Connery, Sean (1930- )

Scottish film actor. He was the first interpreter of James Bond in several films based on the spy thrillers of Ian Fleming, including Dr No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), and Goldfinger (1964). He enjoyed success as a mature actor in such films as The Name of the Rose (1986), Highlander (1986), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). He won an Academy Award for his supporting performance in the crime thriller The Untouchables (1987). In 1998 he won the BAFTA Lifetime Achievement Award.

Connery endows his film roles with grace and wit and, since his resurgence as a mature performer, a degree of worldly wisdom. From Bond to more recent roles, he has conveyed himself on screen as a charismatic masculine adventurer. In 1999, he received the Kennedy Center Honors award for lifetime achievement in the performing arts. He was knighted in 1999.

He starred in several thriller adaptations, for example Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October (1990), John le Carré's Russia House (1990), Michael Crichton's Rising Sun (1993), and William Boyd's A Good Man in Africa (1994). Other films include the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Marnie (1964), the action adventures The Rock (1996) and The Avengers (1998), and the sentimental drama Finding Forrester (2000).