Sean Connery`s cards played close to his chest in new book

The huge print run of what is being optimistically described as Sir Sean Connery's autobiography is sitting in a warehouse awaiting release on the actor's 78th birthday next month, reports The Telegraph.

There's no doubt that Sean's story is a big one: that of a boy born poor in the Scottish tenements who grew up to be a movie star. The question is: how much of it will he tell?

Connery has spent years dodging inquiries into his life in the way James Bond dodges bullets.

In 2003 he pulled out of a project with author Meg Henderson, a personal friend, for a co-written book of memoirs. Two years later he withdrew from a seven-figure deal with the biographer Hunter Davies.

A subsequent project with Canongate, a prominent Edinburgh publishing house, collapsed when the two parties "failed to see eye-to-eye" on the book's content.

Ms Henderson alleges - among other things - that Connery wanted to keep nearly all the proceeds to himself.

Hunter Davies regrets that he is legally bound not to talk about the affair, but is known to view it as a lost opportunity to produce an enthralling book.

Jamie Byng, the head of Canongate, says: "Sean has got a great storytelling instinct. There was some beautiful Angela's Ashes-type stuff about growing up in Edinburgh, but ultimately we couldn't agree on what the book should be, and how we could move it on."

So what may well turn out to be the only first-hand record of Connery's eventful life is a 100,000-word tome entitled Being A Scot, which, according to Weidenfeld, the publisher that finally took it on, "fuses Connery's own experiences, including his acting career, with his efforts to track down what Scots have given to the world in art, science and sport".

From which you might deduce that the world's most famous Scot won't be dishing the dirt on his ex-lovers, naming the stars he hated most, or demolishing the hurtful myths about his stinginess (he has donated to and supported hundreds of charities).

All of which may strike his admirers as a pity. For it is the things we only think we know about Connery - the irascibility, the problematic attitude to women and the obsessive championing of a country he chooses not to live in - that most need attention.

After the Davies debacle, Sir Sean claimed he had gone off the idea of an intimate memoir, "because I realised I was going to be spending the rest of my life trying to correct the inaccuracies, and I can't be bothered."

The obvious problem with this admirably above-it-all stance is that it incites other people to tell the story for him.

People like… well, his volatile ex-wife, Diane Cilento, who last week alleged that Connery wasn't planning to leave a penny of his fortune to their son, Jason.

According to Ms Cilento, a former actress who now runs an arts centre in Australia, "Sean has a problem about relationships, as everyone around him knows." She claimed that the actor's refusal to help Jason financially obliged the young man to survive on handouts from friends.

Or people like Dr Burton Sultan, Connery's neighbour in New York, who described the actor as "a rude, foul-mouthed, fat old man", after the pair quarrelled over renovation work being done to the actor's apartment.

Or the pint-sized pop star Lynsey de Paul, who had a fling with him in the late 1980s, and now laments: "I tried to keep our relationship platonic but he pursued me relentlessly. He wasn't my type at all because I'm not usually attracted to the macho type."

If Connery is reluctant to offer a more detailed response ("Diane is insane" he snorted last week), it may be because, as he sees it, the explanation for everything he does, thinks or stands for, lies in his childhood.

And this, at least, he is prepared to confront. "My first big break came when I was five years old," he writes in the opening chapter of his new book.

"It's taken me more than 70 years to realise that. You see, at five I first learnt to read. It's that simple and it's that profound. I left school at thirteen. I didn't have a formal education. It has been a long return journey from my two-room Fountainbridge home in the smoky industrial end of Edinburgh opposite the McCowans' toffee factory…."

In these mildly poignant words, Connery reveals what those who know him have long recognised as a lifelong source of resentment.

"It's the key to the man," says Ms Henderson, "his lack of education bothers him. No matter what he has achieved in his life, how much money he has stashed away, he didn't have the education he wanted to have."

The Connery family's roots lie in a line of immigrant Irish tinkers. Sean's father, Joe, worked at a local rubber factory, and with his wife Euphemia, a charlady, and two sons, lived in a one-bedroomed flat.

Until he was eight, Sean, the youngest boy, had to sleep in the bottom drawer of a wardrobe. Ms Henderson recalls Connery telling her that his mother never hugged or kissed him.

He thrived, nonetheless, growing tall and handsome, and leaving school to become a trainee milkman.

Successful? Big Sean soon had his own cart, and even then he appears to have sensed that his future lay beyond Edinburgh, beyond Scotland, and that somewhere he couldn't yet envisage lay the promise of a richer life.

In search of it he joined the Royal Navy, but two years later, plagued with peptic ulcers - which continue to trouble him at times of stress - he was discharged on health grounds.

Back home he toiled in a steel mill, delivered coal, polished coffins, and, in late 1951, landed a part-time job as a stage hand at the King's Theatre. It was his first whiff of showbusiness.

A keen bodybuilder, he went to London the following year to compete in the Mr Universe finals. He came third in the Junior section, and while in town heard that strapping young men were being auditioned for South Pacific at the Theatre Royal. Sean flexed his 6ft 2in frame and talked his way into a part.

"How much am I getting?" was his first question upon being chosen.

"That doesn't concern me," sniffed the producer. "Well," said the glowering Scotsman. "It f------ concerns me!"

The actress Honor Blackman, who met him at this time, recalls him as "a mass of chips on his shoulders". They were impressive shoulders, though, and less than a decade later, they would nudge Connery into the part of James Bond in Dr No. The film turned him into the biggest movie star Britain has ever produced.

And one of the most consistently controversial. In her own autobiography, Ms Cilento graphically told how Connery, "bashed my face in with his fists".

The plausibility of this account was helped by an infamous interview the actor gave to Playboy magazine in which he observed: "I don't think there is anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman - although I don't recommend doing it in the same way that you hit a man. An open-handed slap is justified - if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical or bloody-minded continually, then I'd do it."

Connery has always said that his words were taken out of context, and also denies hitting Cilento.

Now effectively in retirement, he remains, to most of us, a riddle; feted and fawned over - especially by the Scottish National Party, on whose behalf he tub-thumps from the Bahamas, where he lives with his French wife of 35 years, Micheline Roquebrune - but frequently mocked by those who say he has neither the talent to be a major actor nor the grace to be a celebrity.

"My view is that to get anywhere in life you have to be anti-social," he once said. "Otherwise you'll end up being devoured. If I've ever been rude, half of it has usually been provoked by people's attitudes."

Those people are still out there, waiting for his story. It isn't too late.

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