Sean Connery`s ex-wife tells of the pain of being Mrs Bond

Diane Cilento’s marriage to Sean Connery seemed to be the perfect match, but as her autobiography will reveal, it quickly descended into acrimony. She tells Allan Brown of The Times what drove her to bare their relationship.

There’s an unmistakable fatigue in Diane Cilento’s voice as she discusses her 11-year marriage to Sean Connery. If Cilento found that being Mrs James Bond was tedious at the dazzling zenith of the 1960s, the decades since have been a deepening twilight of rumour, counter-rumour and third-party nostalgia for an era Cilento doesn’t miss. Buried deep in Queensland, Australia, her experiences as Connery’s wife seem a million miles away.

Having wed at the fresh-faced start of their careers, their marriage quickly dissolved into one long, mistrustful squabble.

It was actually Cilento who left Connery, but the relationship haunts her still. There’s little warmth in her memories of their union, little affection for life as one half of what was then the world’s most glamorous couple.

Now she claims to have put the record straight in her forthcoming autobiography, My Nine Lives. “The moment Sean heard about my autobiography, he started work on his own,” she says over the telephone from the other side of the world.

The picture painted in her book foregrounds a grand romance extinguished swiftly by Connery’s global fame, but it was a process that paradoxically reawakened instincts inculcated in Connery in the tenements of Edinburgh. The man could be taken out of Fountainbridge, Cilento discovered, but not vice versa.

“Everyone who’s heard about the book has said, are you going to tell it warts and all?” Cilento tells me. “What they mean is, am I going to talk about the size of Sean’s genitalia, am I going to be salacious and sensational?

“You can write a book to sell books or you can write a book that tells what you feel was the truth, even if it is deeply one-sided.”

Cilento considers her autobiography to be the latter kind of book, a measured, thoughtful memoir not only of the marriage but also of her various incarnations.

It traces her privileged childhood in Queensland as the daughter of Sir Raphael and Lady Phyllis Cilento, through her film career and into her marriage to the man for whom she left Connery, Anthony Shaffer, the late English screenwriter who created the Scottish classic The Wicker Man.

It also takes in her present circumstances in Port Douglas, where the 72-year-old runs the Karnak Playhouse, an open-air theatre dedicated to experimental drama.

Any scores settled in the book are done so with a misty, watercoloured regret and an awareness that any relationship obliged to deal with the global hysteria around Bond never stood a chance. Cilento even has some tender sympathy for Connery.

In her book, she recalls meeting Connery with his father in a Shepherd’s Bush pub in the early 1960s and being sharply aware that not only was the actor passing money to his father, but it seemed to be a regular ritual.

Cilento remembers feeling a deep compassion for her husband, wondering whether his family resented Connery’s escape from his impoverished upbringing or whether his father had been embarrassed to be seen accepting money from his son.

She also recounts her early professional days fondly, remembering how she would shave her husband’s back every three weeks in preparation for him filming Bond’s love scenes.

In the heady ambience of swinging London, he even wrote a never-produced ballet entitled Black Lake, which Cilento remembers as being “very good, great even. He met with a choreographer and he was very serious about it. He could hear it all in his head. It was like Swan Lake, but far more Macbethian and more classical ballet than modern”.

Eventually, however, the actress claims she watched helplessly as her dashing young swain succumbed to chauvinism, career envy and financial pettiness.

In their marriage it was golf that started the rot, she said, but it was a night in Almeria, Spain, that ended it, a night that allegedly had an explosive denouement that plagues Connery’s reputation to this day.

“It has been gone over millions of times,” Cilento says, as our conversation turns to the night Connery is alleged to have attacked her in a hotel room, “but what’s in the book is exactly what happened. I wouldn’t have said anything about it if Sean hadn’t done all those interviews about slapping ladies around.”

In 1965, Connery told Playboy: “I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong in hitting a woman, though I don’t recommend you do it in the same way you hit a man.”

Then in Vanity Fair in 1993 he said: “Sometimes there are women who take it to the wire. That’s what they are looking for — the ultimate confrontation. They want a smack.”

Connery has always said his words were taken out of context and has consistently and strongly denied Cilento’s claims that he hit her.

“I live in a place that has a lot of Aboriginal people, of the kind that could be called redneck,” Cilento says to me. “So when someone like Sean says stuff like that it confirms what people think they can do to each other. It happened to me only once, but that was once too often. So that’s why I decided to address what Sean did.”

In her book, Cilento feels well enough placed to formulate four golden rules for being the perfect Mrs Sean Connery.

Rule 1: be as besotted with golf as Connery is. When they married in 1962, just as the movie Dr No was introducing Bond to a cinema-going public, the actor was a golf virgin. When the game was introduced to him by his dentist he adopted it as the ideal means to elude the Bond-mad public. Connery’s love of the game was not shared by Cilento.

Rule 2: be a millionairess who never has to ask him for money. Cilento claims that Connery, despite earning £50,000 a film, refused to subsidise the couple’s housekeeping costs if Cilento continued her career as an actress. In 1964 she was nominated, to her husband’s annoyance she said, for an Oscar for the film Tom Jones. By 1966 she was being pursued by the couple’s bank to pay back their £5,000 joint overdraft. Cilento reimbursed the bank from her savings because, she writes, “the quickest way to send Sean into a rage was to talk about money”.

Rule 3: do not be a celebrity. Cilento recalls that Connery had a fixed impression of what a wife should be, and least among it was a competitor in the fame game.
Then there is:

Rule 4: to have no friends but Connery’s. When Cilento began to rely on a coterie of male theatrical acquaintances while Connery was away filming Goldfinger, he phoned his wife to say he had no intention of returning to find his house full of effeminate thespians. Instead, Cilento was expected to fraternise with a trusted circle of well-known entertainers who shared Connery’s passion for golf. Her husband had little idea, however, that some were making approaches to her in his absence.

“It was terribly difficult to be in Sean’s position, terribly difficult,” Cilento tells me. “The world doesn’t want you to be anything other than the thing it knows you as. It doesn’t want you writing ballets. The public want the same version of you over and over again. You get too used to being special. The thrill of having dinner in a restaurant surrounded by screens so that the other diners can’t gawp at you fades quickly, believe me.”

The pair first met in 1957. Cilento was married and pregnant at the time. She thought Connery looked like trouble, but fun nonetheless.

He invited the actress to lunch at his mews house in St John’s Wood, northwest London, which he bought by saving every spare penny of his wages from a year-long theatre tour of South Pacific (the cast called him the Jolly Green Giant).

They married five years later in a calamitous wedding in Gibraltar, with Cilento heavily pregnant again, two local taxi drivers as witnesses and a reception in a shabby hotel during which the female vocalist flirted with an unshaven and haggard Connery. The relationship began its slow disintegration soon after when, Cilento claims, Connery refused to let her continue her career as an actress. “Sean was very keen to see me becoming a wife,” she says, adding he would snap at colleagues who proposed acting projects for her, preferring Cilento to stay at home with Jason and prepare Sunday lunches for him and his golf buddies. Cilento was aware she had become a golf widow.

Connery, meanwhile, was opening his mind to new ideas. In the book, Cilento confirms that Connery had become fascinated by the work of RD Laing, the notorious Glaswegian psychiatrist.

To meet Connery, Laing demanded a mammoth fee, complete privacy, a limousine to and from the meeting and a bottle of finest single malt whisky during each session.

By 1965 their marriage was moving towards its final crises. The couple were in Almeria, Spain, for Connery to shoot The Hill. At the couple’s hotel a wedding party was in progress and the film crew took part, drinking fearsome local brandy with beer chasers. Cilento found herself swept up by a gang of young Spaniards, dancing wildly as the crew clapped and yelled. In the book she says she could vaguely see a familiar face through the whirl of activity, but thought no more about it until she returned to her room to find the absent Connery. Walking through the door into the darkened room she felt a blow to her face and was knocked to the floor.

According to her literary account Cilento then remembers screaming. She got to her feet, but a second blow knocked her back. She locked herself in the bathroom, spending the night there in tears. In the morning she fled to Marbella. When she called Connery the next day, neither mentioned what had happened.

“Before writing the book I’d shoved all that into the recesses of my mind,” Cilento tells me. “Writing, I got a much better overview of why we’d got ourselves into such a tangle and why we couldn’t cope with each other. I know talking about it opens a can of worms, but I couldn’t not mention it because it coloured the rest of our marriage.

“It’s very difficult to understand what an event like that does if you haven’t experienced it. It changes things a lot, especially if neither party acknowledges it, as happened with us.

“If I’d left it out it would have made my leaving Sean much less understandable. We had just stopped being able to understand why the other did what they did. We couldn’t meet properly and know who the other person was.”

Cilento last met Connery about a decade ago during a chance encounter at an airport. A devotee of eastern faiths, Cilento feels that with the book she has taken a giant step towards allaying the restless karmas of the 1960s. But what does she think Connery will make of it?

“I hope he recognises the truth and the reality of it from my point of view,” she tells me. “But I really don’t know. We don’t have any contact. I don’t spend much time in Nassau and he doesn’t spend much time in Queensland. He’ll probably hate it.

“But I’ll have to ask Jason to know for certain . . .”

My Nine Lives by Diane Cilento is published by Michael Joseph on May 25, £20

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