But then, right around that time, the man came back, an elder statesman finally embracing his age, and actually showing some versatility. When I was a kid in the 1980s, watching Thunderball and Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice on the ABC Sunday Night Movie, the word on Connery was that he had never quite managed to shake the shadow of 007. (There is, by the way, a 65,000-member subreddit dedicated to Connery’s accent.) Upon seeing George Lazenby show up in a kilt and lace jabot highland ensemble in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service - the first Bond film sans Connery - a friend’s mom once remarked, “Sean Connery would never be caught dead in that.” But maybe she hadn’t seen John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974), in which a pony-tailed Connery shows up in a red futuristic mankini, and, at one point, dons a big old wedding dress (admittedly, he does not look happy). We don’t think of Sean Connery as having range indeed, we sort of think of him as proudly not having range, keeping that lilting, shing-shong ackshent of hish even when playing an Egyptian-Shpaniard. (And who knows what was going on in his private life? I’ve heard rumors of a scuppered memoir, resting in a vault somewhere, deemed too scandalous to publish.) Connery did some of his best, most daring work in the years following Bond, when he was desperately trying to shed the character - The Anderson Tapes (1971), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Robin and Marian (1976), Time Bandits (1981), even the much-reviled Wrong Is Right (1981) - but that period now feels like his wilderness years, as if the manly ideal he represented in the 1960s had been overtaken by a more sinister and uncertain climate, leaving him behind his times. It took some time, and it definitely took some aging. Indeed, he was the rare 007 actor (he occupied the role from 1962 to 1971, and revisited the character in 1983) who managed to reclaim and redefine his image beyond the superspy. That was ideal for Bond, but of course, Sean Connery, who died on Saturday at the age of 90, was a lot more than Bond. The Sean Connery on screen was a guy who could ease into a tux or opine about champagne, and boy, did he also look like he could hold his own in a bar fight. The latter reportedly didn’t come naturally to him he learned it from his first Bond director, Terence Young. A former body builder who possessed just the right amount of self-awareness to deliver those dainty, cherry-on-top one-liners, he had animal unpredictability and urbane grace in equal measure. Obviously, it wasn’t merely the dialogue that made Scottish Connery’s 007 so compelling. (Even SNL’s “ Celebrity Jeopardy!” sketches, in which Darrell Hammond’s surly, savage Connery went remorselessly after Will Ferrell’s Alex Trebek with your-mom jokes and willful misreadings, captured a bit of this quality.) It even lay at the heart of Connery’s comeback in later years. But Connery’s ability to deliver the perfect rejoinder, the perfect kiss-off, endured beyond Bond. Later Bonds adopted the cinematic quip and made it their own eventually, so did the Ahnulds, the Slys, the Bruces, and in horror, the Freddys and Chuckys.
“He had a pressing engagement.” “He blew a fuse.” “ playing his golden harp.” “She had her kicks.” “See you later, irrigator.” Sans context, these lines might not sound like much, but coming from the lips of Sean Connery, they helped define the James Bond mystique and made the dry wisecrack a mainstay of genre cinema.
The late actor’s ability to deliver the perfect rejoinder shaped the Bond franchise and genre cinema at large.