The Search For Bond Part 1 of an exclusive 3-part article

And so a meeting with the actor was arranged at the producer’s London office in South Audley Street, a meeting that has since passed into movie legend. Director Terence Young telephoned Connery urging him to wear a suit for the impending interview and not his usual casual street gear, but the actor insisted on arriving scruffily dressed in baggy, unpressed trousers, a nasty brown shirt, no tie, a lumber jacket and suede shoes. “I never saw anyone come more deliberately to antagonize people,” said Young. Associate producer Stanley Sopel thought Connery the most appallingly dressed man he’d ever seen. ‘He looked as though he’d just come in off the street to ask for the price of a cup of tea.’ Throughout the meeting Connery behaved with bloody-minded arrogance, repeatedly pounding on the desk, swearing and telling the producers in no uncertain terms how he intended to play Bond. It was all an audacious act, for Connery didn’t want to leave the impression of a starving actor desperate for work. “I think that’s what impressed us,” Broccoli remembered, “the fact that he had balls.”

No sooner was the interview over and Connery was out of the room than the producers rushed to the window to watch him leave the building and cross the street. It was the way Connery moved that clinched it, for a big man he was light on his feet, “like a big jungle cat,” Saltzman observed. The producers had found their Bond. Barring falling under a double-decker bus Connery was it from that moment. “We’d never seen a surer guy,” said Saltzman. “Or a more arrogant son of a bitch!” added Broccoli.

That both producers were international (Broccoli American, Saltzman Canadian) and not English, undoubtedly affected their final choice for Bond; neither really wanted some cultivated actor with a theatrical background. Alert to the world market, they needed their Bond to be less Ian Fleming’s old Etonian and more of a brawling street fighter. Hence Broccoli’s belief that Connery’s virile, aggressive masculinity was crucial, arguing against the role being played by, “some mincing poof.”

Backers United Artists were less than convinced. Refusing to test, Connery was tricked into undergoing a few filmed auditions with prospective leading ladies. This footage was sent to the States and the studio response was blunt to say the least in a cable sent to Harry Saltzman dated 23 August 1961: “…New York did not care for Connery feels we can do better.” To their eternal credit Broccoli & Saltzman stood by their man, intending to go ahead with Sean or not at all.

On hearing the news about Connery, Fleming wrote to a friend: ‘Saltzman thinks he has found an absolute corker, a 30 year old Shakespearean actor, ex-navy boxing champion and even, he says, intelligent.’ A meeting between Connery and Fleming was arranged at the author’s cramped business office near Pall Mall. They talked and in the end Connery guessed Fleming regarded him as a compromise choice: “Fleming had a veto but I believe he is the one who approved me at the end of the day.”

On 3 November 1961 it was announced in the movie trade papers, with surprisingly little fanfare, that Connery had secured the role of James Bond. In today’s climate of multimillion dollar deals it’s striking to note that Connery’s fee for Dr. No was a modest £6,000.

Colleagues found it all terribly amusing that Connery had landed the role of 007. Here was a working class Scot playing an upper class product of the English establishment. What made Bond so appealing worldwide was that Connery was able to imbue the character with a cool classlessness; apt for the age of the ‘angry young man’ and the emergence of working class actors like Albert Finney, Michael Caine and Richard Harris. Connery’s robust portrayal was the antithesis of Fleming’s rather unappealing snob, whom audiences, especially in America, would have found unpalatable. The industry, too, was dumbstruck by the choice. One day Saltzman met his old producing partner at Woodfall Films the playwright John Osborne and told him of his plans to make a Bond film. ‘And who do you think I’ve got as James Bond?’ Osborne scarcely knew the books but gamely played along. ‘I don’t know Harry. James Mason.’ Saltzman stared back, dumbstruck. ‘Hell, no.’ Osborne had another try. ‘David Niven.’ ‘For Christ sake,’ screamed Saltzman, before pausing for effect. ‘Sean Connery!’ Osborne looked incredulous. ‘Harry, he’s a bloody Scotsman! He can hardly read.’

There is evidence that Connery himself didn’t rate winning the Bond role as that much of a career breakthrough. Critic Barry Norman recalled a train journey he shared with Connery, travelling up to report on the filming of The Longest Day. Every compartment was packed with actors and technicians, so Norman and Connery were forced to sit on the floor of a third class carriage. Just to make conversation, Norman asked what the actor was doing next. ‘I’m playing James Bond,’ Connery answered, and then rather defensively adding, ‘well, it’s a job.’ The rest as they say is history. “I’ve travelled third class many times since then, but I doubt if he has,” said Norman. “He probably bought the train.”

Preparing to play Bond, Connery had the wonderful advantage; one denied every subsequent actor in the role, of spending time with the character’s creator. Together they discussed Bond the man and the world he operated in. Over time Fleming grew enormously fond of Connery and the feeling was reciprocated with genuine warmth. When he wrote his final Bond novel THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, published posthumously in 1965, Fleming paid perhaps his greatest accolade to Connery. “At the end of the story Bond retires and Fleming gave him Scottish heritage,” says Bond screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz. “That’s all a tribute to Sean.”

One mustn’t forget here, though, the key role the Eton-educated Terence Young had in turning Connery into Fleming’s hero. He began by taking the actor to his own personal tailor and shirt maker in Savile Row and then to eat in the finest restaurants and to gamble in Mayfair’s most elite casinos. It was a total transformation, a feat of which Henry Higgins would have been proud. Connery was a man who preferred pints to champagne and eggs and chips to caviar.

On January 14, 1962 the cast and crew of Dr. No arrived in Jamaica with little inkling that they were about to make cinema history. Composer Monty Norman had been hired by the producers to provide the score, and the all important James Bond theme, and travelled to Jamaica in the hope of finding inspiration in the local music scene. The journey out there was memorable to say the least, as he explained to me: “Harry hired what must have been about the last turbo prop to cross the Atlantic with people in it. Everybody was on that flight; Cubby and his wife and Harry and his wife, the cameraman Ted Moore and his wife, Ken Adam and his wife, me and my wife, a lot of the actors, the stuntman Bob Simmons and of course Sean Connery. And it became almost like a cocktail party, drinks were flowing and food, by the time we got to Jamaica I think we were all pissed. It was about a 20-hour flight, it stopped in New York or somewhere. It was absolutely a historic flight.”

When Dr. No proved a box office smash Saltzman and Broccoli hurried their next film into production, From Russia With Love, which proved even more successful. Then with Goldfinger Connery found it difficult to live in a world where the public expected him to be Bond and only Bond. To some extent he no longer existed as an actor, or a person. Yet Connery never allowed these problems to corrupt the working atmosphere on the set as Goldfinger’s Burt Kwouk recalls: “Sean was never less than totally professional. On the factory floor he had a job to do which he simply got on and did.”

Connery also grumbled that his cut of the profits was paltry compared to what the producers were raking in. After the fourth Bond opus, Thunderball, which still ranks as the most financially successful 007 movie ever made (inflation adjusted), Terence Young urged the producers to take Sean as a partner. “In future make it Cubby and Harry and Sean. He’ll stay with you because he’s a Scotsman. He likes the sound of gold coins clinking together.” The producers didn’t take their director’s advice and Connery started dropping hints that his next Bond would be his last. “The sooner it’s finished the happier I’ll be,” he told one reporter, no doubt with a pissed off expression on his face.

And so en route to Japan to start work on You Only Live Twice Connery made an announcement many had been predicting. At a stopover in Thailand on 27 July 1966, he formally announced this was indeed to be his final Bond. The 007 image, he said, had turned into a Frankenstein monster and his relationship with the producers had irredeemably broken down.

I recall You Only Live Twice’s director Lewis Gilbert telling me that he tried to talk Connery out of leaving the series, putting a quite logical argument to him which the actor really should have heeded. ‘Look Sean, it’s silly not to keep on playing Bond because whilst you’re playing Bond you can do anything in the world that you want to do. If you say, I want to do Hamlet, you could get the money straightaway, providing you’re Bond.’ But Connery wouldn’t listen, his mind was made up. “Bond’s been good to me,” he said after filming. “But I’ve done my bit. I’m out.”

Terence Young was correct of course, had Connery been made a partner by Saltzman and Broccoli then he might well have carried on playing Bond well into the 1970s. Nevertheless his impact on the Bond role was such that future actors not only had to tussle with the myth of the character, but also the image of Connery himself. He is, and always will be, the yard stick. Honor Blackman, the screen’s classic Pussy Galore, once confessed to me that she lost all interest in the Bond movies after Connery left. “Sean was so special, and so right in the part.”

Connery’s performance as Bond had just the right mix of humour, cruelty and sexual power. As a former bodybuilder, he also looked formidable on screen, the embodiment of Broccoli’s edict that Bond be a ballsy, two-fisted spy. “One of the chief qualities, I think, that made Sean such a big star in those early Bonds, was his movement,” says Philip Saville, who directed Connery in two of his pre-fame television plays. “His hand movement, his agility, he was an altogether organic man. It’s a very important quality if you’re making action movies. Steve McQueen had it, he had that natural sense of forward movement and all his body coordinated. Connery had it, too, in spades.”

Undoubtedly Connery’s performance as Bond was a cinematic landmark that influenced countless future screen heroes. Which rather begs the question, how the hell do you replace the irreplaceable? We’ll find out how Broccoli & Saltzman managed to do just that in Part 2.

Robert Sellers and 007 MAGAZINE wishes to thank the following for making this feature possible: George Baker (1931-2011), Honor Blackman (1925-2020), Michael Craig, Cyril Frankel (1921-2017), Lewis Gilbert (1920-2018), John Glen, Bob Holness (1928-2012), Burt Kwouk (1930-2016), Sir Christopher Lee (1922-2015), Tom Mankiewicz (1942-2010), Guy Masterson, Monty Norman (1928-2022) and Philip Saville (1927-2016).

©007 MAGAZINE JUNE 2023

BACK

PART 2