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But Connery’s influence helped shape the character in the books as well as the films. He never attempted to disguise his Scottish accent, leading Fleming to give Bond Scottish heritage in the books that were released after Connery’s debut.
Born Thomas Connery on Aug. 25, 1930, he was the elder of two sons of a long-distance truck driver and a mother who worked as a cleaner. He dropped out of school at age 13 and worked in a variety of menial jobs. At 16, two years after World War Two ended, Connery was drafted into the Royal Navy, and served three years.
“I grew up with no notion of a career, much less acting,” he once said. “I certainly never have plotted it out. It was all happenstance, really.”
Connery played small parts with theater repertory companies before graduating to films and television.
It was his part in a 1959 Disney leprechaun movie, “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” that helped land the role of Bond. Broccoli, a producer of the Bond films, asked his wife to watch Connery in the Disney movie while he was searching for the right leading actor.
Dana Broccoli said her husband told her he was not sure Connery had sex appeal.
“I saw that face and the way he moved and talked and I said: ‘Cubby, he’s fabulous!’” she said. “He was just perfect, he had star material right there.”
Connery married actress Diane Cilento in 1962. Before divorcing 11 years later, they had a son, Jason, who became an actor. He married French artist Micheline Roquebrune, whom he met playing golf, in 1975. (Reporting by Andrew MacAskill in London and Will Dunham and Sonya Hepinstall in Washington Editing by Bill Trott, Andrew Heavens and Frances Kerry)
