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Sean Connery
Sir Thomas Sean Connery is a retired Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award,
two BAFTA Awards and three Golden Globes. Connery was the first actor
to portray the character James Bond in film, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983.
In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables.
His film career also includes such films as Marnie, The Name of the Rose,
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt
for Red October, Finding Forrester, Highlander, Murder on the Orient Express, Dragonheart,
and The Rock. Connery has been polled as "The Greatest Living Scot" and
"Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". In 1989, he was proclaimed "Sexiest Man Alive"
by People magazine, and in 1999, at age 69, he was voted "Sexiest Man of the Century".
Connery was knighted by Elizabeth II in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to Film Drama.
 Early life 
Thomas Sean Connery, named Thomas after his grandfather, was born in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh,
Scotland on 25 August 1930. His mother, Euphemia McBain "Effie", was a cleaning woman,
and his father, Joseph Connery, was a factory worker and lorry driver.
His paternal grandfather's parents emigrated to Scotland from Ireland in the mid-19th century.
The remainder of his family was of Scottish descent,
and his maternal great-grandparents were native Scottish Gaelic speakers from Fife,
and Uig on the Isle of Skye. His father was a Roman Catholic, and his mother was a Protestant.
He has a younger brother, Neil. Connery has said that he was called Sean, his middle name,
long before becoming an actor, explaining that
when he was young he had an Irish friend named Séamus
and that those who knew them both had decided to call Connery
by his middle name whenever both were present. He was generally referred to in his youth as
"Tommy". Although he was small in primary school, he grew rapidly around the age of 12,
reaching his full adult height of at 18. He was known during his teen years as "Big Tam",
and has stated that he lost his virginity to an adult woman in an ATS uniform at the age of 14.
 [^]  Connery's first job was as a milkman in Edinburgh with St. Cuthbert's Co-operative Society.
He then joined the Royal Navy, during which time he acquired two tattoos,
of which his official website says "unlike many tattoos,
his were not frivolous—his tattoos reflect two of his lifelong commitments: his family
and Scotland.. One tattoo is a tribute to his parents and reads 'Mum and Dad,'
and the other is self-explanatory, 'Scotland Forever.'" Connery was later discharged
from the navy on medical grounds, because of a duodenal ulcer,
a condition that affected most of the males in previous generations of his family. Afterwards,
he returned to the co-op, then worked as, among other things, a lorry driver, a lifeguard
at Portobello swimming baths, a labourer, an artist's model for the Edinburgh College of Art,
and after a suggestion by former Mr. Scotland, Archie Brennan, a coffin polisher.
The modelling earned him 15 shillings an hour. Artist Richard Demarco,
at the time a student who painted several notable early pictures of Connery, described him as
"very straight, slightly shy, too, too beautiful for words, a virtual Adonis".
Connery began bodybuilding at the age of 18, and from 1951 trained heavily with Ellington,
a former gym instructor in the British army.
While his official website claims he was third in the 1950 Mr. Universe contest,
most sources place him in the 1953 competition, either third in the Junior class or failing
to place in the Tall Man classification. Connery stated that he was soon deterred
from bodybuilding when he found that the Americans frequently beat him in competitions,
because of sheer muscle size and, unlike Connery, refused
to participate in athletic activity which could make them lose muscle mass.
Connery was a keen footballer, having played for Bonnyrigg Rose in his younger days.
He was offered a trial with East Fife. While on tour with South Pacific,
Connery played in a football match against a local team that Matt Busby,
manager of Manchester United, happened to be scouting. According to reports, Busby was impressed
with his physical prowess
and offered Connery a contract worth £25 a week immediately after the game.
Connery admits that he was tempted to accept, but he recalls,
"I realised that a top-class footballer could be over the hill by the age of 30,
and I was already 23. I decided to become an actor and it turned out
to be one of my more intelligent moves."
 1950s 
Looking to pick up some extra money, Connery helped out backstage
at the King's Theatre in late 1951. He became interested in the proceedings,
and a career was launched. During a bodybuilding competition held in London in 1953,
one of the competitors mentioned that auditions were being held for a production of South Pacific,
and Connery landed a small part as one of the Seabees chorus boys.
By the time the production reached Edinburgh,
he had been given the part of Marine Cpl Hamilton Steeves
and was understudying two of the juvenile leads, and his salary was raised from £12
to £14–10s a week. The production returned the following year out of popular demand,
and Connery was promoted to the featured role of Lieutenant Buzz Adams,
which Larry Hagman had portrayed in the West End. While in Edinburgh, Connery was targeted
by the notorious Valdor gang, one of the most ruthless gangs in the city. He was first approached
by them in a billiard hall on Lothian Street where he prevented them from stealing from his jacket
and was later followed by six gang members to a 15 ft high balcony at the Palais.
There Connery launched an attack singlehandedly against the gang members, grabbing one
by the throat and another by a biceps and cracked their heads together.
From then on he was treated with great respect by the gang and gained a reputation as a
"hard man". Connery first met Michael Caine at a party
during the production of South Pacific in 1954, and the two would later become close friends.
During the production of South Pacific at the Opera House, Manchester
over the Christmas period of 1954,
Connery developed a serious interest in the theatre through American actor Robert Henderson who
lent him copies of the Henrik Ibsen works Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, and When We Dead Awaken,
and later listed works by the likes of Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev,
George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and William Shakespeare for him to digest. Henderson urged him
to take elocution lessons and got him parts at the Maida Vale Theatre in London. In addition,
he had already begun pursuing a film career,
having been an extra in Herbert Wilcox's 1954 musical Lilacs in the Spring alongside Anna Neagle.
Although Connery had secured several roles as extras, he was struggling to make ends meet,
and was forced to accept a part-time job as a babysitter for journalist Peter Noble
and his actress wife Mary, which earned him 10 shillings a night.
He met Hollywood actor Shelley Winters one night at Noble's house, who described Connery as
"one of the tallest and most charming and masculine Scotsmen" she'd ever seen,
and later spent many evenings with the Connery brothers drinking beer.
Around this time Connery was residing at TV presenter Llew Gardner's house.
Henderson landed Connery a role in a £6 a week Q Theatre production of Agatha Christie's Witness
for the Prosecution, during which he met and became friends with fellow-Scot Ian Bannen.
This role was followed by Point of Departure and A Witch in Time at Kew,
a role as Pentheus opposite Yvonne Mitchell in The Bacchae at the Oxford Playhouse,
and a role opposite Jill Bennett in Eugene O'Neill's production of Anna Christie. During his time
at the Oxford Theatre, Connery won a brief part as a boxer in the TV series The Square Ring,
before being spotted
by Canadian director Alvin Rakoff who gave him multiple roles in The Condemned,
shot on location in Dover in Kent. In 1956,
Connery appeared in the theatrical production of Epitaph,
and played a minor role as a hoodlum in the "Ladies of the Manor"
episode of the BBC Television police series Dixon of Dock Green. This was followed
by small television parts in Sailor of Fortune and The Jack Benny Program.
In the spring of 1957, Connery hired agent Richard Hatton who got him a role as Spike,
a minor gangster
with a speech impediment in Montgomery Tully's No Road Back alongside Skip Homeier,
Paul Carpenter, Patricia Dainton and Norman Wooland. In April 1957, Rakoff—after being disappointed
by Jack Palance—decided to give the young actor his first chance in a leading role,
and cast Connery as Mountain McLintock in BBC TV's outstanding production of Requiem For a
Heavyweight, which also starred Warren Mitchell and Jacqueline Hill.
He then played a rogue lorry driver, Johnny Yates,
in Cy Endfield's Hell Drivers alongside Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom, Peggy Cummins
and Patrick McGoohan. Later in 1957,
Connery appeared in Terence Young's poorly received MGM action picture Action of the Tiger opposite
Van Johnson, Martine Carol, Herbert Lom and Gustavo Rojo;
the film was shot on location in southern Spain.
He also had a minor role in Gerald Thomas's thriller Time Lock as a welder,
appearing alongside Robert Beatty, Lee Patterson, Betty McDowall and Vincent Winter;
this commenced filming on 1 December 1956 at Beaconsfield Studios.
He had a major role in the melodrama Another Time,
Another Place as a British reporter named Mark Trevor,
caught in a love affair opposite Lana Turner and Barry Sullivan. During filming,
star Lana Turner's possessive gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, who was visiting
from Los Angeles, believed she was having an affair with Connery. He stormed onto the set
and pointed a gun at Connery, only to have Connery disarm him and knock him flat on his back.
Stompanato was banned from the set. Connery later recounted that he had to lie low
for a while after receiving threats from men linked to Stompanato's boss, Mickey Cohen. In 1959,
Connery landed a leading role in Robert Stevenson's Walt Disney Productions film Darby O'Gill
and the Little People alongside Albert Sharpe, Janet Munro, and Jimmy O'Dea.
The film is a tale about a wily Irishman and his battle of wits with leprechauns.
Upon the film's initial release, A. H. Weiler of the New York Times praised the cast
and thought the film an "overpoweringly charming concoction of standard Gaelic tall stories,
fantasy and romance.". In his book The Disney Films, film critic
and historian Leonard Maltin stated that, "Darby O'Gill
and the Little People is not only one of Disney's best films,
but is certainly one of the best fantasies ever put on film."
He also had prominent television roles in Rudolph Cartier's 1961 productions of Adventure Story
and Anna Karenina for BBC Television, in the latter of which he co-starred with Claire Bloom.
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