August 16, 2005. Copyright 2005, Graphic News. All rights reserved

The nameÕs Connery, Sean Connery
By Joanna Griffin

LONDON, August 16, Graphic News:  He will always be best known for playing debonair secret agent 007 -- some say he was the only one who had enough sex appeal and derring-do for the role. But, on the eve of his 75th birthday on August 25, Sean Connery is still teaching moviegoers to look beyond James Bond.

Few actors retain their charisma and sex appeal into their seventies, but Connery is an exception. Steven Spielberg, who worked with him on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, said he was Òone of the seven genuine movie stars in the world todayÓ. So how has Connery outlasted stars, such as Roger Moore, that once shone just as brightly?

His humble beginnings in Edinburgh point to the determination and versatility of an actor who refused to be typecast as the suave spy even though it made him his name. Born the elder of two sons to a truckdriver and a cleaner in 1930, young Thomas Connery began earning his keep as soon as possible. Leaving school at 13, he took several unskilled jobs, including milkman, labourer and lifeguard, and also had a brief stint in the Royal Navy.

Eventually, he made his way to London, coming third in the 1953 Mr Universe tournament en route, and began to train himself for theatre roles. His screen debut came opposite Lana Turner in the 1958 film Another Time, Another Place. But it was as Bond in Dr. No in 1962 that Connery secured a future in Hollywood, and a label he would come to dislike. He made five more Bond movies over the next decade, returning in 1983 for a final outing, as an older and wiser 007, in Never Say Never Again.

But something about Connery gets him noticed even when not in a leading role: he won a best supporting actor Oscar in 1987 for playing a cop in The Untouchables, and delighted as Harrison FordÕs dad in the third Indiana Jones film. He is an actor whose fans seem to erase embarrassing projects (King Arthur in First Knight) from memory. When most men his age are jiggling grandchildren on their knees, Connery has topped ÒSexiest ManÓ polls.

Off-screen, Connery has become increasingly active in the politics of his native land, and in 1999 he contributed to the formation of a Scottish parliament. Even the Queen could not resist the charms of the fiercely patriotic Scot, and in 2000 he was knighted.

Connery lives in the Bahamas with his second wife, French-Moroccan artist Micheline Roquebrune.
/ENDS