'Best' Bond actor, Sean Connery, dies at 90

LONDON • Sean Connery, the Scottish-born actor who was the first to utter the famous movie line, "the name's Bond, James Bond", has died. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his family, the BBC reported yesterday. Connery, who had been unwell, died overnight in his sleep while in the Bahamas.

Though he made more than 60 films, winning an Oscar for his supporting role as an incorruptible lawman on the trail of Al Capone in The Untouchables (1987), Connery was most closely affiliated with the debonair fictional British spy he portrayed seven times.

He introduced Bond and his trademark greeting in Dr No (1962), which turned Connery into an international star. He would go on to play the womanising, martini-quaffing spy, created by Ian Fleming, in From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967) and Diamonds Are Forever (1971). In 1983, Connery starred in one more Bond movie, Never Say Never Again.

"Connery was always my favourite Bond and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel the pressure to measure up to him," Pierce Brosnan said in an interview with Cinefantastique magazine in 1995, the year he took over the Bond role.

Brosnan, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig all played Bond, none capturing the same following as Connery. He was voted the best Bond actor, with 56 per cent of the votes, in a 2012 poll by NPR news organisation. Craig came in second, with 28 per cent.

People magazine named Connery its sexiest man alive for 1989. In 1997, it hailed him for remaining "a man's man of action who still leaves women as shaken as any of Bond's martinis".

Former Bloomberg News critic Peter Rainer in 2006 called Connery "the rare example of a performer who became a versatile actor after being identified with a famous role".

In addition to Connery's Oscar-winning performance, Mr Rainer cited his roles as a sadistic London police detective in Sidney Lumet's The Offence, a British soldier in The Man Who Would Be King and a dashing thief in Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery, all released in the 1970s.

He played the estranged father of Harrison Ford's swashbuckling archaeologist in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1989), the mutinous commanding officer of a Soviet submarine in The Hunt For Red October (1990), King Arthur in First Knight (1995) and a reclusive writer who mentors a talented black teenager in Finding Forrester (2000). His last role in a film was The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003).

Thomas Sean Connery was born on Aug 25, 1930, in the working-class district of Fountainbridge in Edinburgh. The elder of two boys, he first slept in a drawer in a traditional Scottish apartment called a tenement. His home was demolished decades ago, though there is a plaque with his name on it at a new housing development there.

Connery left school at 14 and worked a range of jobs including bricklayer, lifeguard and coffin polisher. At 16, he joined the Royal Navy before a stomach ulcer prompted his return to civilian life in Edinburgh. At 19, he posed as a model at the Edinburgh Art School. Bodybuilding and a shot at the Mr Universe title - he came in third - led to a career in acting.

Connery spent much of the 1950s modelling, playing bit theatrical parts and making the odd chorus appearance. Then in 1958, he won his first significant film role, playing opposite Lana Turner in Another Time, Another Place as a war correspondent who falls in love with an American journalist.

He stuck with acting until he won the role that made him a household name.

Fleming, as author of the Bond novels, reserved the right to approve the actor who would play the character on film and he wanted that to be Cary Grant, according to a 1989 Los Angeles Times article. The team making the Bond films, led by producer Albert Broccoli, could not afford such a big star.

Broccoli was intrigued by Connery's performance in the Walt Disney Productions film Darby O'Gill And The Little People (1959). After Broccoli's wife, Dana, told him that Connery "has sex appeal", he insisted on casting him as Bond.

Connery's role as Jim Malone, a Chicago cop who helps track down mobster Al Capone in The Untouchables, also won him a Golden Globe Award.

In 2000, Connery was knighted after a delay that he attributed to his ardent support of Scottish independence from the UK. One of two tattoos he got after joining the Navy said "Scotland Forever".

Connery, however, was reluctant to delve deeper into politics.

"I'm too naive to be a politician," he said. "Politicians don't have enough dream in them. I actually believe that things can be done."

Connery married French-born artist Micheline Roquebrune in 1975. With his first wife, Diane Cilento, he had a son, Jason Connery.

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