Sir Sean Connery gives rare press interview in Edinburgh Zoo

Sir Sean Connery interview in Scotland on Sunday.

Sitting in the coffee shop of Edinburgh Zoo on a Sunday afternoon in the late 1970s, Sean Connery finds himself suddenly talking about his Irish great-grandfather. He was, among other things, a formidable bare-knuckle fighter. He would accept any challenge to his prowess. The memory of him surfaces and goes, leaving Connery laughing and shaking his head at the strange past he had before he was born.
He leaves it at that. He usually does. He doesn't seem keen to make any sustained attempt to give a detailed account of how his background and the youth he had there connect with where he is now, neither for himself nor for any others who might be interested. Those elements are integral to him already and he appears to have no impulse to unpick the complex weave that is his life. The roughness of his past and the smoothness of his present are both inevitably a part of him. They're who he is, that's all. Not even the contrast between an ancestor fighting bare-knuckle in a field and the reason he is sitting in this coffee shop in Edinburgh seems to occur to him as being particularly strange.

He is discussing the possibility of putting together the means of making a film about a Glasgow detective. The idea is that he will direct and play the detective and the author of the original novel will write the script. He wants any other film offers for the book to be put on hold until he sees if he can raise American money for the project.

When asked why he has chosen such an odd venue as the zoo for the meeting, he says simply: "I don't want to be bothered." The point of the remark is made clear even in an almost empty coffee shop on a quiet afternoon. As he talks, a waitress is approaching by curious indirections. She takes a few steps, pauses, gazes assessingly, head to the side. She repeats the process. She looks like somebody in an old silent movie – say Buster Keaton, making his way quizzically towards another potential disaster. As she finally reaches the table, Connery is in mid-sentence.

"Excuse me," she says, nodding conspiratorially and smiling the smile of those who are in the know. "But are you who I think you are?"

He looks up at her pleasantly.

"No," he says straight-faced.

"Oh, sorry! I beg your pardon," and she withdraws.

He raises his eyebrows mischievously and flashes a demonic grin and goes on talking. In one way, you could probably say he was right, if you want to get all metaphysical about it. Stars seldom are who we think they are. They are quite often not even who they think they are. And this is one star who definitely isn't going to go out of his way to tell us who he thinks he is.

Yet even by his minimalist approach to self-revelation he is telling us something about himself. This is a man who owns the space around him. You may be invited in but don't encroach too far. It's as if he has psychological trip-wires secreted about him. Set one off and you've blown it.

Another time, in the early 1980s, he is sitting with a group in the bar at Glasgow Airport. It's after a Scottish international football match at Hampden. The group have been in the car that gave him a lift to the airport and they don't seem desperate to leave his company. He has bought a round of drinks as a thank you and has sat down to start on his own drink, as a small crowd threatens to gather round the table. Pens and pieces of paper are beginning to appear. A woman is asking for his autograph. He signs politely and a signing session has been established. He sustains his pleasantness remarkably well until a man is standing over him with a beer-mat.

"Ah haveny got a pen, big yin. Have you got wan?"

He looks up at the man, his familiar hatred of incompetence in all its many forms taking slow shape like a small cloud on his face when somebody in the group produces a pen. He signs that one and a few more. He must have done 10 or so when a big heavy man is standing beside him.

"Here we go, Sean," the man says.

"Naw," Connery says. The newly categorical accent in the voice changes the temperature of the situation slightly, as if someone has just turned down the heating. For a moment you aren't looking at Sean Connery. You are looking at just another pissed-off Scotsman in a bar, dealing with a nuisance. "That's it." He points to his pint. "I'm here to have a drink."

Retiral of stout party, with several others muttering in his wake. The chat becomes general. It seems Connery was sitting in Tramp in London in the early hours of the morning when Rod Stewart walked in, hailed him and said he was going up to Glasgow on a private plane and had tickets for the game.

"And here I am," Connery says, laughing at the unexpectedness of it all.

"Small world," one of the group says. "I was sitting at two o'clock this morning at a party in Muirhead" – which is in Troon in Ayrshire. "It was fulla tramps as well."

Connery looks at the speaker, gives a measured smile and nods, presumably recognising the Scottish style of greeting the returning native: welcome back, but don't try to impress us with where you've been.

As if he would have a try. Who needs to drop names when the dropping of his own would make at least as much noise in Scotland (as well as many other places) as just about any you can think of? Rather than being a reminder of how important he is, his story of how he came to be sitting there is probably more expressive of a natural acceptance of how surprisingly things can work out.

It's an acceptance which seems to extend to his entire life. Observed from the outside, it is an amazing story, in some ways as improbable as some of the films he has been in. But then he has lived it from the inside, scene by scene, disappointment by disappointment, success by success. When the bizarre becomes part of your daily life it doesn't look so bizarre any more. The wonder of it is something for others to engage in. The improbability of his career, its weird progress from jobbing actor to superstar, creates more awe in observers than it does in him. He was there at the time.

This means that even parts of the legend which has gathered around him don't seem to be legendary to him, like the frequent retelling of what might be called the Stompanato Incident. Johnny Stompanato was not the kind of man a girl would want to bring home to mother, unless her mother was Ma Baker. In the 1950s he was an active hoodlum in the employ of Mickey Cohen, a major Los Angeles gangster. He was also the lover of Lana Turner and was known as the owner of a male appendage called Oscar – perhaps because of its size, or maybe the nickname was meant to indicate a prize-winner. (And the Oscar for Outstanding Membership goes to...) Various versions of his collision with Connery have been told, sometimes involving guns and always involving high drama. Yet the way Connery himself tells it is remarkably quiet.

"It was a very funny kind of circumstance. I didn't know anything about Stompanato. Stanley Mann, a writer friend of mine, was writing a film of Lana Turner's and she was producer on it. And her daughter was there. Stanley Mann and Lana Turner, the daughter and I, we went out quite a few times. We used to go to vaudeville, which I like. So we're doing the film, Another Time, Another Place, and suddenly out of the blue this guy arrived. I didn't know anything about his story at all. The director was Lewis Allen. We were just going out when he arrived at the door. She had her chauffeur-driven car and everything. And he comes in. And, shocked, she introduces him to me. We're going to go into the car. And he makes to hand me his coat. And I said, 'I don't want your coat.' 'Just look after it,' he says. I said, 'Look after your own coat, for Christ's sake.'

"That was the beginning. It was... I don't know what it was. But he was a real kind of gigolo. With little pistols for cufflinks. Anyway, we came back and then the next thing was he came down to the set when we were filming. And he started to threaten her. The producers came and he said, 'Jesus! You can't make the movie. We're having real problems.' I said, 'Well, get the police and arrest him.' Because he had threatened apparently to beat her up. He used to beat her up all the time. I don't know how much of it was mutual or not.

"Then he threatened to scar her and we'd already started shooting. We were halfway through the picture. It was going to be a sort of major thing.

"He was in the corridor outside her dressing room. She wouldn't come out onto the set. He said she's not coming. I was on the set and I went down to ask, 'What's the problem?' 'No discussion with you,' he said. 'Nothing to do with you.' I said, 'Surely. I'm waiting on the set.' In the meantime, the producer and the director came down. And she went to go out the other door. There were two doors to her dressing room. And he immediately took it that I had set it up to get her on the set. She was terrified. And then he took a hold of me. You know. I didn't know what he was going to do. Anyway, I gave him one. First, I hit him with the head. Then I punched him in the ear and he went down the corridor.

"And that was the beginning. So I went onto the set and I was already agitato. Right? But before anything else could happen... Oh, no. It wasn't like that. He put the head on me. He grabbed me, he was coming and I put my head down and he hit my head, then I punched him... Anyway, somebody had the smart move of calling LA to find out about him. And he was one of the supposed hitmen for Mickey Cohen. They got a background check on him. So they phoned the guys in Whitehall with the white raincoats. They came, took him from the studio to the apartment, and then to London Airport. And put him on an aeroplane... No, he didn't pull a gun. But he had guns in London with him. He was armed."

The incident was to have a sequel.

"I went after that to do the film for Disney (Darby O'Gill And The Little People). I was staying at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and I got a call from Cohen. Stompanato had obviously given the tale to Cohen. So I got a call: 'Sean Connery?' 'Yeah.' 'This is Mickey Cohen. Get your ass outa town.' So I didn't need two tellings for that. I went to the Valley. I mean, I'm sure if they really wanted to find me they coulda found me."

What is revealing about Connery's telling of the story is how casual, how random it is. It comes out rough, as unprocessed memory. He isn't even clear about the sequence of the fight. He thinks first that he put the head on Stompanato and suddenly remembers that it was the other way round. He hasn't worked over in memory his part in it in any way. He doesn't glamorise the event at all. He doesn't retrospectively give noble motives for his intervention, cast himself as Galahad protecting womanhood. This is a practical matter. A film that seems important to him is being screwed up. He doesn't like that. The sense you get from him is that Turner and Stompanato's relationship is their business but they're letting it interfere with his. His physical involvement is a reflex response to Stompanato's. His irrelevant mention of who the director is gives away how unscripted his version of events is. Any hint of personal heroics is effectively undercut by the honesty of his reaction to Mickey Cohen's phone call, although you're left with a residual feeling of the nerve it took to make so small a move.

This man doesn't seem to keep even a mental diary of things that have happened to him, in that way we can often fix things in our memories by going over and over in our minds situations or events which have been dramatic or significant. You can sometimes tell someone who's given to doing this by the polished nature of what appear to be casual anecdotes. The rough edges of irrelevant incidentals have been buffed away and the story comes out honed sharp, and often timed for maximum effect. He doesn't do that. He doesn't seem to process the past by serious reflection upon it so much as he simply incorporates it into the present, and becomes the result of it rather than a commentator upon it. This may be partly what gives his presence such fierce definition. There is no significant residue of elsewhere. He is simply the man in front of you. The rest is history. Where he is now is what matters, and where he might go from here. If you question him about his past, he may accommodate your interest but he doesn't seem significantly to share it. It is as if even hoarded memories would be too much luggage to carry, would slow him down.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons why he has always been so resistant to the idea of a biography. What happened all seems natural to him. What matters to him is that he arrived. Who needs the traveller's tale of how he got here?

Of course, there has to be more to it than that. When he finally agreed to do a ghosted autobiography, there was considerable money upfront for him, and he has the mythical Scotsman's non-aversion to the folding stuff. There was no shortage of people auditioning to be the ghost. A choice was made and the process was started. Within a length of time which could still be conveniently measured in weeks, the deal was off. The Achilles in Connery, that part of him that is very easily offended, was back sulking in his tent, and the ghost was gone to haunt another celebrity. That there was some kind of failed rapport between them is a certainty. What has never been divulged is why. Whatever reasons there may have been, it's impossible not to suspect a recurrence of Connery's congenital allergy to the confessional mode so beloved of many celebrities. It wouldn't have taken too many minor irritations for him to remember that he didn't really want to do this in the first place and, if money was the only salve, he had enough of that already.

Anyway, that rejection of any official version of a biography would seem to be set in stone. His antipathy is hardly unique. He wouldn't be the first person to see biography as one of the more dubious literary forms, a kind of fiction masquerading as fact. It is perhaps significant that Freud, the great astronaut of inner space, discoverer of other people's secrets, was so determinedly against any biography of himself. Maybe he felt that, given the effectively unmappable morass that is the inner life of any person, a biography of externals might miss the point. Or maybe it was simply that there were things Freud didn't want us to know about him. Reviewing the interestingly creative autobiography of Salvador Dalí, George Orwell wrote: 'Autobiography can only be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.' This is perceptive, except perhaps for the first sentence, since in these times people often elaborate on their disgraces as a way of touting the piquancy of their lives, as Dalí himself seems to have done.

Whatever Connery's reasons are, he's not telling. He's not into self-revelation. All you can do is try to deduce him from his life. Like the woman in the coffee shop of Edinburgh Zoo, you can only approach by indirections and hope that you get closer to him than she did. v

Sir Sean Connery will appear at Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 25, 11.30am, to mark the publication of Being A Scot, his personal account of Scotland.See right for your chance to be there.

Man and boy

August 25, 1930 – Born Thomas Sean Connery in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh, to Euphamia and Joseph Connery.

Enlists in the Navy aged 16, serves three years. Gets two tattoos: "Mum and Dad" and "Scotland Forever".

Leaves Navy, works variously as a milkman, a coffin polisher and a bricklayer. Bodybuilds as a hobby and comes third in Mr Universe 1950.

1958 – Following TV roles, lands first major film role in Another Time, Another Place opposite Lana Turner.

1962 – Marries Diane Cilento.

1964 – Following the release of Goldfinger, hangs out at the London flat of the 'celebrity shrink' RD Laing, who promoted the use of LSD as a means of therapy.

1965 – During the shoot for The Hill, an incident takes place in Connery and Cilento's hotel room, during which Cilento later claims in her autobiography she felt a blow to her face and fell screaming to the floor. She stumbled to her feet, but another huge blow knocked her back down again.

1970 – During a golf tournament in Casablanca he meets French-Moroccan artist Micheline Roquebrune. Connery and Cilento are divorced in 1973 and he marries Roquebrune in 1975. Over the years many women make claims of affairs with the actor, yet the couple remain together publicly and privately.

1993 – In an interview with Vanity Fair, Connery is quoted as saying: "There are women who take it to the wire. That's what they are looking for, the ultimate confrontation. They want a smack."

2000 – Receives his knighthood at Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh

Politics and patriot games

1971 – Uses fee from Diamonds Are Forever to launch a charity for poor children in Edinburgh

1997 – Suggests the Labour Party prevented him being knighted because of his support of the SNP. A Labour spokesperson, however, claims it is because of his comments about violence against women.

1999 – Considers moving to Scotland following the opening of the Scottish Parliament and looks at properties in Edinburgh and St Andrews. Decides to remain in the Bahamas.

2001 – Tells a US audience in Washington that he looks forward to Scotland becoming fully independent while, 20ft away, First Minister Henry McLeish looks on

2003 – Confirms that he has helped finance the SNP for six years

2005 – "Hello there. This is Sean Connery. No, it's not a joke – unfortunately the real joke is the Labour Party." Connery's automated call as part of the SNP's party political broadcasts, heard in more than 300,000 messages

2007 – "Scots voted for optimism. They voted for change. They voted for progress. And that is why they voted for the SNP." Writing in the Washington Post after the SNP wins the election.

2007 – Pledges to return to his homeland after 50 years away if Scotland votes for independence. He also reveals plans to act as an international ambassador for the country.

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