80 The EconomistNovember 7th 2020
I
n october 1962, just as the world watched America’s handsome
young president go head to head with the Soviets over their mis-
siles on Cuba, another 20th-century hero made his first on-screen
appearance. James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, described him as
English, with a slim build, blue-grey eyes, a cruel mouth and short
black hair, a comma of which rested on his forehead. The man the
world came to know as Bond when “Dr No” was released that
month was a hulking Scot with dark eyes and so little hair he had to
wear a toupée. But the two men had more in common than one
might think, and it was their differences as much as their similar-
ities that combined to make him the Bondest of Bonds.
The first glimpse of him is from behind. The camera pans
around the gaming table at Les Ambassadeurs in London, pausing
briefly to take in Sylvia Trench’s red-chiffonned bosom before
turning at last to the saturnine face with its feline eyebrow, its sul-
try lips. He is sitting down, so you don’t see the way the manly tai-
loring emphasises how he dresses to the left or how, when clothed
in nothing but a towel, his pelty chest fills a doorway. But the mes-
sage is clear. Sean Connery as James Bond simply isBritish man-
hood: good-mannered, patriotic, entitled.
Both went to Fettes College in Edinburgh, Mr Bond after he was
reputedly expelled from Eton, Mr Connery to deliver milk from a
barrow. He grew up in Fountainbridge, which used to be known as
Foulbridge for the open sewer that ran through it. Although thesewer was eventually culverted, a stench remained, thanks to the
toffee factory, the brewery and the rubber mill where his father
worked 12 hours a day. By 1930, when he was born, it was one of the
worst tenement slums in Edinburgh, with outside toilets and no
hot water. The only bath in the street belonged to the brewery. Half
a century later, whenever he stayed in a posh hotel he liked to luxu-
riate every day in a long hot soak.
He didn’t think of it as a tough childhood, but it left its mark in
several ways. His mother may have taken command of his father’s
wages every week, but that did not make her his equal. Even as atti-
tudes were changing in the 1960s, Mr Connery expected women to
understand that, and if they refused—if a woman was “a bitch, or
hysterical, or bloody-minded continually”, he famously told Play-
boy in 1965—then he was entitled to slap them. His first wife, Diane
Cilento, said he abused her physically and psychologically for all of
their decade-long marriage, which ended in 1973.
Delivering milk was only the first job he tried. By the time he
was 13, he couldn’t see the point of staying on at school. There was a
war on and he wanted to earn money and play football. So he
signed up, first as a bricklayer and then as a lifeguard before he
learned French polishing from a coffin-maker. He hoped, for a
while, that he might become a professional footballer, but
plumped for acting when a friend pointed out that, as a career, it
had a longer shelf life.
Not long after he finished touring provincial theatres as part of
the chorus for “South Pacific”, during which he did bodybuilding to
keep in shape, a friend suggested he try out for a low-budget film
whose producers were looking to sign up a cheap unknown rather
than an established name. Fleming was unsure about the heavy
Scots burr and the lumber jacket he wore to the interview, empha-
sising that what was needed was Commander Bond and not an
overgrown stuntman. But the producer’s wife liked his barely con-
cealed menace. He played Bond in six more films.
With his second wife, Micheline Roquebrune, he settled in the
Bahamas. He liked the low tax rate. He played golf and made up for
his lack of schooling by reading—literature, politics and history,
especially about how the English oppressed the Scots. Even after
decades of the classless, moneyed world of international cinema,
he retained much of what his childhood had taught him about be-
ing born on the wrong side of the tracks.
Perhaps because he was away from it for so long, his devotion to
Scotland was intense. In 1967 he released “The Bowler and the Bun-
net”, the only film he ever directed, about turbulent industrial rela-
tions in a shipyard on the Clyde in which the managers wore bow-
ler hats and the workmen “bunnets” or cloth caps. A staunch
nationalist, he campaigned for the Scottish parliament in Edin-
burgh and spoke up for Scottish independence—literally, in a party
political broadcast for the Scottish National Party. Not for nothing
did he have “Scotland Forever” tattooed on his arm.Untouchable
There were other film roles, some of which made far better use of
his acting talents than Bond—Daniel Dravot in John Huston’s “The
Man Who Would Be King” and Jimmy Malone in “The Untouch-
ables”, a caper about Al Capone, which won him his only Oscar—
but it was Bond that defined him. It made him rich, world famous,
a real star. Five other Bonds would follow, but none was as good as
him. And if at times, the association seemed to weigh on him so
much that some referred to it as bondage, in his gut he understood
that owning Bond the way he did amounted to a sort of Scottish co-
opting of an English hero, and that was sweet revenge.
Most of the time he responded to questions about it with that
eyebrow. Just occasionally, he would open fire. “In playing Bond, I
had to start from scratch,” he pointed out to an interviewer just
after “Dr No” opened. “Nobody knows anything about him, after
all. Not even Fleming.” Bond made Connery. But, more than any-
one else, Connery also made Bond. 7Sean Connery, actor and Scottish nationalist, died on
October 31st, aged 90Screen Scot
Obituary Sean Connery