Sean Connery

Thomas Sean Connery was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1930, the son of a factory worker and a cleaner. He left school young, served in the Royal Navy, and worked as a milkman, lorry driver, and bodybuilder before turning to acting through stage chorus work and British television, steadily building a reputation through the 1950s.

In 1962 Connery became the first cinematic James Bond in Dr. No, and across seven films his mixture of elegance, menace, and dry humor made 007 a worldwide phenomenon. Determined not to be defined by Bond alone, he delivered acclaimed performances in The Man Who Would Be King, The Name of the Rose, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Untouchables, which won him an Academy Award.

A proud Scot and lifelong advocate for his homeland, Connery was knighted in 2000 at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. He retired from acting in the mid-2000s and died peacefully in the Bahamas in October 2020, at ninety. He remains the measure against which every screen Bond is judged, and one of the most magnetic leading men in the history of film.