Writing an appreciation of Sean Connery feels inevitably inadequate compared to experiencing the real thing. To glimpse his magnetism, you might turn to a…
Writing an appreciation of Sean Connery feels inevitably inadequate compared to experiencing the real thing. To glimpse his magnetism, you might turn to a photograph of him in a tailored suit, leaning against an Aston Martin. You’d probably get more of his menacing charisma by pulling up the “Chicago way” scene from “The Untouchables.” It might be enough simply to say: The king is dead. As a lion of movies for half a century, Connery’s talent was manifest. He was famously cast as James Bond without a screen test. It was that obvious. And from then on, in even the lesser films, Connery, who died Saturday at 90, was never out of place on screen. His presence was absolute. Noting his supreme confidence, the late film critic Pauline Kael once wrote, “I don’t know any man since Cary Grant that men have wanted to be so much.” As a more earthy, macho movie-star ideal, Connery was so beloved that he was shared, like folklore, between generations. It helped that he never seemed to be appealing to the audience, or to anybody, for anything. With raised eyebrows and roguish wisecracks, there was little that Connery (nearly always the lead) didn’t command. And to a certain extent, that cocksureness shaped his career, too. Connery,32 when “Dr. No” came out,” had already lived through World War II. Born into poverty in Edinburgh, he left school at age 13 during the war and worked as a laborer and a bricklayer before he donned the tuxedo. He saw Bond, too, as a product of the war. “Bond came on the scene after the War, at a time when people were fed up with rationing and drab times and utility clothes and a predominantly gray color in life,” Connery, who served in the British Navy as a teenager, told Playboy in 1965. “Along comes this character who cuts right through all that like a very hot knife through butter, with his clothing and his cars and his wine and his women.
