Sean Connery ordered a Perrier water because he had been drinking heavily the night before and, mortal, had not been able to make a James Bond-like with one leap he was free escape from the clutches of the resulting hangover. He watched the elegant back of Kenneth Tynan disappearing into the further recesses of the restaurant. “K-k-kenneth (sic) f-f-fucking T-t-tynan,” he mimicked. “Spends his life criticising plays from a position of lofty principle and then dives into a show like “Oh, Calcutta!” which isn’t half so well presented as Raymond’s Revuebar where I was the other night. Even though the Revuebar champagne is so bloody pricey…



‘Of course the films will go on, but who’ll play me?’ Sean Connery

“I’ll give Tynan one thing, though: I was once at a party and he was there and there was this fight between two men over a girl and he helped separate the men and do you know what he said? ‘Stop behaving like people,’ he said. He must have been waiting all his life for a situation where he could make a remark like that.”

He ordered a dozen oysters and consumed them with the avid rapidity of a man who is now aged forty-one and knows he needs the vitamins to make him feel human again. For the actor who has so often assumed the myth of snobbish thuggery that is Bond he is very human indeed: he does not evade or avoid; talks with a fine growl of voice that, when relaxed, occasionally lapses into the dour vowels inherited from a working-class background in the tougher areas of Edinburgh (milkman, lorry driver, cement mixer, bricklayer, steel bender, coffin-polisher, and other grinding etceteras). He uses four-letter words like a dramatic technician: to freeze what you might pass off as a casual remark into a statement of import.

His new Bond film, “Diamonds Are Forever,” is to be released on Thursday (Odeon, Leicester Square) and he had, he said, been put through the necessary mill of interviews to promote that event. “At least you converse. Usually I hate interviews because I end up boring myself listening to me talking all the time.” He managed, though, to talk without self-inflicting too much pain.

Sean Connery as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Photograph: Allstar/UNITED ARTISTS

His love-hate affair with the character of Bond began ten years ago, when producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli signed him up for “Dr No.” He is not exactly in sympathy with the character (“I’ve only read two Bond books; I found Ian Fleming himself much more interesting than his writing”), but realises that without Bond he would not be the rich man he is today. He is a director of a Pall Mall bank and was able to donate a lot of the money to his self-founded Scottish International Educational Trust from the deal he made on “Diamonds Are Forever.”

The role of Bond was taken over for the last film, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” by George Lazenby, an actor whose most eloquent claim to previous fame was as Big Fry in the TV commercial. The result was a Big Drag. The lure that trapped Connery back again in the part was the chance to produce two further films of his own choice for United Artists, a large percentage of the profits and a start-stop clause in his contract which meant that if shooting over-ran 18 weeks he would be paid $10,000 a week. The film finished on time.

“It can be done, you see, if there’s money at stake. I’d been frigged about too much on other Bond pictures. There’s so much bullshit that comes from bad decisions being made at the top. I admire efficiency: like watching a good racehorse or the way Picasso works: where everything functions perfectly within its capacity. But talking to some of these moguls about it is like trying to describe to someone who has never taken exercise what it is like to feel fit when you do exercise. They don’t understand.”

He is notably overt in his opinions of producers Saltzman and Broccoli (“for every good idea Harry has had he’s gone on to eight flops”) and said: “They’re not exactly enamoured of each other. Probably because they’re both sitting on fifty million dollars or pounds and looking across the desk at each other and thinking: that bugger’s got half of what should be all mine.”

He revealed his lack of Bond’s culinary conceit by saying he couldn’t remember what lobster thermidor was, settled for cold lobster instead, and maintained yet again that “Diamonds Are Forever” would be the last Bond film he would ever make. “Of course the films will go on, but who’ll play me I just don’t know and can’t guess.”

This is an edited extract, read the full article

