Remembering the Dark Magnetism of Sean Connery

Sean Connery wasn’t a stranger to moviegoers when he made his debut as James Bond in the 1962 film Dr. No, the first big-screen outing for Ian Fleming’s super-spy. Connery had been around for awhile. He’d almost stumbled into acting in the early ’50s via a string of odd jobs, but supporting roles on stage led to bigger parts and, on screen, work as an extra evolved into name-on-the-poster jobs like Another Time, Another Place — in which he played opposite Lana Turner and tussled with her gangster boyfriend on set — and Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People. But Connery’s first moments as Bond made all that feel like prelude.

Introduced gambling in an upscale private club, Bond is revealed bit-by-bit by director Terrence Young. He appears first as a pair of hands, his profile obscured by the gambler to his left, then from behind, via a shot of his precise haircut and a tuxedo filled out by intimidatingly broad shoulders. When we finally see his face he’s Fleming’s hero in full: the handsome features, the disrespectful angle of the just-lighted cigarette he can’t be bothered to remove when speaking, the inquisitive eyebrows, and the alert gaze that mixes wariness with mockery. Never mind that Fleming had envisioned a hero bearing a resemblance to singer Hoagy Carmichael or the unmistakable traces of a Scottish accent Connery applies to the words “Bond, James Bond.” It was the role Connery was born to play.

Except, in many respects, it wasn’t. Connery was born to working class parents in Edinburgh, growing up with none of the advantages evidenced in Bond’s high-toned manners and ability to state a preference between the 1953 and 1955 vintages of Dom Pérignon. Both Bond and Connery had served in the Royal Navy, but where Bond had risen to the rank of Commander, an ulcer ended Connery’s time in service. He left at the age of 19 returning to Edinburgh with a “Scotland Forever” tattoo and embarking on a tour of the jobs then available to young Scottish men with sturdy backs and handsome faces: lifeguard, model, coffin polisher, bodybuilder, musical theater chorus member. That last gig struck a fire and, with some guidance from American actor Robert Henderson, Connery became something of an acting and literary autodidact. Devouring the works of Shakespeare, Joyce, and Ibsen as he toured Britain in a production of South Pacific, he started to suspect his true calling wouldn’t involve polishing coffins.

That calling brought him to Bond and to stardom. Dr. No led to From Russia With Love which led to Goldfinger which led to Thunderball, creating a snowball effect that by 1965 had turned the character into a pop-culture phenomenon and Connery into a global icon. As Bond, he foiled increasingly elaborate global threats and bedded beautiful women with absurd names and received fame and fortune in return. To the role he brought charm, skill, and more than a hint of brutality. Speaking to Playboy in 1965, he gave most of the credit to good timing, saying, “Bond came on the scene after the War, at a time when people were fed up with rationing and drab times and utility clothes and a predominately grey colour in life. Along comes this character who cuts right through all that like a very hot knife through butter, with his clothing and his cars and his wine and his women.”

Connery wanted more from the start. In the same interview he described taking on the role with some reluctance, saying, “it would have to be the first of a series and I wasn't sure I wanted to get involved in that and the contract that would go with it. Contracts choke you, and I wanted to be free.” He sought freedom elsewhere, alternating Bond work with projects like the Sidney Lumet war movie The Hill, the star-filled comedy A Fine Madness and, most memorably, playing opposite Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie. After his fifth outing as Bond in 1967’s You Only Live Twice he left the character behind, seemingly for good, letting a young Australian model with little acting experience have a go instead.

It wouldn’t be quite that simple. Connery played Bond in two more movies. Enticed to return for 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, he donated his considerable salary to charity. In need of cash after some bad real estate investments, he played him again in 1983’s Never Say Never Again for a rival Bond production made possible by a decades-long legal dispute. His heart never seems to be in either performance and his appearance — toupee-clad, thicker-in-the-middle — stirred up unflattering comparisons to his previous appearances as Bond. The character cast the sort of long shadow others actors would have difficulty escaping.

Connery, however, moved on with grace and without any conspicuous vanity in other films. For his friend John Boorman, he took a starring role in the post-apocalyptic Zardoz, a risky choice in a bizarre flop that’s, justifiably, found a second life as a cult film. In the ’70s he started to appear in adventure films with wistful, ironic, often elegiac undertones, playing the most Scottish of Berbers in John Milius’ The Wind and the Lion and co-starring opposite Michael Caine in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King. In one of his best films from this era, Connery plays a less-than-spry Robin Hood opposite Audrey Hepburn’s Marian in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian. A film about how eras pass and heroes fade into legend, it could easily have been mistaken as the beginning of a long goodbye.

Then a funny thing happened: from the mid-’80s on, Connery became more in-demand than ever. In 1986 he was suddenly inescapable, appearing in the bombastic action fantasy Highlander and playing a monkish detective in Umberto Eco adaption The Name of the Rose. He won a Best Supporting Actor as a Chicago cop in The Untouchables, appeared as the father of an action hero as nearly as iconic as Bond in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, served as a Russian sub commander in The Hunt for Red October, and helped reshape Nicolas Cage into an action hero in Michael Bay’s The Rock. In the end, movies didn’t give up on him, he gave up on movies, stepping away after the unpleasant experience of making the 2003 film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He gave Bond voice one more time in the 2005 video game adaptation of From Russia With Love and appeared as a skateboarding veterinarian in the low-budget Scottish animated film Sir Billi in 2012. But, for the most part, he slipped out of the spotlight as quickly as he’d entered.

What was it that made Connery so compelling for so long? Maybe it was that he so often played characters who kept much of themselves hidden. We learn much of what Bond likes — via his specific tastes in food, booze, women, and clothes — but little of what drives him or what made him who he is. In The Untouchables, his Jimmy Malone appears out of nowhere to help Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness, seemingly summoned by the city itself. And sometimes the glimpses he offered of these men’s hidden sides suggest a suppressed darkness.

So it was with Connery as well. An often-brooding figure who suffered no fools, Connery was long dogged by another quote from that 1965 Playboy interview: “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman ... although I don't recommend doing it in the same way that you'd hit a man. An openhanded slap is justified ... if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning.” Rather than backing away, Connery would double down when asked about this in later decades, most famously in a 1987 interview with Barbara Walters. In her 2006 autobiography My Nine Lives, actress Diane Cilento, Connery’s first wife, shares stories of his abuse.

All of which raises other troubling questions about the dark magnetism that comes with some sorts of stardom. With women, Connery’s Bond is at once forceful and threatening — and sometimes openly rough. We can chuckle at the unvarnished sexism of it all, but it’s an uncomfortable sort of laughter. He proves ideally cast in Marnie, in which the abuse and sexual domination beneath the surface of so many Hitchcock films comes bubbling to the surface. In role after role he brought out the hardness and meanness at the core of his characters and, yes, it was acting, but it also echoed the man we knew Connery to be. He’s gone now, leaving only the performances behind, a collection of classic turns we can watch with a love that’s both unsettling and undeniable.