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Sean Connery

Sean Connery brought physical confidence, dry humour and a formidable sense of authority to the screen. Born Thomas Sean Connery in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh, on 25 August 1930, he worked as a milkman, lorry driver, lifeguard, labourer and artist’s model, and served in the Royal Navy before acting became his path. Early stage and television work eventually led to the role that changed his career: James Bond in Dr. No. He played Bond across seven films, making his final appearance as the agent in Never Say Never Again in 1983. Yet Connery’s career was always larger and stranger than Bond alone. In Time Bandits, he played Agamemnon, while Outland placed him at the centre of a science-fiction thriller as Marshal William T. O’Niel. The Name of the Rose earned him the BAFTA Award for Best Actor, and Highlander made effective use of the older-mentor presence that would recur in his later work. That authority came with warmth when the part called for it. As Henry Jones Sr. in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Connery found comedy and friction in the relationship between father and son. In The Untouchables, his performance as a hard-nosed Irish-American police officer opposite Kevin Costner brought him the Academy Award, Golden Globe and a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The Hunt for Red October and The Rock showed how comfortably Connery could anchor large-scale thrillers without getting lost in their machinery. He also made a brief appearance as King Richard the Lionheart in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Dragonheart found another use for that unmistakable voice, casting him as Draco the dragon. Across these films, Connery could be stern, playful, worldly or intimidating, often within the same performance. Bond made him globally famous, but the monks, mentors, policemen, kings, soldiers and dragons around that role reveal the fuller shape of his screen career.