Sean Connery – From Milkman to Spy to Sexiest Man of the Century

Sir Sean Connery may be one of the most illustrious actors of his time, but this does not mean that he started out that way. In fact, he was just an ordinary Scot whose first job was being a milkman at the age of 14. Little did he know that he will eventually be polled as Scotland’s Greatest Living National Treasure and The Greatest Living Scot. An Academy Award winner, who also got himself three Golden Globes and two BAFTA Awards, Connery was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in July of 2000 and got the Kennedy Center Honors as well.

The actor-producer is best known for being the first to portray the British secret agent James Bond. He starred in seven Bond movies starting 1962 up to 1983. Five years later, he won the Oscar award for Best Supporting Actor for his The Untouchables role. He is also known for being in such movies as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Hunt for Red October, The Rock, Indiana Joes and the Last Crusade and Dragonheart, among others. In 1989, People magazine hailed Connery as the Sexiest Man Alive. When he was 69 years old, he got proclaimed as the Sexiest Man of the Century.

His Roots and Humble Beginnings

Connery’s paternal ancestors came to Scotland from Ireland in the middle of the 19^th century. His maternal great-grandparents, on the other hand, were native Scottish Gaelic speakers from Fife and Uig on the Isle of Skye, thus giving him a Scottish-Irish lineage. Born Thomas Sean Connery in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh on August 25, 1930 to parents Euphamia McBain and Joseph Connery, the Scottish actor’s beginnings were as humble as they can get. His mother was a cleaning lady, while his father worked as a truck driver and factory worker.

He himself took on several different jobs before he went into acting. Aside from starting as a milkman with the St. Cuthbert’s Cooperative Society when he was yet 14 with a starting salary of 21 shillings a week, he also worked as a laborer, a lorry driver, a coffin polisher, a lifeguard, a bodybuilder and an artist’s model at the Edinburgh College, where he earned 15 shillings an hour and was described by student artist Richard Demarco as being “slightly shy” and a “virtual Adonis”. As a bodybuilder, Connery trained with a British army former gym instructor and entered in the Mr. Universe contest sometime in the early ‘50s. The dates are not that clear because while it was stated in his official website that he came in third in the 1950 contest, a number of other sources pegged him in the 1953 competition, where he either placed third in the Junior Class or failed to even be part of the Tall Man Classification.

In between all these jobs, Connery also joined the Royal Navy in 1948, where he got himself two tattoos, one that reads “Mum and Dad” and another that says “Scotland Forever”. However, he was discharged for medical reasons because just like most of the males in his family, the then young serviceman suffered from duodenal cancer.

The Start and Breadth of His Career

When Connery was 23 years old, he had the option of becoming a professional footballer or an actor. He was offered a 25-pound contract by Matt Busby, the manager of Manchester United during that time. However, even if his physical prowess was greatly admired by the Busby, the young Connery declined the offer. He admitted though that he was quite tempted to take the offer in hand, but said that he realized how a top-class footballer could be at the end of his career by the time he is in his 30s and he was already in his early 20s then.

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“I decided to become an actor and it turned out to be one of my more intelligent moves,” Connery said during a Playboy interview in November 1965.

His Time in Theater

By the time Connery was offered the football contract, he was already dabbling in theater. In the later part of 1951, he started helping out at the King’s Theatre and in 1953, he landed a small part in the chorus of the South Pacific production in London. When the production came to Edinburgh, the young actor was already playing Marine Corporal Hamilton Steeves and was the understudy for two of the juvenile leads, which earned him a raise in salary, from 12 pounds to 14 pounds per 10 shows a week. And, his theater career started from there. Although the actor earned himself a friend in American director and actor Robert Henderson, who helped him develop quite a serious interest in theater work and let him borrow a number of acclaimed theater production copies like Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler and later those by William Shakespeare, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust and even got him parts at the Maida Vale Theatre in London, he was still just getting bit roles that did not bring in serious money. And, even if he was also getting extra roles in films while he was performing in Maida Vale, he still struggled to make ends meet. As a result, he was forced to become a babysitter, which paid 10 shillings a night, for journalist Peter Noble, whose wife Mary was an actress.

The Start of His Film Career

It was during this time when he met Hollywood actress Shelly Winters, whom he spent many a night with drinking beer with his brother, lived at TV presenter Llew Gardner’s residence and got himself more roles from Henderson, one after the other. But, it was not until 1957 that Connery got himself an agent in Richard Hatton, who helped him acquire minor roles in different productions.

Before he was cast as James Bond and proceeded to star in seven movies of the highly popular franchise, the first of which was the 1962 Dr. No, Connery was already playing major roles in such films as the 1958 melodrama Another Time, Another Place and Walt Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People, which came out in 1959. He also got himself prominent TV roles in the 1961 BBC Television productions Adventure Story and Anna Karenina by Rudolph Cartier.

His Time as James Bond

Although Connery was initially doubted by James Bond creator Ian Fleming as not having the kind of looks he envisioned for the character, the success of the Dr. No premiere changed his mind. In fact, he was so impressed by the actor’s performance that he attributed Bond’s heritage to being half Scottish and half-Swiss in his later novels.

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It was said though that Connery’s highly outstanding James Bond portrayal was largely due to the tutelage of director Terence Young, who helped polish the actor while utilizing much of his presence and physical grace for the action scenes. Miss Moneypenny actress Lois Maxwell revealed that the director took the actor under his wing and took him to dinner where he showed him “how to walk, how to talk, even how to eat”. Young’s tutoring worked magnificently because as soon as Dr. No premiered, Connery started receiving thousands of letters from fans every week and earned himself the accolade of being one of film’s greatest male sex symbols. The actor played the role of Bond in the succeeding films From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965) and You Only Live Twice (1967). He reprised the role in Diamonds are Forever in 1971 and in Never Say Never Again in 1983.

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Because of the commercial success of all seven James Bond films portrayed by Connery, the British secret agent was chosen by the American Film Institute as third greatest hero in cinema history after Atticus Finch and Indiana Jones, who got the first and second spots, respectively.

His Career Outside James Bond

The Bond movies might have started giving him the acclaim he now enjoys, but Connery ended up hating the idea that he has become synonymous with the British spy and eventually got tired of playing the role. While he was filming the Bond films, he was also cast in other such critically-acclaimed movies as Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie and The Hill, which was released in 1965. He also earned ample success as part of ensemble casts in such films as Murder on the Orient Express, which came out in 1974, with John Gielgud and Vanessa Redgrave and in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far with Laurence Olivier and Dirk Bogarde. In 1972, he earned the Henrietta Award for Male World Film Favorite together with Charles Bronson. This acclaim was followed by the BAFTA award he won for his performance in the 1986 movie The Name of the Rose. The next year, he got the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing a tough Irish-American cop in The Untouchables. This was the first and only Oscar nomination he has ever gotten in his whole career so far.

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The consecutive box-office hits he was part of included the 1989 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where he played the father of the title character, The Hunt for Red October, which came out in 1990 and where he was said to have been cast with just two week’s notice, The Russia House, which came out in the same year, the 1996 film The Rock and Entrapment, which was released in 1999. In 1996, he lent his voice to the role of the dragon Draco in the action-adventure film Dragonheart and two years after he earned the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award. Connery was in other films as well, but these were pegged as critical and box office disappointments. These include First Knight, which came out in 1995 and also starred Richard Gere, the 1998 The Avengers and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which came out in 2003. He got positive reviews during this time for his role in the 2000 Finding Forester though and he was also accorded the Crystal Globe for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema.

His Retirement from Acting

In June 2006, Connery received the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. This was also the time when he confirmed his retirement from the world of acting. In 2007, he denied talks of his possible appearance in the fourth Indiana Jones film saying that “retirement is just too much damned fun”.

However, he did return to voice acting when he played the title character in the animated short film Sir Billi the Vet. To recall, aside from voicing Draco in Dragonheart, Connery was also the one who recorded the voiceovers for the new video game version of his Bond movie From Russia with Love. In 2010, he also reprised his role in a longer version of Sir Billi, for which he was also executive producer. In the same year, a bronze bust sculpture of the distinguished actor was erected in Estonia’s capital city.

His Life Outside Acting

Although he was attracted and linked to a number of women during the early part of his career in show business, Connery has only been married twice.

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His first marriage was to Diane Cilento, who was said to have been instrumental for his getting the role of James Bond. They stayed together from 1962 to 1973 and had a son together, actor Jason Connery.

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In 1975, he married Moriccan-French painter Micheline Roquebrune. They have been together since, but their union did not give them any children. Connery’s nomination for knighthood started in 1997, but it was not until 2000 that he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.

With this title and considering that he now has a villa in Kranidi, Greece with King Willem-Aexander of the Netherlands as a neighbor and co-owner of a helicopter platform, it can be said that the milkman turned actor has really come a long way from his humble beginnings. As such, if you will just look at his life and the acclaim he now has, you can definitely say that success do come for those who are willing to work for it.