Sean Connery
1930-2020
SFX pays tribute to the man who was Bond and so much more
“I’M LOOKING FOR COMMANDER Bond and not an overgrown stuntman,” despaired arch snob Ian Fleming, confronted by the prospect of Sean Connery starring in Dr. No. Bond’s creator quickly came to endorse the choice but you can understand why he bristled: here was an ex-bodybuilder and West End chorus boy, a barely known, raw-edged brute of an actor bred in Scotland’s tough tenements. He had once mixed cement and polished coffins. Was this really the man to embody an old Etonian’s fantasies of upmarket escapism on the big screen?
In fact Connery has as much claim to creating James Bond as Fleming himself. He created the movie Bond, who’s a very different beast to the book Bond. And he did this by bringing a sense of self-awareness, a sense of irony. He did this by twinkling.