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  1. Connery shaken, not stirred, by his Bond roles

    By David Winter on 2001-02-16

    BERLIN (Reuters) – Fans might consider him the greatest British film star ever, but Scottish film legend Sean Connery would rather watch anyone else play the role that made him famous.

    ‘Each one has a hard time playing the Bond role,’ Connery said at a news conference at the Berlin Film Festival, where he was presenting his new film “Finding Forrester.” ‘Everyone plays it differently. Maybe I set too high a standard.’

    Connery, 70, did not want to say which actor he thought embodied the James Bond role best but he said that the current actor, Pierce Brosnan, was doing a good of keeping the role alive. Connery was the first Bond, playing in “Dr. No” four decades ago.

    ‘It’s a difficult question to answer,’ said Connery. ‘I’d rather watch all the others but me.’

    He said he didn’t mind being identified with the famous British agent even though he hasn’t played the role in 17 years.

    In “Finding Forrester,” which is based loosely on a figure like the American novelist J.D. Salinger, Connery stars as a elderly novelist in New York who lives as a recluse 40 years after writing a Pulitzer-prize winning novel and helps a talented young writer get his start.

    In his news conference in Berlin, Connery also evaded a question about the secret of his sex appeal.

    ‘Sorry, but I am going to take that with me to the grave,’ the septuagenarian said.

    Connery, recently ranked as Britain’s greatest film star of all time in a Orange Film survey of 10,000 fans, said that he was never completely satisfied with his work. He said that his favorite film to work on was “Indiana Jones.”

    ‘The best experience was “Indiana Jones” because I enjoyed working with Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford,’ he said. ‘It was hard-working film-making. It was a fun-spirited film-making experience.’

    Connery said there were other films that were successful but not as much fun to work on, but he did not name them.