Sean Connery is the spy who loved books

Sir Sean Connery's memoir reveals his hitherto unknown literary side, writes Brian Pendreigh in The Scotsman.

He may be one of Scotland's richest thespians, with an estimated fortune of £85 million according to this year's Rich List, but when he tried to secure film rights for The Da Vinci Code, Sir Sean Connery was put off by the asking price for Dan Brown's bestseller – in excess of £5m.

This is one of the few revelations about his already much-documented life in Connery's long-awaited book, Being A Scot,to be published on Monday – the star's 78th birthday.

Connery's principal interest in The Da Vinci Code was as a producer – it is unclear if he ever imagined himself taking a starring role. What is made clear is that Connery's version would have been significantly different from the po-faced film eventually made by Columbia studios. "Provided we filmed The Da Vinci Code with buckets of irony, I thought it would have all the makings of a popular, fast-paced thriller," he writes.

At that time Connery had his own production company, Fountainbridge Films, named after the Edinburgh area where he grew up "opposite the McCowans toffee factory". But now, it seems, he considers himself well and truly retired and so free to complain about a perceived lack of vision among those who fund film-making in Hollywood and Scotland. "I stopped acting in movies when what Billy Connolly calls 'a bunch of effing foetuses in three-piece suits' began to call the shots," he writes.

We already know that Connery, now resident in the Bahamas, was raised in a tenement flat with no hot water and a communal lavatory, about which he writes here.

"My first big break came when I was five years old," he tells us. "It's taken me more than 70 years to realise that. You see, at five I first learnt to read …" In a country at war, however, Connery "got away with" leaving school at 13. He regrets his lack of formal education, and in the foreword pays tribute to teachers at Bruntsfield Primary who instilled in him "the lust for reading".

And, it seems, for writing. The book includes dashes of his own poetry and prose, including Portrait of the Artist as a Young Horse, in which he recalls the emotions of his first day as a milkman with his own horse and cart.

Being a Scot is an apt title, for Connery is the world's most famous living Scotsman and his nationality clearly means a great deal to him. But this is not by any stretch of the imagination the autobiography we expected after he first mentioned it in a Scotsman interview in 2004 – though, in fairness, it is not being sold as such. (Connery twice started work on an autobiography with professional writers, but both attempts came to nothing.)

Being a Scot is a distinctly odd book, beginning with a chapter of autobiography before veering off into a series of essays about various aspects of Scottish culture and society, including film, sport and architecture.

Anyone looking for juicy details of his relationship with ex-wife Diane Cilento, who once accused Connery of physical abuse, will be disappointed. There is little here about his life as 007, either. He traces his passion for golf back to the filming of Goldfinger and mentions Diamonds are Forever as the source of cash for his Scottish International Education Trust charity – but that's pretty much it for the character that made him a superstar.

Being a Scot is credited jointly to "Sean Connery (in bold capitals] and Murray Grigor". Grigor, a former director of Edinburgh Film Festival, documentary-maker and cultural historian, collaborated with the actor on the documentary Sean Connery's Edinburgh in 1983. It seems here that Grigor very much set the agenda and the authorial voice is not always entirely clear.

What we do see of Connery here tells us that he's proud of his achievements and status, yet craves privacy and is somewhat oversensitive. "For someone who is a private person who also happens to be a public figure, I am a very easy target," he writes.

He is very much a Scot of his generation and still knows the value of money. His account of early days reads amusingly like a ledger: starting salary with St Cuthbert's dairy, £1.05; second-hand Norton motorbike, £87; playing football for Bonnyrig Rose, £35 (paid in the lavatory).

Connery is a complex, contradictory character whom we certainly won't come to know thoroughly through this book. And yet there are endearing glimpses of a star who, back in the days when he was poor, spent his own money on rosettes and decorative chains for Tich, the horse that pulled his milk cart.

Being a Scot, by Sean Connery and Murray Grigor, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced £20. Connery and Grigor also appear at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday 25 August at 11:30am.

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