in Callan, Sean Connery, p. 235. 85 Quoted in Zoë Heller, ‘Great Scot’, Vanity Fair, June 1993. 86 Candice Bergen, Knock Wood, New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2014, pp. 241–2. 87 William McIlvanney, ‘The Big Man’, Sunday Times, 11 August 1996, pp. 4–5. 88 See Dyer, Stars, pp. 48–9. The quotation is from Geoffrey Macnab, Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in the British Cinema, London: Cassell, 2000, p. 196. 89 Quoted in Dan MacGuill, ‘Did Sean Connery Condone Slapping Women?’, Snopes, 2 November 2020, www.snopes.com/fact-check/sean-connery-slapwomen/, accessed 24 August 2021. 90 Diane Cilento, My Nine Lives, London: Michael Joseph, 2006, p. 239. 91 Kathleen Murphy, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, Film Comment, 33: 3 (May–June 1997), p. 42. 92 Pat Keane, ‘Hero Today, but Gone Tomorrow’, Observer, 25 June 2000. 93 Martin Shingler, Star Studies: A Critical Guide, London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 178.

8  Scots actor/activist/icon 1 Quoted in Jasper Gerard’s interview with Connery, ‘I’ve a Wee Issue with the English’, Sunday Times, 12 March 2006. 2 Alan Massie, ‘Expatriate Games’, Daily Telegraph, 6 October 1996, p. 57. The only comparable Scottish media celebrity is the music hall comedian Harry Lauder, 1870–1950; see John Ritchie, ‘Sir Harry Lauder and the Scots Diaspora: Cementing Identity Through Stage and Screen’, Visual Culture in Britain, 20: 3 (September 2019), pp. 278–95.

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316 Notes 3 Scottish Republic, ‘Sean Connery Voted Scotland’s “Greatest Living National Treasure”’, Newsnet, 25 November 2011, https://newsnet.scot/archive/seanconnery-voted-scotlands-greatest-living-national-treasure/, accessed 2 November 2021. 4 Massie, ‘Expatriate Games’. 5 John Millar, ‘Sean Connery’, in Eddie Dick (ed.), From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book, London: BFI/SFC, 1990, p. 163. 6 Quoted in Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery, London: Virgin, 2002, pp. 254–5. 7 Laura Webster, ‘Nicola Sturgeon Pays Tribute to “Global Legend” Sean Connery after Death Aged 90’, National Scot, 31 October 2020, www.thenational.scot/ news/18836994.nicola-sturgeon-pays-tribute-global-legend-sean-connery-deathaged-90/, accessed 4 November 2020. 8 Sean Connery, New Statesman, 4 March 2014, www.newstatesman.com/ politics/2014/03/sean-connery-scottish-independence-there-no-more-creativeact-creating-new-nation, accessed 14 August 2018. 9 The literature on national identity is too extensive to be fully acknowledged here but my discussion has been informed by, in particular, Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism, London: Sage, 1995; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; and Anthony Smith, National Identity, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. It has also been informed by discussions of ‘Britishness’, including Jon Cook, ‘Relocating Britishness and the Break-Up of Britain’, in Stephen Caunce, Ewa Mazierska, Susan Sydney-Smith and John K. Walton (eds), Relocating Britishness, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 17–37; Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright (eds), Britishness: Perspectives on the British Question, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1989; Keith Robbins, Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and the Idea of Britishness, London: Longman, 1998; Paul Ward, Britishness since 1870, London: Routledge, 2004; and Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000, London: Macmillan, 2002. Discussions of Scottishness and Scots national identity are identified in specific footnotes but see also Christopher Harvie, No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Scotland 1900–2015, 4th edn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016; David McCrone, Steve Kendrick and Pat Shaw (eds), The Making of Scotland: Nation, Culture and Social Change, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989; Lindsay Paterson, The Autonomy of Modern Scotland, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994; and Murray G.H. Pittock, Scottish Nationality, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 10 Neal Ascherson, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, London: Granta, 2002, pp. 37–8. 11 Magnus Linklater, Myth and Reality: The Nature of Scottish Identity, Saltire Series No. 4, Saltire Society, 2013, p. 2. 12 Homi Bhabha, ‘Narrating the Nation’, in Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 1. 13 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 2016 [1983], p. 19.

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Notes 317 14 Peter Lynch, SNP: The History of the Scottish National Party, 2nd edn, Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2013, p. 4. See also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, London: Vintage, 1996, p. 11; Michael Hecter, Internal Colonialism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975; and Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, Champaign, IL: Common Ground Publishing, 2015 [1977], pp. 105, 113, 122, 139–54. 15 Jonathan Hearn, Claiming Scotland: National Identity and Liberal Culture, Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000, p. 141. See also David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer, Understanding National Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 16 T.M. Devine, Independence or Union: Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Present, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2017, pp. 12, 16. 17 Quoted in Oriana Fallaci, ‘Sean Connery: The Superman’, in The Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews, Chicago, IL: H. Regnery, 1968, pp. 26–7. 18 Brian Pendreigh, The Scot Pack: The Further Adventures of the Trainspotters and Their Fellow Travellers, London: Mainstream Publishing, 2000, p. 41. 19 Duncan Petrie, ‘The Eclipse of Scottish Cinema’, Scottish Affairs, 23: 2 (2014), p. 219. 20 Even in the ensemble piece, Playing by Heart (1998), he was one half of a Scottish couple living in Los Angeles. 21 Alan Hirschberg, interview with Connery, undated (MHL). 22 In William Boyd’s novel, A Good Man in Africa, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 82, it is Leafy who shouts down a telephone at Murray: ‘What about the Hippocratic Oath eh? You’re a fucking doctor aren’t you, you sanctimonious Scottish bastard’, at which point Murray slams the telephone down. The film, through the casting of Connery, makes Murray a more forceful character, one provided with an on-screen death scene which, in the novel, is just reported. 23 Robbie Collin, ‘Suave Yet Brutal, He Was Ideal for 007 Role’, Sunday Telegraph, 1 November 2020, p. 14. 24 Paul McDonald, George Clooney, London: BFI Publishing, 2019, pp. 123–61. 25 P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 203. 26 Jackson was MP for Hampstead and Highgate 1992–2015; Reagan was Governor of California 1967–75 and the 40th American President 1981–89; Schwarzenegger was Governor of California 2003–11. 27 Quoted in Kenneth Passingham, Sean Connery, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983, p. 108. 28 John Street, ‘Celebrity Politicians: Popular Culture and Political Reputation’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 6: 4 (2004), pp. 436–8. 29 Street, ‘Celebrity Politicians’, pp. 439–40. See also Mark Wheeler, Celebrity Politics: Image and Identity in Contemporary Political Communications, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, especially pp. 142–67; and Julie Wilson, ‘Stardom, Sentimental Education, and the Shaping of Global Citizens’, Cinema Journal, 53: 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 27–49. 30 Richard Dyer, Stars, rev. edn, London: BFI Publishing, 1998 [1979], pp. 77–85. 31 McDonald, George Clooney, p. 135.

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318 Notes 32 ‘Playboy Interview: Sean Connery’, Playboy, November 1965; Fallaci, ‘Sean Connery: The Superman’. 33 Quoted in the interview with Tom Ottaway, TV Times, 10 August 1972. 34 The Bowler and the Bunnet was a joint production between Scottish Television and Sean Connery Productions. It was researched and co-written by Cliff Hanley and produced by Bryan Izzard. 35 Quoted in Variety, 4 December 1967. 36 Duncan Petrie, Screening Scotland, London: BFI Publishing, 2000, pp. 79–87, 97–122. 37 Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement, London: I.B. Tauris, 1990, p. 111. Grierson led the second Films of Scotland Committee (1954–82), which had a key focus on industrial activity, making over fifty documentaries about traditional industries, including shipbuilding. 38 John Foster, ‘Red Clyde, Red Scotland’, in Ian Donnachie and Christopher Whatley (eds), The Manufacture of Scottish History, Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992, pp. 106–24; Angus Calder, Revolving Culture: Notes from the Scottish Republic, London: I.B. Tauris, 1994, pp. 48–50. Clydeside’s reputation as a centre of political activism stemmed from 1918 when John Maclean, a revolutionary Socialist, tried to persuade the Trades Council of Glasgow to create a Scottish Workers Republican Party. Churchill, describing Maclean’s action as a Bolshevist uprising and fearing Glasgow might become a second Petrograd, ordered tanks into George Square; see Sean Connery, Being a Scot, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008, p. 198. 39 Michael S. Moss and John R. Hume, Workshop of the British Empire: Engineering and Shipbuilding in the West of Scotland, London: Heinemann, 1977, p. 3. 40 Petrie, Screening Scotland, p. 111. 41 Moss and Hume, Workshop of the British Empire, pp. 4–5. 42 John Hunter, Great Scot: The Life of Sean Connery, London: Bloomsbury, 1993, p. 108. 43 Hunter, Great Scot, pp. 110–11. 44 Although this deal was brokered by Stewart and supported by an interest-free £5.5 million loan from the Labour government, UCS ran into financial difficulties. When the Conservatives gained power in 1970 with an industrial policy mantra of ‘no lame ducks’, there was no hope of securing further government funding. UCS went into liquidation in July 1971. UCS was reorganised as Govan Shipbuilders with a vastly reduced workforce, and the industry nationalised in 1977 with the profitable section re-privatised by the Thatcher government, after which shipbuilding on the Clyde was reduced to supplying highly specialised orders; see Ian Whitehead’s introduction in the booklet accompanying the two-DVD compilation Tales from the Shipyard, London: BFI Publishing, 2011, pp. 1–3. 45 The interview was intended to form part of a television series entitled Now and Then, which never found a buyer. It has been made available on Tales from the Shipyard; see p. 39 of the accompanying booklet for details.

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Notes 319 46 Bob McCabe, Sean Connery, London: Pavilion, 2001, p. 73. 47 Lynch, SNP, p. 5. See also Andrew Mycock, ‘SNP, Identity and Citizenship: Re-imagining State and Nation’, National Identities, 14: 1 (March 2012), pp. 53–69. 48 Gerry Hassan, ‘The Making of the Modern SNP: From Protest to Power’, in Hassan (ed.), The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p. 5; David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 118–21. 49 David Torrance, Salmond: Against the Odds, Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2011, p. 185. 50 Quoted in Brian Pendreigh, ‘A Secret Weapon Brought in from the Cold’, Scotsman, 19 June 1992, quoted in Christopher Bray, Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 279. 51 Ewen MacAskill, ‘Connery Comes to SNP Aid’, Guardian, 26 April 1999, www. theguardian.com/politics/1999/apr/26/uk.politicalnews, accessed 2 November 2021. 52 Shirley English, ‘Connery Funds SNP with £4,000 a Month’, The Times, 6 April 1998. 53 Callan, Sean Connery, p. 277. 54 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 27. Connery professed to having ‘a great affection’ for John Smith, who vigorously promoted devolution as ‘unfinished business’ and the ‘settled will of the Scottish people’ until his untimely death in 1994. This did not extend to his successor, Tony Blair, whom Connery thought had presided over ‘a sad decline of the Labour Party’s values’, Connery, Being a Scot, p. 8. 55 Translation from the Latin in James Mitchell, The Scottish Question, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 85. 56 Torrance, Salmond, p. 233; Ascherson, Stone Voices, pp. 131–2. 57 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 290. 58 Connery, New Statesman, 4 March 2014. Connery also argued that independence would give additional support and encouragement to the Scottish film industry and that a ‘bigger and more confident film and broadcast sector will mean an inflow of resources and new jobs and training’. 59 The campaign has been renewed by the current SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, fuelled by the UK’s decision to leave the European Union in 2016 as the result of a referendum in which Scots voted overwhelmingly to remain. 60 Quoted in Passingham, Sean Connery, p. 114. 61 The donation to Dundee University enabled it to establish the Wellcome Trust Biocentre and to become the leading UK institution for research into life sciences and a leading European centre; see www.lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/, accessed 15 August 2018. Connery also endowed a chair of drama at Strathclyde University. 62 Variety, 5 May 1997. 63 Hunter, Great Scot, pp. 118–22; see SIET’s website, www.scotinted.org.uk, accessed 24 August 2020.

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320 Notes 64 The film was part-funded by the Scottish Tourist Board; the other funders of the film were the City of Edinburgh District Council, British Caledonian Airways, Scottish & Newcastle Breweries, the British Tourist Board and the Clydesdale Bank. 65 Interview with Murray Grigor, 18 November 2019. 66 Ian Fleming’s account of this episode in You Only Live Twice (1964) has often been taken as his tribute to Connery’s success in the screen version; see William Boyd, ‘Why James Bond Ran Away to Fettes’, Spectator, 28 March 2015, www.spectator.co.uk/2015/03/from-fettes-with-love/, accessed 23 August 2018. 67 Pendreigh, The Scot Pack, p. 40. 68 In interview, Grigor revealed that Being a Scot was originally planned as a six-part television series. However, Connery was so disillusioned with the screen after appearing in League of Extraordinary Gentleman that he asked Grigor to turn the screenplays into a book, which enabled Grigor to add more nuance and to elaborate on the history in more detail. Although Grigor was the actual author of the book, it was very firmly based on a series of extended interviews with Connery, who was ever vigilant that his ‘voice’ came through in each chapter. 69 Sunday Times, 7 April 2004. 70 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 74. 71 Connery, Being a Scot, pp. 43–9. 72 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 291. 73 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 46. 74 Quoted in Andrew Yule, Sean Connery: Neither Shaken Nor Stirred, London: Sphere, 2008 [1992], p. 278. 75 Sunday Telegraph, 4 May 1997, p. 18. 76 See Yule, Sean Connery, pp. 353–5. 77 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 259. 78 See the website Guardian of the Highlands, www.guardianofthehighlands.com/ about.htm, accessed 19 April 2021. 79 Peter Debruge, Variety, 15 April 2012, https://variety.com/2012/film/reviews/ sir-billi-1117947392/, accessed 19 July 2020. 80 Peter Bradshaw, Guardian, 13 November 2013, www.theguardian.com/film/2013/ sep/13/sir-billi-scotland-beaver-review, accessed 19 July 2020. 81 Cleaver Patterson, Cinevue, 13 September 2013, https://cine-vue.com/2013/09/ film-review-sir-billi.html, accessed 19 July 2020. Because of the length of time before Sir Billi was released, The Illusionist took that accolade. 82 See Creative Scotland and BOP Consulting, Review of the Scottish Animation Sector, March 2017, www.creativescotland.com/__data/assets/ pdf_file/0008/38861/Animation-Sector-Review-Final-Report.pdf, accessed 16 November 2021. 83 Gerard Seenan, ‘Connery Bonds with Edinburgh and Snubs Dewar in £60m Film Deal’, Guardian, 2 November 1998, p. 11. 84 Callan, Sean Connery, p. 280.

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Notes 321 85 Magnus Linklater, ‘Connery’s Refusal to Ditch SNP “Cost Scotland Its Big Film Studio”’, The Times, 21 May 2007, p. 7. 86 Connery, Being a Scot, p. 261. 87 John Walsh, ‘Oh Yesh, He’s the Great Pretender’, Independent Review, 6 May 1999, p. 8. 88 Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989, p. 1. The Celts are an invented, mythic nation, having no historical existence; see Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. 89 Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Richards’s overview of Scotland’s cinema (pp. 175–211) is contextualised within an informative account of Scottish history and myths. He is particularly sensitive to the distortions and inaccuracies of Hollywood’s interventions, including Braveheart (pp. 185–6), but recognises their emotional appeal. For a more acerbic account see Colin McArthur, ‘Brigadoon’, ‘Braveheart’ and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris, 2003. 90 The Highlands of Scotland are not a ‘natural’ landscape but the result of extensive human intervention, notoriously the ‘clearances’ – the forced eviction of inhabitants of the Highlands and western islands of Scotland, c.1750–1850, in which their smallholdings were removed to create open land for sheep farming; see Katherine Grenier, Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770–1914: Creating Caledonia, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005; Charles Withers, ‘The Creation of the Scottish Highlands’, in Ian Donnachie and Christopher Whatley (eds), The Manufacture of Scottish History, Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992, pp. 143–56; and Womack, Improvement and Romance. For an overview of the Scottish tourist industry, see David McCrone, Angela Morris and Richard Kiely, Scotland – the Brand: The Making of Scottish Heritage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. 91 See ‘Homecoming Scotland Advert – Sean Connery’, YouTube, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GGrkwjTM9dA, accessed 16 November 2021. 92 Connery, Being a Scot, pp. 76–7; Richard Zumkhawala-Cook, Scotland as We Know It: Representations of National Identity in Literature, Film and Popular Culture, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2009, pp. 22–5; Ascherson, Stone Voices, pp. 261–3. Ascherson points out (pp. 266–8) that although the supposed connections between the Declaration and the American Constitution are specious, they represent a shared desire for freedom and self-determination. 93 See Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture, Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996, pp. 105–7; and Calder, Revolving Culture, pp. 95–103. See also Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain; the essays in Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels, London: BFI Publishing, 1982; and John Caughie, ‘Representing Scotland: New Questions for Scottish Cinema’, in Dick (ed.), From Limelight to Satellite, pp. 13–30. 94 Ian Brown, ‘Tartan, Tartanry and Hybridity’, in Ian Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

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322 Notes Press, 2011, p. 9; Murray G.H. Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 151–2, 161, 164. A recent cinematic example, Robert the Bruce (2019), concludes by emphasising that Bruce freed Scotland from its English overlords as the champion of a progressive, democratising egalitarianism, a leader who ‘owned no castle’ and was content to ‘live among his people’. 95 See McArthur, ‘Brigadoon’, ‘Braveheart’ and the Scots, pp. 126–7; and Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg, 2002, pp. 139–70. Edensor also discusses the continuing cult of Wallace. 96 David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema – Genres, Modes and Identities, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p. 72. 97 Sally Totman and P. David Marshall, ‘Real/Reel Politics and Popular Culture’, Celebrity Studies, 6: 4 (2015), pp. 603–4. 98 Walsh, ‘Oh Yesh, He’s the Great Pretender’. 99 Seven years earlier in 1984 Connery had been made a fellow of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow for his contribution to the furtherance of Scottish education. 100 ‘Freedom of Edinburgh for Sean Connery’, UK Parliament, Early Day Motions, https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/2876/freedom-of-edinburgh-for-seanconnery, accessed 16 November 2021; Bray, Sean Connery, pp. 278–9. 101 Quoted in Sunday Times, 4 June 2000. 102 Katrine Bussey, ‘Scottish Independence: Sir Sean Connery Urges Scots to Break Away from Britain as an Opportunity “Too Good to Miss”’, Independent, 2 March 2014. 103 See Richard Holt, ‘King Across the Border: Denis Law and Scottish Football’, in Grant Jarvie and Graham Walker (eds), Scottish Sport in the Making of the Nation: Ninety Minute Patriots?, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994, pp. 58–74. 104 Alan Taylor, ‘He’s Sir to His Friends’, Observer Review, 1 March 1998, p. 20. 105 Bray, Sean Connery, p. 279. Connery considered that the Scottish press had waged a vendetta against him; see Geoffrey Macnab, ‘I Had Drive from the Beginning’, Guardian, 13 December 2004, p. 14. 106 In 2003 Connery was able to resume his SNP donations after having been barred as an expatriate for two years. The SNP Chief Executive Peter Murrell is quoted as considering that Connery had been an ‘enormous help’ to the SNP: ‘He recorded both radio and television messages for us, participated in newspaper interviews and fronted our drive to win over the business community on fiscal independence’; see ‘Connery Resumes SNP Donations’, BBC News, 28 August 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3189149.stm, accessed 28 August 2020. 107 Sunday Herald, 15 January 2013. 108 Lawrence Donegan, ‘Connery Denied a Knighthood’, Guardian, 23 February 1998, p. 1; Connery, Being a Scot, p. 298. On 8 June 1992, forty-five Labour MPs had signed an Early Day Motion expressing their condemnation of the views expressed by Connery ‘in an Australian magazine, that giving a woman

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Notes 323 a smack in the face is acceptable conduct, and that she is “looking for” such behaviour on the part of her partner or husband; and call[ed] on the Scottish National Party to immediately dissociate itself from these remarks’; see ‘Sean Connery’s Views on Violence against Women’, UK Parliament, Early Day Motions, https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/7938/sean-connerys-viewson-violence-against-women, accessed 16 November 2021. 109 Zumkhawala-Cook, Scotland as We Know It, p. 145. 110 Zumkhawala-Cook, Scotland as We Know It, pp. 146, 150, 136. 111 Some members of the SNP wrote to The Times saying that the party ‘should be delighted Sean Connery has been ignored’; see Zumkhawala-Cook, Scotland as We Know It, p. 151. The English press also took up Connery’s cause; see ‘A Star without Honour in His Own Land’, Sunday Times, 1 March 1998. The Scottish activist Tom Nairn, interviewed on Brits Go to Hollywood: Sean Connery, ITN Factual, 2003, heaves a long sigh when the knighthood is mentioned. 112 Jackie Stewart, Observer, 13 December 2020. 113 Pendreigh, The Scot Pack, pp. 17–18. 114 See their contributions to Sean Connery: In His Own Words, produced and directed by Pete Stanton, BBC Scotland, 2015. 115 McDonald, George Clooney, p. 163.

Conclusion 1 Peter Bradshaw, Guardian, 25 August 2020. 2 Quoted in Russell Miller, ‘No One Says No to Sean’, Sunday Times Magazine, 5 November 1989, p. 28. 3 Quoted in Michael Freedland, Sean Connery: A Biography, London: Orion, 1994, p. 359. 4 Sean Macauley, Time, section 2, 22 February 2001. 5 Peter Rainer, ‘Some Like It Hotter’, New York Times, 10 May 1999. 6 Geoffrey Macnab, Independent, 31 October 2020, www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/films/features/sean-connery-death-james-bond-untouchables-obituarytribute-cause-bahamas-b1481134.html, accessed 3 November 2020. See also Ronald Bergan’s obituary in the Guardian, 31 October 2020, www.theguardian.com/ film/2020/oct/31/sir-sean-connery-obituary, accessed 2 November 2020. After Connery’s death, these materials recirculated, especially the interview with Barbara Walters. 7 John Boorman, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Feeley Callan, Sean Connery: His Life and Films, London: W.H. Allen, 1984, p. 2. 8 For example Brian Pendreigh, ‘The Sean Connery I Knew’, Scotsman, 1 November 2020. 9 Andrew Rissik, The James Bond Man: The Films of Sean Connery, London: Elm Tree Books, 1983, p. 124.

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Archival collections BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, Reading (WAC) 5064 7C: Without the Grail – camera script; n.d. R120/7/1: An Age of Kings – merchandising/promotions; n.d. T5/610/1: General File on Sean Connery. (Contains correspondence, salaries, rehearsal and transmission times and dates and additional offers of roles by Rudolph Cartier and others); n.d. T5/610/1: An Age of Kings – general; n.d. T5/611/1: Anna Karenina – production file; July 1961. VR/57/181: Requiem for a Heavyweight – viewers’ reports; 30 April 1957. VR/60/34: Colombe – viewers’ reports; 11 February 1960. VR/60/238: An Age of Kings – viewers’ reports for Richard II – The Hollow Crown; 25 May 1960. VR/60/270: An Age of Kings – viewers’ reports for Edward II – The Deposing of a King; 10 June 1960. VR/60/539: Without the Grail – viewers’ reports; 5 October 1960. VR/61/321: Adventure Story – viewers’ reports; 3 July 1961. VR/61/585: Anna Karenina – viewers’ reports; 20 November 1961. British Film Institute Library, London (BFI): Bond scripts S6500 Dr. No – Fourth Draft Screenplay (Richard Maibaum, Wolf Mankowitz), 12 December 1961. S6501 From Russia with Love – Final Draft Screenplay (Richard Maibaum), 18 March 1963. S6502 Diamonds Are Forever (Tom Mankiewicz), undated but with ‘further revisions’, 9 and 13 April 1971 and 27 July 1971. S6508 Goldfinger – Final Draft Screenplay (Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn), 26 February 1964. S8910 Thunderball – Shooting Script (Richard Maibaum), 30 November 1964. S18574 Dr. No – Fifth Draft Screenplay (Richard Maibaum, Wolf Mankowitz and J.M. Harwood), 8 January 1962.



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[I have also consulted the BFI Library’s microfiches for Sean Connery and each of his films.]

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Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles (MHL) Gene Allen Papers George Cukor Papers Alfred Hitchcock Papers Hedda Hopper Papers John Huston Papers Martin Ritt Papers Fred Zinnemann Papers [I have also consulted the MHL’s microfiche for Sean Connery and the following film files: Dr. No; From Russia with Love; Goldfinger; The Man Who Would Be King; Marnie; Robin and Marian; Thunderball.] Theatre and Performance Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum, London [Four files covering aspects of Connery’s career, 1960–2000.] Printed sources: film journals, trade papers, newspapers, magazines and periodicals [I have drawn on a range of film journals, trade papers, newspapers and periodicals to supplement archival sources; specific references are identified in the endnotes.] Extended studies of Connery Bray, Christopher (2010), Sean Connery: The Measure of a Man, London: Faber and Faber. Callan, Michael Feeley (1984), Sean Connery: His Life and Films, London: W.H. Allen. Callan, Michael Feeley (2002), Sean Connery, London: Virgin. Cousins, Mark (1997), ‘King of the Hill’, Sight and Sound, 7: 5 (May), pp. 24–5. Freedland, Michael (1994), Sean Connery: A Biography, London: Orion. Gant, Richard (1967), Sean Connery: Gilt-Edged Bond, London: Mayflower-Dell. Hunter, John (1993), Great Scot: The Life of Sean Connery, London: Bloomsbury. Lane, Sheldon (ed.) (1965), For Bond Lovers Only, London: Panther. McCabe, Robert (2001), Sean Connery, London: Pavilion. McIlvanney, William (2013), Almost a Book About Sean Connery, www.personaldispatches.com/dispatch007a.html, accessed 8 December 2016. Macnab, Geoffrey (1992), ‘Before Bond’, Sight and Sound, 2: 6 (October), pp. 32–3. Millar, John (1990), ‘Sean Connery’, in Eddie Dick (ed.), From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book, London: BFI/SFC, pp. 163–70. Parker, John (1993), Sean Connery, London: Victor Gollancz. Parker, John (2005), Arise Sir Sean Connery, London: John Blake.

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Passingham, Kenneth (1983), Sean Connery, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Pfeiffer, Lee and Philip Lisa (2001), The Films of Sean Connery, New York: The Citadel Press. Rissik, Andrew (1983), The James Bond Man: The Films of Sean Connery, London: Elm Tree Books. Sellers, Robert (1990), The Films of Sean Connery, London: Vision Press. Sellers, Robert (1999), Sean Connery: A Celebration, London: Robert Hale. Sinyard, Neil (1981), ‘Heroic Irony’, Films Illustrated (October), pp. 16–18. Spicer, Andrew (2001), ‘Sean Connery: Loosening His Bonds’, in Bruce Babington (ed.), British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 218–30. Tanitch, Robert (1992), Sean Connery, London: Chapmans. Yule, Andrew (2008 [1992]), Sean Connery: Neither Shaken Nor Stirred, London: Sphere. Secondary sources (selected) Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2010), ‘The Celebrity-Icon’, Cultural Sociology, 4: 3, pp. 323–36. Aronstein, Susan (2005), Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ascherson, Neal (2002), Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, London: Granta. Balio, Tino (1998), ‘“A Major Presence in All of the World’s Important Markets”: The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s’, in Steve Neale and Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, London: Routledge, pp. 58–73. Balio, Tino (2009), United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry – Volume 2, 1951–1978, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Balio, Tino (2013), Hollywood in the New Millennium, London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. Baron, Cynthia and Sharon M. Carnicke (2008), Reframing Screen Performance, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Basinger, Jeanine (2009 [2007]), The Star Machine, New York: Vintage Books. Bennett, Tony and Janet Woollacott (1987), Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Billington, Michael (1973), The Modern Actor, London: Hamish Hamilton. Calder, Angus (1994), Revolving Culture: Notes from the Scottish Republic, London: I.B. Tauris. Caughie, John (1991), ‘Before the Golden Age: Early Television Drama’, in John Corner (ed.), Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History, London: BFI Publishing, pp. 22–41. Chapman, James (2005), ‘Bond and Britishness’, in Edward P. Commentale, Stephen Watt and Skip Willman (eds), Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 129–43. Chapman, James (2007), Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, rev. edn, London: I.B. Tauris.

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Chapman, James and Nicholas J. Cull (2009), Projecting Empire: Imperialism and British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris. Chapman, Llewella (2015), ‘Fashioning the Bond Vivant: Dressing for the Fans of James Bond’, in Claire Hines (ed.), Fan Phenomena: James Bond, Bristol: Intellect, pp. 108–19. Chapman, Llewella (2021), Fashioning James Bond: Costume, Gender and Identity in the World of 007, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Chivers, Sally (2011), The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema, Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press. Cilento, Diane (2006), My Nine Lives, London: Michael Joseph. Clark, Danae (1995), Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors’ Labor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cochrane, Claire (2011), Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, David A. (2000), Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970–1979, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Cook, Pam and Claire Hines (2005), ‘“Sean Connery Is James Bond”: Re-fashioning British Masculinity in the 1960s’, in Rachel Mosley (ed.), Dress, Culture, Identity, London: BFI Publishing, pp. 147–59. Cork, John and Bruce Scivally (2002), James Bond: The Legacy, London: Boxtree. Cunningham, Frank R. (2001), Sidney Lumet: Film and the Literary Vision, Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky. DeCordova, Richard (2001 [1990]), Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Devine, T.M. (2017 [2016]), Independence or Union: Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Present, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dolan, Josephine (2017), Contemporary Cinema and ‘Old Age’: Gendering and the Silvering of Stardom, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Drake, Philip (2006), ‘Reconceptualising Screen Performance’, Journal of Film and Video, 58: 1–2, pp. 84–94. Drazin, Charles (2011), A Bond for Bond: Film Finances and ‘Dr No’, London: Film Finances. Duncan, Paul (ed.) (2012), The James Bond Archives, Cologne: Taschen. Dyer, Richard (1986), Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, London: Macmillan. Dyer, Richard (1998 [1979]), Stars, rev. edn, London: BFI Publishing. Edensor, Tim (2002), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, Oxford: Berg. Eliot, Marc (2017), Charlton Heston: America’s Last Icon, New York: Dey Street Books. Elley, Derek (1984), The Epic Film: Myth and History, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. English, James F. (2005), The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Field, Matthew and Ajay Chowdhury (2015), Some Kind of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films, Stroud: The History Press.

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French, John (2016 [1993]), Robert Shaw: The Price of Success, London: Dean Street Press. Frymus, Agata (2020), Damsels and Divas: European Stardom in Silent Hollywood, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Gaines, Jane M. (1992), Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice and the Law, London: BFI Publishing. Gallagher, Mark (2015), ‘Alain Delon, International Man of Mystery’, in Nick ReesRoberts and Darren Waldron (eds), Alain Delon: Style, Stardom, and Masculinity, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 91–109. Gamson, Joshua (1994), Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press. Ghosh, Bishnupriya (2011), Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Gunter, Barrie (2014), Celebrity Capital: Assessing the Value of Fame, London: Bloomsbury. Hayes, Janys (2008), ‘The Knowing Body: Meaning and Method in Yat Malmgren’s Actor Training Technique’, PhD thesis, University of Western Sydney. Hearn, Jonathan (2000), Claiming Scotland: National Identity and Liberal Culture, Edinburgh: Polygon. Hewett, Richard (2017), The Changing Spaces of Television Acting: From Studio Realism to Location Realism in BBC Television Drama, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hines, Claire (2018), The Playboy and James Bond: 007, Ian Fleming and ‘Playboy’ Magazine, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hochscherf, Tobias (2010), ‘From Refugee to the BBC: Rudolph Cartier, Weimar Cinema and Early British Television’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 7: 3, pp. 401–20. Holmes, Sean P. (2000), ‘The Hollywood Star System and the Regulation of Actors’ Labour, 1916–1934’, Film History, 12, pp. 97–114. Holmlund, Chris (2001), ‘The Aging Clint’, in Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies, New York: Routledge, pp. 143–56. Jacobs, Jason (2000), The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Johnstone, Iain (1977), The Arnhem Report: The Story Behind ‘A Bridge Too Far’, London: Star Books. Kaminsky, Stuart (1978), John Huston: Maker of Magic, London: Angus & Robertson. Kapsis, Robert E. (1992), Hitchcock and the Making of a Reputation, London: University of Chicago Press. Kemper, Tom (2010), Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. King, Barry (1985), ‘Articulating Stardom’, Screen, 25: 5 (September/October), pp. 27–50. King, Barry (1986), ‘Stardom as an Occupation’, in Paul Kerr (ed.), The Hollywood Film Industry, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 154–84. King, Barry (2014), Taking Fame to Market: On the Pre-History and Post-History of Hollywood Stardom, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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King, Barry (2018), ‘Becoming Iconic’, International Journal of Communication, 12, 3390–408. Klaprat, Cathy (1976), ‘The Star as Market Strategy: Bette Davis in Another Light’, in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 351–76. Knight, Stephen (2015), The Politics of Myth, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Kolker, Robert (1988), A Cinema of Loneliness, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, Daryl (2014), The Heist Film: Stealing with Style, London: Wallflower Press. Leotta, Alfio (2019), The Cinema of John Milius, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Lev, Peter (2013), Twentieth Century-Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935–1965, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Levinson, Julie (2015), ‘The Auteur Renaissance’, in Claudia Springer and Julie Levinson (eds), Acting, London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 95–119. Luzón-Aguado, Virginia (2020), Harrison Ford: Masculinity and Stardom in Hollywood, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Lynch, Peter (2013), SNP: The History of the Scottish National Party, 2nd edn, Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press. McAllister, Robbie (2019), Steampunk Film: A Critical Introduction, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. McCrone, David (2001), Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation, London: Routledge. McCrone, David, Angela Morris and Richard Kiely (1995), Scotland – the Brand: The Making of Scottish Heritage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McDonald, Paul (2000), The Star System: Hollywood Production of Popular Identities, London: Wallflower Press. McDonald, Paul (2008), ‘The Star System: The Production of Hollywood Stardom in the Post-Studio Era’, in Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (eds), The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 167–81. McDonald, Paul (2012), ‘Story and Show: The Basic Contradictions of Film Star Acting’, in Aaron Taylor (ed.), Theorizing Film Acting, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 169–83. McDonald, Paul (2013), Hollywood Stardom, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. McDonald, Paul (2019), George Clooney, London: BFI Publishing. McGilligan, Patrick (1975), Cagney: The Actor as Auteur, London: Tantivy Press. McGilligan, Patrick (1991), George Cukor: A Double Life, London: Faber and Faber. McLean, Adrienne L. (2005), Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Macnab, Geoffrey (2000), Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in the British Cinema, London: Cassell. Mann, Denise (2008), Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover, Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Marshall, P. David (1997), Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Meeuf, Russell (2013), John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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Index

Action of the Tiger (1957) 27 Adam, Ken 51, 70 Adams, Brooke 141 Adventure Story (1961, BBC) 40–1 Age of Kings, An (1960, BBC) 38–9 Amiel, Jon 195, 196, 197 Anderson Tapes, The (1971) 107–8 Andress, Ursula 60 Andrews, Harry 95, 96 Anna Christie (1957, ITV; 1959 Stage play) 35 Anna Karenina (1961, BBC TV) 41 Annaud, Jean-Jacques 159–63 Another Time, Another Place (1956) 28, 51 Attenborough, Richard 137, 138, 139 Avengers, The (1998) 193 Bacchae, The (1959 stage play) 44–5 Baldwin, Alec 176, 178 Bardot, Brigitte 101, 102 Barry, Michael 23–4 Basinger, Kim 149 Bay, Michael 189 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 22, 23, 24, 26, 35, 37–9, 41, 42, 46, 247 Being a Scot (2008) 34, 236 Bergen, Candice 122 Berry, Cicely 32 Blackman, Honor 55, 66 Bloom, Claire 41, 43 Boam, Jeffrey 171 Bogarde, Dirk 138, 140 Boorman, John 19, 119–21, 180

Bowler and the Bunnet, The (1967) 231–3 Boy with the Meat Axe, The (1958, ITV) 36 Bracco, Lorraine 186–7 Brandauer, Klaus Maria 147, 174, 183 Bregman, Martin 136 Bridge Too Far, A (1974) 137–40, 152, 229 Broccoli, Albert R. (Cubby) 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 61, 64, 71, 72, 81, 151 Brooks, Richard 144 Brown, Rob 200, 202 (photo) Bruckheimer, Jerry 189–90 Cage, Nicolas 191, 192 Cagney, James 54, 67, 261 n.33 Caine, Michael 125, 126, 138 Cartier, Rudolph 39–43 Cilento, Diane 19, 32, 44, 55, 93, 223 Clancy, Tom 174 Clement, Dick 147–8, 189 Cohen, Rob 212–3, 214, 215 Colombe (1960, BBC) 37 Connolly, Billy 242 Costner, Kevin 163, 164, 166 (photo) Creative Artists Agency (CAA) 119, 142, 143, 144, 156, 169, 181, 186, 187, 252 Cross, Ben 211 Crucible, The (1959, ITV) 35–6 Cuba (1979) 140–2, 152 Cukor, George 98–100 Dahl, Roald 71, 280 n. 168 Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1960) 28–9, 51

334 Index

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Dearden, Basil 85 De Palma, Brian 163, 164, 167 Diamonds Are Forever (1971) 76–8, 80 DragonHeart (1996) 210, 212–15 Dr. No (1962) 56, 53–63, 65, 78 Eastwood, Clint 83, 101, 102, 136, 142, 152, 155, 156, 157, 169, 196, 198 Eaton, Shirley 66 End Game 201 Entrapment (1999) 193–9 Eon Productions 5, 49–50, 74, 83–4, 146 Family Business (1989) 169 Finding Forrester (2000) 199–201 Fine Madness, A (1966) 97–8 First Great Train Robbery, The (1978) 136–7 First Knight (1995) 210–12, 215 Fishburne, Laurence 188 Five Days One Summer (1982) 145 Fleming, Ian 48, 49, 50, 54–5, 64–5 Ford, Harrison 170, 171, 172, 173 Fountainbridge Films 181, 185–6, 188–9, 193, 199, 201, 205–6 Frightened City, The (1961) 29, 30–1 From Russia with Love (1963) 63–4, 65, 73, 79 Gere, Richard 211, 212 Gilbert, Lewis 71, 72–3 Glimcher, Arne 188, 189 Glorious Days, The (1953, Stage musical) 17 Goldfinger (1964) 64–9, 70, 79, 81 Goldman, James 129–30, 131, 138 Good Man in Africa, A (1994) 229 Grant, Cary 50, 67, 68, 86, 87, 88, 194, 220, 221 Grigor, Murray 236, 238 (photo) Hamilton, Guy 53, 65–8, 76–7 Hardy, Robert 38, 39 Harmon, Mark 169 Harris, Ed 188–9, 191 Harris, Richard 103–4, 105, 130

Hartmann, Sascha 239 Hartmann, Tessa 239 Harwood, Johanna 57, 59 Hatton, Richard 21, 27, 35, 69, 76, 84, 85, 99, 109, 117, 283 n. 7 Hedren, Tippi 86 Hell Drivers (1957) 27 Henderson, Robert 18–19, 21, 34, 45 Hepburn, Audrey 130, 131, 132–3 Heston, Charlton 3, 152, 179, 208, 215, 220, 221 Highlander (1968) 157–9 Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) 159 Hill, The (1965) 92–7 Hitchcock, Alfred 85–92 Hunt for Red October, The (1990) 174–8 Huston, John 125, 126, 127 Hyams, Peter 143 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) 170–3 ITV (Independent Television) 22, 32, 35, 36, 233 Judith (1962, Stage play) 45 Just Cause (1995) 188–9, 205, 228 Kerschner, Irvin 147, 148 La Frenais, Ian 147–8, 189 Lambert, Christopher 157, 158–9 Lancaster, Burt 20, 117, 168, 265 n. 45 L’Amour, Louis 101–2 Lazenby, George 75 Le Carré, John 182, 183 League of Extraordinary Gentleman, The (2003) 199, 202–5 Lee, Bernard 60–1 Lester, Richard 130–1, 133–4, 140, 141–2 Levine, Joseph E. 137–8 Linson, Art 163, 167 Lollobrigida, Gina 85 Longest Day, The (1962) 27–8 Lucas, George 170, 171 Lumet, Sidney 93–6, 97, 107–8, 109, 110, 111, 113, 135, 136, 169

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Index 335 Macbeth (1961, TV) 43 Maibaum, Richard 50, 55, 56, 57, 64, 76, 79, 80 Male of the Species (1969, ITV) 290 n. 156 Malmgren, Yat 32–5, 45, 52 Mamet, David 163, 164–6, 187 Mankiewicz, Tom 76–7 Man Who Would Be King, The (1975) 2, 125–9 Man with the Deadly Lens, The (1982) see Wrong Is Right Marnie (1964) 85–92 Maxwell, Lois 60 McClory, Kevin 146, 148, 151 McGoohan, Patrick 51, 74, 273 n. 23 McTiernan, John 175, 176, 185, 186, 187 Medicine Man (1982) 181, 185, 186–7 Meteor (1979) 136 Milius, John 121–2, 124, 125, 174–5, 175 Mitchum, Robert 20, 220 Molly Maguires, The (1970) 102–7 Moore, Alan 203 Moore, Roger 31, 51, 74, 116, 117, 146, 148, 150, 171, 274 n. 24 Murder on the Orient Express (1974) 135–6 Murphy, Don 203 Naked (1960, Stage play) 44 Name of the Rose, The (1986) 159–63, 215 Neill, Sam 175–6 Neufeld, Mace 174 Never Say Never Again (1983) 145–51 Next Man, The (1976) 136 Nine Tiger Man 98–101 Norrington, Stephen 204 No Road Back (1957) 27 Offence, The (1973) 108–14 Olivier, Laurence 39, 41, 138, 216 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service 75–6, 77 On the Fiddle (1961) 29–30, 51–2 Outland (1981) 143–4

Ovitz, Michael 119, 142–3, 144, 145–6, 147, 148, 153, 156, 157, 159, 163–4, 169, 174, 186, 187, 188, 189 Paramount 28, 29, 106, 163–4, 167, 169, 174, 177 Pets, The (1960, ITV) 36 Pfeiffer, Michelle 183 Picker, David 50, 76, 85 Playing by Heart (1998) 193 Presidio, The (1998) 169–70, 229 Presson Allen, Jay 88, 90 Quaid, Dennis 213 (photo), 214 Rakoff, Alvin 23–5, 35 Ransom (1974) 135 Rattigan, Terence 40–1, 99, 100–1 Red Tent, The (1969) 289 n. 129 Relph, Michael 85 Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957, BBC) 23–6 Reynolds, Burt 119, 121 Rich, Mike 199, 200 Richards, Kenneth 146–7 Richardson, Ralph 85 Rising Sun (1993) 187 Ritt, Martin 102–3, 105, 106, 107 Robin and Marian (1976) 129–34, 152 Rock, The (1996) 189–93, 228 Roquebrune, Micheline 147, 148, 239 Russia House, The (1991) 181–4 St. John, Jill 77 Salmond, Alec 234, 235 Saltzman, Harry 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 71, 72, 81, 84, 113 Schepisi, Fred 182, 184 Schwartzman, Jack 146, 148, 151 Scottish International Education Trust, The (SIET) 235–6, 242, 244 Sea Shell, The (1959, Stage play) 45 Sean Connery’s Edinburgh (1986) 236, 237 (photo) Selinger, Dennis 117, 119, 125, 135, 136, 137, 142, 153, 296 n. 115 Shalako (1968) 101–2 Shaw, Robert 36, 79, 131 Simpson, Don 189, 192

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336 Index Sir Billi (2012) 239 Slater, Christian 160, 161 (photo), 162 Snipes, Wesley 187 SNP (Scottish National Party) 229, 230, 233–5, 240, 241, 242, 243, 248, 322 n. 106 & n. 111 Sony Pictures 199, 239 South Pacific (1953–55, Stage musical) 18, 21 Spielberg, Stephen 170, 171 Square Ring, The (1959, ITV) 35 Stewart, Iain 232, 235 Stewart, Jackie 235, 243, 286 n. 49 Stoppard, Tom 171, 182, 184, 186 Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1984) 157 Tantallon Films 109, 118, 181 Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959) 29 Thunderball (1965) 69, 70, 71, 81 Time Bandits (1981) 151–2 Time Lock (1957) 27 Tollefson, Rhonda 185–6, 194, 195, 199, 201 Tutin, Dorothy 37

Twentieth Century-Fox 26–9, 98–100, 119, 158, 160, 187, 194–5, 203, 204 United Artists 49, 61, 63, 68–9, 71–2, 85, 112–13, 122, 151 Untouchables, The (1987) 163–8 Van Sant, Gus 200, 201 Wayne, John 101, 155, 168, 208, 209, 219, 220 Weintraub, Jerry 193 Wind and the Lion, The (1975) 121–5 Without the Grail (1960, BBC) 37–8 Woman of Straw (1964) 85 Wrong Is Right (1982) 144–5 Young, Terence 50, 55, 56–61, 63 You Only Live Twice (1967) 69, 70, 71–4, 75, 79 Zanuck, Richard 99 Zardoz (1974) 119–21 Zeta-Jones, Catherine 195, 197–8 Zinnemann, Fred 145 Zucker, Jerry 211, 212