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Let’s raise a goodbye glass to one of the greats of all time, Sean Connery. Despite the legendary Scottish actor turning 90 this summer, his death still feels like a shock, just because it seemed like Connery would be around forever – a giant oak tree towering over other stars, showing them off as lightweights. Connery, the most charismatic of movie stars, all rugged seriousness, no interest in celebrity, appealing to no one, had a simple code and lived it. What did you say Rolling Stone in a 1983 cover story, “The lesson is to keep your mouth shut and your front door clean.”
Connery truly came from another world: the last generation of actors who grew up hungry in WWII, a working-class Edinburgh boy raised in urban slums with no indoor plumbing, who dropped out of school at age 13 and went to work a series of dirty jobs. However, he became famous playing James Bond, the most elegant and elegant sophisticated Englishman. You could put him in any movie, no matter how cheesy it was, and he gave it a bit of dignity. He even managed to get away with playing King Arthur in a 1995 fantasy drama called First gentleman, directed by Jerry Zucker of Plane! fame, starring Richard Gere as Lancelot and Julia Ormond as Guinevere. The movie might be terrible, but Connery was worth watching, and he always left with all his mystique intact. You always felt like you were watching the last real movie star.
It exploded as the definitive James Bond, 1961 Dr. No to 1971 Diamonds are forever, with a comeback in 1983 with Never say never again. He gave Bond his own sullen tone, handsome but serious, a spy with a license to kill. His 007 seemed not to enjoy his drunkenness and black tie womanizer; everything was in the line of duty, for the queen and the country. Connery was the most grumpy and grumpy Bond, wincing at the jokes he had to tell. A classic moment, in From Russia with loveWhen he discovers that a fellow agent is a KGB assassin posing as an upper-class Brit: Connery rolls his eyes and says, “Red wine with fish. That should have told me something. “
The irony: James Bond, the elite son of Eton and Sandhurst, was played by a poor Scottish boy. Like many of the movie’s favorite British gentlemen, Cary Grant, Connery was a street con man who learned to activate the charm of the camera. He always had that famous “Scotland Forever” tattoo, which he got when he was a teenager in the Royal Navy in the 1940s, long before a respectable movie star was imaginable. “The war was on, so my entire education time was a disaster,” he says. “I had no qualifications for any job, and unemployment has always been very high in Scotland anyway, so you take what you get. I was a milkman, a laborer, a steel bender, a cement mixer, pretty much anything. “
He took up bodybuilding and acting, which were no strangers to him, and moved to London to participate in a Mr. Universe competition. (He was third). He had his big break when he caught the attention of Lana Turner, 10 years older than him; she chose him to play her lover in the melodrama of failure Another time, another place. (Connery fled Los Angeles to avoid being beaten up by her mobster boyfriend.) He also starred in the Disney movie. Darby O’Gill and the Little People, a deeply creepy kids movie about psychopathic goblins.
But Connery eventually became a star in Dr. No, with Ursula Andress as his muse beach bunny, Honey Ryder. Like “Bond, James Bond,” his pout got nastier with every 007 movie, from Gold finger to Thunderball, since You only live twice (where he hits The Rock’s grandpa in real life) to Diamonds are forever (where his Bond girl is Henry Kissinger’s real life side piece).
Only Connery could have made Bond so compelling, given that the fantasy was not that in sync with the real world. There was something ridiculous about an English spy fighting a Cold War and no one else seemed to notice that England had been invited to join. (What, were the British planning to invade Connecticut?) At a time when the greatness of that country consisted mainly of bringing out pop stars and inventing miniskirts, Bond was the last man to defend the honor of a British Empire that no longer existed. . Yet he seemed to believe that Russian troops would spill over to Croydon, Shaftesbury, and Wakefield the moment he let his guard down or settled for a shaken, not stirred martini. That was the joke behind his codename 007: the idea that he had at least six more Of these delusional pranksters running around the world
Sean Connery called the role of 007 “a Frankenstein monster,” one he fought hard to escape. “I’ve been an actor since I was 25 years old,” he said. Rolling Stone. “But the image that the press spread was that I fell into this tux and started mixing martinis with vodka. And of course, it was none of that at all. He had done television, theater, a lot of things. But it was more dramatic to introduce myself as someone who had just hit the street. “Eager to prove himself as a real actor: watch Hitchcock’s 1964 thriller Marnie, with Tippi Hedren, he left Bond behind to face bigger challenges. Connery could have spent the rest of his life as 007, but he became himself.
It really became “Connery, Sean Connery” in the mid-1970s, with a trilogy of adventure films about middle-aged rogues: The man who would like to be king, the wind and the lion, Robin and Marian. She stopped wearing her 007 hairpiece, but it only increased her charisma, as Pauline Kael wrote: “If baldness ever needed to be redeemed, it has done so forever.”
In his forties, the star suddenly seemed bigger, stronger, more arrogant than ever. It is moving in Robin and marian, like a Robin Hood finished in Sherwood Forest, reunited with Audrey Hepburn’s Maid Marian. But he’s even better at The man who wanted to be king – his fiercest performance and role of his life. In John Huston’s film about the Rudyard Kipling story, Connery and his real-life friend Michael Caine play a pair of English con men in India from 1880. They make a perfect criminal team, lighting each other’s cigars or marching on the way, devising a mad plan to take over a small country and pose as divine rulers. Connery’s Danny Dravot is the most dangerous type of criminal – a mystical scoundrel who can’t resist falling in love with his own lies.
These films weren’t hits, but they defined Connery as the world came to know him, in great old man mode. It was always in demand after that, in good or bad movies: Highlander, Time bandits, Cuba, Outland, The rock, Zardoz (the 1980 dystopian thriller with the tagline “I’ve seen the future and it doesn’t work”), Indiana Jones (as the father of Harrison Ford, just 12 years his junior). He won an Oscar in 1987 for The Untouchables, playing a cynical Chicago cop with vigor and humor that dazzled on screen. For the first time in his career, past 60, he was bigger than Bond. Only one man beat 007, and it was Connery.
He appeared in many flimsy movies, but always as himself. Connery had the same energetic attitude that Neil Young brought when playing with Crosby, Stills and Nash: don’t join the tour, just show up for the concerts. You could go see him in anything and know that you’ll get that trademark seriousness. He teamed up with Wesley Snipes to kick the yakuza’s butt in the incredibly ridiculous 1993 thriller. Rising Sun, lecturing Snipes on the subtleties of Japanese culture. In the 1999 heist prank Entrapment, played a gentle thief master, the kind that could only exist in Connery movies, frolicking with Catherine Zeta-Jones, who was born in the middle You only live twice Y Diamonds are forever. A less confident actor would have looked downright silly in these films: self-parodic, even a little sad. However, Connery stood his ground.
Darrell Hammond captured Connery’s charisma in SNLRecurring “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches, teasing Will Ferrell’s Alex Trebek. But Ferrell did better, turning his own Connery impression into Anchorman, where his Ron Burgundy yells things like “The great Odin’s raven!” or “By Zeus’s beard!” (He’s parodying Connery from The man who wanted to be king, whose favorite expletive is “God’s holy pants!”)
Connery was knighted by the Queen in 2000, after considerable controversy, as he was the most outspoken Scottish nationalist in the world. His last film was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in 2003. It never became a joke, it never looked ridiculous, it never got confused. A fan of privacy and golf, surprisingly married to the same woman for the past 45 years (speaking of off-brand products), he retained his sense of humor to the end, as well as his irritable independence. We will not see their resemblance again. So here’s a toast to Sean Connery: shaken, not stirred.
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