Sir Sean Connery talks about life as James Bond and writing his autobiography

It is late afternoon in a basement cinema in the Palais des Congres in Marrakech, and Rosa Klebb is on the prowl. A jumpy old print of From Russia With Love is being screened to a small audience of Moroccan and European journalists. "From this angle, things are shaping up nicely," murmurs Sean Connery's Bond, as he looks through a periscope from deep in the Istanbul sewers up at the offices of his Russian adversaries. His eyes are trained firmly on the shapely legs of Daniela Bianchi, playing Tatiana Romanova - reports The Guardian (UK).

An hour or so after the screening finishes, the real Sean Connery materialises in the theatre upstairs to collect a lifetime achievement award from the Marrakech film festival. The 74-year-old Scottish star is dressed in a tartan tuxedo. A tall, imposing figure with a silver handlebar moustache, he is in good humour, but there is something comic about the haste with which he shakes his head and quits the stage when a female Moroccan compere quizzes him as to whether he might consider again playing the role recently vacated by Pierce Brosnan.

In some ways, it's a surprise to find him attending a film festival at all. Earlier this autumn, when Connery quit his latest film, Josiah's Canon, there was widespread speculation that he was going to abandon the movie business altogether. After half a century of acting, it appeared he was fed up with the inefficiency and time-wasting that go hand in hand with making studio movies.

This, Connery insists the next day, is not the case at all. He is simply taking a sabbatical to write his memoirs. Once they are complete, he'll be ready and willing to go back in front of the cameras - just as long as he receives "an offer I can't refuse".

The autobiography should make a compelling read. To the outside eye, Connery's life story seems glamorous in the extreme. In the words of his friend Laurence Fishburne (who presented him with the award), he is "the man who has been everywhere and done everything".

That is not how he sees it. Sipping tea in a suite in the Mamounia Hotel, Connery seems mildly perplexed by his transformation from Edinburgh coffin polisher, lifeguard, bodybuilder and would-be professional footballer into one of the world's most famous movie stars. "It reads as though one had made great dramatic decisions, but in fact one didn't," he reflects. "I certainly had the drive from the beginning, but the targets and ambitions were much, much less."

He admits that the autobiography is proving "much, much more difficult" than he anticipated. "It is time absorbing and very wearing. It's the sort of thing that wakes you up in the middle of the night. But it has a therapeutic side."

Connery is still in the process of dredging up long-buried and sometimes painful memories. He offers a few snapshots that the writing of the book have helped him revive. Picture him as a 16-year-old, desperate to go to war, and enlisting in the navy for a 12-year-tour of duty. His dreams of glory end abruptly when he is invalided out of the force after two years with duodenal ulcers. During his two-month convalescence in a hospital in Portsmouth, he does not receive a single visit: his parents can't afford the fare south to see him, and so he is left on his own.

Then he evokes a Dickensian image of himself as a nine-year-old milkman whose education temporarily grinds to a halt because his school is closed down for safety reasons during the war. "It didn't upset me at all. I was thinking, 'I can play more football. I don't have to go to school.' All these memories come back to you."

Connery doesn't indulge in any self-pity about the privations he was forced to endure as a kid growing up in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh. "One of the things that strikes me is that no matter how difficult or underprivileged the situation you were living in as a child, it wasn't considered difficult. I don't think as children, you are aware of it. You have nothing to compare it to."

He was desperate to escape his background, but beyond that, he doesn't have any glib explanations about the way his career developed. Looking inward is a new and not altogether comfortable experience. He says he has spent so long analysing and thinking about the characters he has played on screen that he has "forever postponed addressing" his own experiences and mistakes.

Even checking details is proving tricky. He was never a hoarder. There is no correspondence or diaries to help him. "I've never kept a record of anything. I gave away everything: all the posters, the memorabilia that would have been helpful - and financially rewarding."

Right at the beginning of his career, when he won a part in a touring production of South Pacific, he put all his possessions in a wicker basket with a padlock on it. He travelled between engagements on a motorbike. He says he has been "a Gypsy" ever since.

To his surprise, Connery discovered that he is already the subject of 10 unauthorised books. He always vowed that he wouldn't add to the pile, but a seven-figure advance from HarperCollins helped change his mind. (He can't help but grumble, though, about the percentage his New York agent has taken.)

It is no secret that Connery is a deeply contradictory figure. He is the fervent Scottish Nationalist who lives in the Bahamas. He is the philanthropist who has given away much of his wealth to organisations such as the Scottish Educational Trust, and yet remains deeply suspicious about being "done out of money". He is often at odds with the Westminster establishment, but he accepted a knighthood. He is often accused of taking himself too seriously, and yet, when a Moroccan journalist attacks his 1975 film, The Wind and the Lion, he simply chuckles and quotes Hitchcock's words to him on the set of Marnie: "It's only a movie."

In Marrakech, he was in relaxed and affable mood - at least until the subject of Scottish politics was broached. He likes Morocco. He first visited the country in 1970 to compete in a golf tournament, La Coupe du Roi de Maroc. Not only did he win the tournament, but he met his wife-to-be, Micheline, for the first time. Morocco is also where he made his favourite film, John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King.

His pleasure in reminiscing about The Man Who Would Be King doesn't simply lie in his admiration for Huston and co-star Michael Caine, and for the boost the film gave his career, post-Bond. The movie was co-financed by Columbia and Allied Artists. "I am happy to say that I sued Allied Artists for cosmetic book-keeping and they're bankrupt," he grins.

But the temperature chills suddenly as he talks about the (foreign-owned) Scottish press, which he believes has long been waging a vendetta against him. Earlier this autumn, he was in Edinburgh for the opening of the new Scottish parliament building in Holyrood. I ask whether he felt pride, dismay or a mixture of both at seeing the building finally completed. Connery's brow furrows and he begins to talk darkly about skulduggery in Westminster. "They never took any tenders. It was a done deal," he mutters (though he adds that he thinks it is "a fantastic building").

Connery is baffled that nobody in UK politics is ever held to account for their misdeeds, whether the Dome, the Scottish Parliament building or anything else. "[Peter] Mandelson, two times thrown out, is now representing Britain in Europe. In the olden times, they would have hung him up by his feet. The decisions in the UK are made by President Tony Blair and a couple of his cooks in the kitchen."

He doesn't have any immediate plans to set up home in Scotland. "The Scottish media all say, oh yeah, he's a tax exile," Connery says. He pauses before adding that he has "paid more tax than the Government put together in that Parliament. I still pay full tax when I work in England and the same when I work in America."

However, the journalists and fans watching To Russia With Love couldn't care less about Connery's fiscal arrangements or feuds with Scottish journalists and London politicians. They want to know about Bond. The Scottish star takes this interest in good heart. At a press conference, someone asks if he will ever escape his identification as the secret agent with a licence to kill. "Not yet," he sighs. "It's with me till I go in the box."

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

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