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I was in bed one weekend morning when the phone rang and in my half-awake
state I was offered the title role in a television production of Macbeth in
Canada. The fee would be C$500, which was generous by early Sixties
standards.
For this offer I had to thank a young Canadian director, Paul Almond. Paul had
been head-hunted by Granada in Manchester to direct The Dumb Waiter, Harold
Pinter's first televised play. He had played a leading part in student
theatre when he was up at Oxford, where he had seen a remarkable performance
of Macbeth at the Playhouse. He had the idea of casting a Scot to play
Macbeth, which back then was considered rather radical. When he asked his
agent, the ex-actress and playwright Elspeth Cochrane, to help him, she
recommended me on the strength of my television performance as Alexander the
Great.
Macbeth is a challenge even for the most experienced actor. On the plane I
began to plot out what I could bring to the role. It was certainly a long
way from my first night on stage singing as a Seabee in South Pacific. But
in the ensuing years I had taken on increasingly complex roles. I had come
through the petrifying terror of acting in live television dramas, an
altogether unnerving experience, totally unknown to actors today ... [I had
also been] cast in a stage production of Anna Christie, Eugene O'Neill's
play that Garbo had made famous in her first talkie. The title role was
played by the accomplished Australian actress Diane Cilento, who had studied
at RADA.
Diane told me how she was still benefiting from movement classes devised by
the Swedish dancer Yat Malgrem and she urged me to join her. Although at
first I was only able to afford floor lessons three times a week, Yat's
approach was a revelation to me. Up to that moment I had never had a single
acting lesson. My training as a body builder greatly helped me play the many
tough parts I was offered. But here was a system applicable to all roles.
Yat articulated the factors actors need in creating a character into the four
main categories of weight, space, time and flow. Learning about the dynamics
of weight, the space which you occupy, the reach of time and the emotion of
flow, soon provided me with the essential basics in creating a character,
and I have used his system ever since.
I could never have [acted] without the depth of understanding instilled in me
by Yat Malgrem. He helped to answer a problem which had always perturbed me.
How do you play an intelligent man if you are a stupid actor? Well, you do
that through the use of the space. You remove as much of the physical as you
can from the scene, and then leave it to the head. To give expression to a
thought is at the very quick of acting as taught by Yat Malgrem.
Macbeth was a big part to learn in ten days, apart from its tough production
schedule. To give my best I realised that I would have to give myself a
strict schedule of work. I would get up each morning at five to rehearse
Macbeth in the shower, shouting my lines over the cascades of the splashing
water ricocheting off the tiles. I would then take the long walk to the
studio, talking to no one, with the lines tumbling round my head.
Paul had expected me to have had studied Macbeth at school but I had neither
read the play nor had I ever seen it performed. Paul liked that because he
said that I had nothing to unlearn, unlike actors who come to the part
having seen 27 Macbeths and want to base their performance on aspects of
past productions. As I came to the role fresh I was open to Paul's
suggestions and his ideas for setting the mood. I had grown my beard and
began to reshape my physical bearing along Yat Malgrem rules. Once I had
learnt the lines I would think through my performance. My only problem was
that I then developed flu. Zoe Caldwell recommended an Australian remedy of
breathing in hot menthol eucalyptus under a towel. But successful as her
remedy was in clearing out my tubes, it had the drastic side-effect of
somehow blocking my remembered lines. Zoe was kind enough to judge my
sometime hesitant delivery as giving an extra dimension of considered
thoughtfulness to my performance.
I set about creating a voice that conveyed my personality
Realising that his Scottish accent was almost impenetrable, the young Sean
Connery set about creating the voice that has become perhaps the most
distinctive in movie history.
“I bought a reel-to-reel Grundig tape recorder for a hefty £60 and began to
hear for myself how heavily accented my own voice really was. Of course I
wanted to be clearly understood. I practised articulating my words more
distinctly. Yet at the same time I wanted to retain the personality of my
own voice and to be honest to my Edinburgh roots. I didn't care much for the
declamatory style that actors were then expected to bring to a part,
especially in Shakespeare plays. For me it separated the head from the
heart. When I recorded myself on tape, declaiming Hamlet in the received
Shakespearean manner, it rang utterly false to me. How could I ever bring an
emotional dimension to a part if I would always be enunciating clipped
elocutions as though I were stuck up there on the battlements of Elsinore? I
wanted to keep my own natural voice and remain true to myself. I never
wanted to imitate that staccato precision of perfection achieved by such
masters of the articulated vowel as the incomparable John Gielgud. I felt
that I couldn't be honest with myself or express any emotions truthfully if
I tried to re-invent my speech patterns in an actor-ish declamatory way. Or
proclaim like Dylan Thomas's ‘men from the BBC who speak as though they had
the Elgin marbles in their mouths'. I was going against the fashion of the
times, since then all actors, regardless of their background, delivered
their lines in the well-articulated plummy vowels of standard English. All
this would change in the Sixties when actors of similar backgrounds to mine,
such as Michael Caine and Albert Finney, took to the stage and screen.
Recently the screen-writer Buck Henry told me that I was the only one he
knew who could convincingly play characters as diverse as a Russian
submarine commander, James Bond, an Arab sheikh, a medieval priest, or a
Chicago Irish cop, and still be totally believable in the part speaking with
a Scottish burr.”
You cannot keep me from my twin passions of football and golf
There are two sports to which Sean Connery is addicted: football and golf. As
a youngster he was a fanatical football player, who was nearly signed up by
Manchester United. These days he watches it from a more detached
perspective. But he is still a fan, referring to it, in the traditional
Scots dialect as “the gemme” ....
“I've always supported the team that I thought played the best soccer. For
years it was Celtic, who were the first British team to win the European Cup
in Lisbon in 1967. They beat the world-famous Internazionale Milan 2-1 in an
all-out attacking style, which then changed the face of soccer. What is even
more extraordinary, in these days of international signings, all the players
of this unbeatable Celtic team came from within 30 miles of Glasgow.
Over the years I've shifted my allegiance to Rangers. Why, as a once Celtic
supporter, with its strong Catholic-Irish allegiances, should I cheer on a
team known to attract extreme Protestants? Well religious affiliations in
sport mean nothing to me. It's the gemme I love. I deplore the bigotry of
sectarianism that still blights soccer in Scotland, especially in clashes
between Celtic, who field the emerald green of Catholic Ireland, against the
blue of Protestant Rangers. Let's have the referee raise the red card to all
bigots, be they blue or green, and send such mindless prejudice off the
field for ever. Why can't we all come together to celebrate the soccer those
Scotch professors pioneered back in the early days; those great midfield
players who opened up the gemme worldwide?
Despite its place in early soccer history, the Hampden stadium was falling
into near dereliction by the 1960s. To help restore it, I came up with an
idea for an international friendly match between Brazil and Scotland. My
friend, the shipbuilder Sir Iain Stewart, persuaded Sir Adam Thomson of
British Caledonian Airways to donate 22 seats for the Brazilian team,
including Pelé, then the world's greatest player. Celtic and Rangers would
combine to field a select team. Entry would be half a crown - 30 old pence,
less than half of that in today's money. Embassies were invited to
contribute and fly their flags. I agreed to underwrite the whole event to
the tune of £35,000. With Celtic and Rangers so strong at the time, this
international friendly had the promise of phenomenal celebration of soccer.
Yet, despite our backing, a wildly supportive press and doubtless the
enthusiasm of thousands of soccer fans, Willie Allan, the Secretary of the
Scottish Soccer Association, blew the whistle on us. ‘Soccer isn't
show-business, son,' he told me as his lip curled into a dismissive sneer to
scotch our dream. I had been away from Scotland too long.”
Connery's other passion is golf. These days he plays every day on the Lyford
Cay course near his home in the Bahamas. His interest in the game began
seriously when he was playing James Bond in Goldfinger.
“I never had a hankering to play golf, despite growing up in Scotland just
down the road from Bruntsfield Links, which is one of the oldest golf
courses in the world. It wasn't until I was taught enough golf to look as
though I could outwit the accomplished golfer Gert Frobe in Goldfinger, that
I got the bug. I began to take lessons on a course near the Pinewood film
studios and was immediately hooked on the game. Soon it would nearly take
over my life. I began to see golf as a metaphor for living, for in golf you
are basically on your own, competing against yourself and always trying to
do better. If you cheat, you will be the loser, because you are cheating
yourself. When Ian Fleming portrayed Auric Goldfinger as a smooth cheater,
James Bond had no regrets when he switched his golf balls, since to be
cheated is the just reward of the cheater [see dialogue between Bond and
Goldfinger above].
During the filming of Goldfinger, I learnt the essential challenge of links
golf in Royal Dornoch, in the north-east Highlands. Ever since then I have
been drawn to links golf and its enduring challenges.
Within a few years of Goldfinger, my golf was good enough to play against
professionals in competitions. I was invited to join one of Bing Crosby's
showbusiness amateur teams against professional golfers in America, which
was an early forerunner of the Pro Ams. It gave me the idea of promoting a
Pro Am tournament in Scotland to showcase our Scottish International
Education Trust.
Since one of its first board members, Sir Iain Stewart, had fabulous
connections in the world of golf, the planning of the event got off to a
flying start. We settled on the out-and-back Ayrshire course of Royal Troon
and chose the week following the British Open. Since all the key players in
the world would be congregating at St Andrews, travelling from Troon to Fife
would hardly be crossing the Atlantic. The amateurs included the comedian
Jimmy Tarbuck, the soccer player Kenny Dalgleish, the boxer Henry Cooper,
along with Eric Sykes and me.
Sponsors put up generous prizes and we allowed them to place their logo on the
holes for £1,000. Eagle Star Insurance took the first hole, which was a
drivable par four. But when two players in the first half dozen holed out in
an eagle three to each claim their prize of £500, Iain Stewart thought we'd
all be left penniless. Fortunately only one more player holed out in three.
The tournament was a great success, with Christy O'Connor becoming the all
round winner and it re-established Royal Troon as a venue for future Opens.
In 1970 I won a trophy at La Coupe du Roi de Maroc in Morocco. The next day I
was drawn against a brilliant player who had won the women's trophy. That
was Micheline Roquebrune. We were married a year later.”
Copyright Sean Connery 2008
Extracted from Being a Scot, by Sean Connery and Murray Grigor, to be
published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, August 21, at £20.00
