Sean Connery Took A Major Personality Trait From James Bond

It’s remarkable how Sean Connery continues to define James Bond some 65 years after he first debuted in “Dr. No,” the film that kick-started cinema’s most enduring franchise. By way of comparison, the equally enduring pop culture figure of Batman hasn’t had quite the same cinematic trajectory. For example, an entire generation of fans grew up with Michael Keaton as the Batman, but today, the youths couldn’t care less about the man’s tenure as the Dark Knight, as evidenced by the fact that “The Flash” became a box office disaster of superheroic proportions despite featuring Keaton’s less than triumphant return in the cape and cowl.

Meanwhile, while Bond fans undoubtedly gravitate towards whichever actor happened to be portraying 007 during their formative years, there’s always a hushed respect for Connery, even among those who swear Roger Moore’s more playful spy was the greatest on-screen iteration of the character. The fact that Connery still commands such respect among fans is testament to how good he was in the role.

However, much of the credit for shaping the cinematic Bond should go to “Dr. No” director Terrence Young, whose bon vivant persona became infused into the movie-version of author Ian Fleming’s spy. But without Connery’s refined yet rugged aura, the character just wouldn’t be the pop culture icon he is today. Which is why it’s always a bit dismaying to hear how much the Scottish star struggled with the role.

Playing Bond was famously a double-edged sword for Connery, who would oscillate between having begrudging respect for and outright hostility towards the character throughout his life. As fans, we often wanted Connery to love the role as much as we did, even while we understood that being perpetually beholden to 007 must have been a truly frustrating experience as an actor. But Bond wasn’t just a burden to Connery. In fact, the late actor found that he came away from his time in the tux with a major aspect of the spy’s personality.

In the 1960s, Sean Connery played James Bond in five films and was notoriously sick of the character by the end of the decade, departing the franchise and clearing the way for George Lazenby to take the lead with 1969’s “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” Throughout that decade, he’d been heard sneering at the character that made his career, at one point saying he’d “always hated that damn James Bond” and going so far as to say that he’d “like to kill him” (via The Hollywood Reporter). Even when he was tempted back for 1971’s “Diamonds are Forever” — an underrated Bond film deserving of more respect – it was only because he’d secured a large enough salary to launch his Scottish International Educational Trust and had been promised funding for two films of his choosing by United Artists.

A BBC interview from 1971 finds the actor being particularly glib about his return to the 007 franchise. When asked why he came back, he attributes it all to his desire to fund the charitable trust and the fact he was given a “two-picture deal,” though he does at least praise Richard Maibaum and Tom Mankiewicz’s script. At this point, then, Bond was seemingly just a means to an end for Connery, who didn’t show any outward fondness for the character even if he might have felt something of the sort underneath his insouciant demeanor.

Years later, the actor sat down with “60 Minutes” for a career retrospective where he seemed a tad more grateful for his time as 007 — as you might expect given his success outside the franchise. Not only that, he admitted that Bond helped shape a big part of his personality, teaching him to be much more self-assured. Asked whether aspects of Bond were with him before he took on the role, or whether he took certain parts of the character away with him, Connery said:

“I would say that I never had the assurance that he had in the films as a person. And the more one played it the easier that was to convey. Because one of the most interesting aspects of it was to make it look as easy as possible no matter how difficult it was, and it wasn’t always as easy as it looked, needless to say.”

Sean Connery, who passed away in 2020never seemed to lack self-assurance. To see him speak in interviews, even in this early example from the set of “Goldfinger,” is to see an articulate, witty, and confident picture of self-assurance. But even before that, the man had this ineffable quality that propelled him from the working class neighborhoods of Scotland to one of the most accomplished actors of the 20th century. Connery took the long road to the world of actingand one of my favorite parts of that particular journey was his commitment to developing his intellect.

After American actor Robert Henderson said that, to become an actor, one needed to look as “though you could work in a mine and have read Proust,” Connery took that to heart, reading the classics, from Shakespeare to Proust. Ever since, the actor never seemed inarticulate, and though his manner could often seem austere, his eloquence was a consistently impressive aspect of his personality. This, combined with his impressive journey from working as a nine-year-old butcher’s assistant in Scotland to the stages of London, meant that Connery never once seemed lacking in self-assurance.

But as is so often the case, the internal life of Connery was clearly much different to the external one. While much of his career was spent bad-mouthing Bond and trying his best to distance himself from the character, it’s nice to know that the late star took something as integral as self-assurance from the role. In his ability to conceal his lack of such a trait and project the confident, self-possessed Scot we all know, Connery clearly shared Bond’s ability to “make it look as easy as possible no matter how difficult it was” — something everybody can surely relate to in their personal lives. In that sense, while 007 has often been described as a simplistic wish-fulfilment fantasy, Connery proves there’s more to it than that, which surely has a lot to do with his enduring appeal among fans.