Sir Sean Connery to receive Bafta Scotland Award for Outstanding Achievement

Does any young actor today have what Connery had in the late 1960s when he became a movie star around the world? The athleticism, the sharkiness, the lack of neurosis? Are there men like him in the movies these days? Are there men like him in life ? The makers of a new biopic of Bob Dylan have decided that you can’t cast Bob conventionally, so he will be played by Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, Ben Whishaw and a black child actor, Marcus Carl Franklin. Absurd, of course, but perhaps the same tack could be taken for a film about Sir Sean. Cast Jamie Foxx – he has the looks, cockiness and humour, he just happens to be black and Texan. Or Daniella Nardini – she has the sass, the darkness and Scottishness, she just happens to be a girl. But that’s one of the first rules of being a movie star: different people see you in different ways - reports the Sunday Herald.

It must be weird to travel around the world, or open newspapers printed in the country of your birth, and meet versions of yourself which seem to be self-sustaining, and have lives of their own. It’s the price you pay for being an icon, an image that has stuck in people’s minds for decades and has come to signify maleness and cinema, sexuality and a plucky wee country north of England. For decades now, in magazines such as People and Empire, Connery has been voted the “sexiest man of the century” or “seventh greatest movie star ever”. He’s been garlanded by Bill Clinton for his contribution to culture, and by the Queen and various universities. But how well do all these images and versions reflect the man? What kind of person gave rise to such personas?

The first thing you notice about the real guy is his directness. Two years ago, eating out in Edinburgh with Connery and others, I moaned, but did nothing, when the food failed to arrive. Connery got up, walked into the kitchen and said: “The food is late.” It arrived in haste. Ask him why he made a certain decision and he’ll answer: “To get the thing done.” It’s a phrase he uses quite a lot, and it reveals an approach to life, I think. Some people circle a problem and seem happy with, almost cosy in, stasis. Not Connery. Nae flannel, nae shite. He wants to get the thing done.

Perhaps this is unsurprising in a person with such clout, though it’s an eye-opener to see how many celebs seem paralysed by the challenge of making decisions, or agree to one thing then tell their assistant to get them out of it, pronto.

More intriguing is Connery’s interest in ideas. He read James Joyce in his youth – he even had a go at Finnegans Wake, which daunts most of us. He is a bibliophile and, if you look carefully, you can see this in his movies. In The Rock, John Mason’s cell is full of books. This was not in the original script, but Connery had it inserted. His character Professor Henry Jones in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade is a bookworm and unworldly with it. Connery’s own new book, which he is co-writing with Murray Grigor, isn’t so much an autobiography as a series of ideas-led chapters on Scotland and his relationship to it.

And then there’s Finding Forrester, a film which is not totally to my taste but which tells you a lot about Connery. He plays a reclusive author, William Forrester, whose interest in the outside world is rekindled by Jamal Wallace, a black Bronx kid with a gift for words. It’s not really about bibliophilia so much as how books can change your life. Finding Forrester is a key to Connery because it dramatises one of his core beliefs, that education can lift people out of disadvantage. Though no New Labour fan, he is a meritocrat – as that party professes to be. Given his own background it is no surprise that he is angry at privilege; that anger explains films such as Finding Forrester and, also, the Scottish International Education Trust that Connery and others endowed – a mechanism for funding talented young people from the wrong side of the tracks.

I first met Connery when I was director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and he was patron. When I left the festival, I began working on TV, and started a show called Scene By Scene, where I would interview film people about their craft. Connery hadn’t, for years, given a full career interview on TV, and hasn’t since, but he agreed to do so then. He came to my house to film it, at his considerable incovenience and for the princely sum of steak and chips at the Caledonian Hotel. Why? I think because he could see that I was: (a) passionate about what I was doing and (b) hadn’t got where I was because my mum or dad were well connected, or I had an uncle in the media.

As we talked in that interview, I realised that Connery’s distrust of the military was another passion, another driving force. He joined the Navy aged 16 and had to leave because of a stomach ulcer, but the privilege he saw there, the unfair treatment, seems to have marked him. The Hill, which he made with Sidney Lumet for almost no fee in 1965, was about the absurdity of punishment meted out to ordinary second world war soldiers by staff sergeants in Libya. Even the plot of The Rock, made two decades later, turns on a general’s anger at seeing soldiers and their families maltreated.

Two final things about the private Connery help to explain his public success. It sounds an odd thing to say, but he is good with objects – the opposite of klutzy. Hence his grace with the Bond gadgets. The second thing is his irony. So many actors I’ve met are deadly serious, but Connery seems to scan situations for edgy humour. At gatherings, when people are making jokes, he often finds a killer line. Buck Henry, who wrote The Graduate and knows a thing or two about comedy, says baldly, as if we should all know it: “Of course, Sean is very funny.”

Murray Grigor was once filming a documentary with Connery who, in a piece to camera, had to use the phrase “the United Kingdom”. He gave the word “united” a slight uplift that made it look out of place in the sentence (and in the world). My publisher sent him the manuscript of my last book, a history of world cinema. Though he is not mentioned in the book, Connery called and gave me the following encomium: “Mark Cousins is incapable of writing anything about cinema history …” (long pause) “… without making it fascinating.” A one-minute call in which he was funny and generous at the same time.

To talk about Connery’s directness, or ideation, his interest in education, the military or wit, is to try to add some grain to the way he is perceived. But the whole point about an icon, a famous global image, is that it is archetypal and resists grain. Nonetheless I have one more observation, and it’s inspired by a strange source: Queer Studies. Theorists writing about non-hetero culture sometimes use the phrase “the performed self” to describe the way that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people “passed” in a world that that was hostile to them. I have always liked the phrase because it is true to the fact that many people – not just queer ones – present surfaces. Working-class people, for example, when they migrate into middle-class worlds.

Connery migrated in this way, from the working class into the world of showbusiness in which, as Ethel Merman hollered, people “SMILE when they are LOW”. The ultimate industry of the performed self. So the final thing I have to say about Connery is the only really surprising one: he seems to have no performed self. Little things clue you into this. When you deal with him, it is not through layers of assistants and managers – all symbols of, or moats around, the performed self. There is genuinely no sense when you talk to him that he has manufactured personas, modes of table talk, routines to deal with autograph-hunters or, more psychoanalytically, versions of himself that even he believes in, to deal with the fear or emptiness that international celebrity must surely make you feel. In a recent book by Chris Heath, Robbie Williams calls such a persona his “evil twin” who visits him on stage and turns the ordinary Williams into a pop star. Nearly all actors I’ve met have some of this, either out of pragmatics or self-doubt, or because they crave audiences and acclaim.

Maybe it’s just my lack of insight, but I’ve never, ever seen a performed self in Sean Connery. If I am right and there isn’t one, then that explains why on-screen there is no flicker in him between confidence and doubt as there was in, for example, Marilyn Monroe. Movie cameras X-rayed her and showed the layers. They do to most actors and they do to Connery. What they show, or what I see in what they show, is a lack of neurosis, clearly directed passion, directness and humour.

If there had been no Sean Connery, would cinema in the second half of the 20th century have been any different? Steve McQueen and James Coburn had similar personae, after all, but neither were icons on the scale of Connery. Neither came to represent what my mum calls the “he-man”, as Connery did. I believe that the movie world has defined more unravelled actors such as Robert De Niro and Al Pacino against what Connery did from the 1960s to the 1990s. He drew from Fonda and Cooper and was the continuity candidate. That’s why he was and is valuable to film history. That’s why it’s so hard to think of who would play him in a movie.

Sir Sean Connery is presented with the Bafta Scotland Award for Outstanding Achievement at the Cineworld, Fountainbridge on Friday August 25 at 2.30pm. Tickets: 0131 623 8030 and www.edfilmfest.org.uk

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