"Mom, Sean Connery died."
"What? Oh no! When?"
"This morning. He was 90."
"Oh... well, that's a good long life, but still very sad."
"Yeah, it is. I know he was your favourite."
"Yes, yes, definitely him, then Daniel Craig."
David pipes up in the background. "Second favourite."
For a moment, I am dumbfounded. "You CAN'T be serious."
"What?" David says, looking confused.
"What's going on there?" my Mom asks on the other end of the phone.
"Sean Connery is your SECOND favourite?!?" I start to stand.
"What's happening?" Mom asks.
"NO! Your Mom's! It's your Dad and then Sean Connery!" David is literally backing away from me.
"Oh, thank God," I say, sitting back down. "I thought you meant that he was YOUR second favourite Bond. That you were going to say some shit about Roger Moore being first, and then I was going to have to punch you in the throat."
"Wow. You are next level with your Connery devotion."
"Heather? Heather?" My Mom is a bit frantic on the phone.
"Sorry Mom." I then catch her up on my David's theory of favourites.
"Well," she laughs. "He is definitely up there for me."
"This could have been an enormous, terrible, marital revelation for me. I mean, we all know that it goes Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, then the pretty-much-interchangeable Brosnan/Dalton, George Lazenby for giving Bond any sort of emotional grounding and then Roger Moore for camp."
"You'll get no argument from me," says David, hands in the air.
***
To ignore Connery's incredible acting talent outside of the Bond franchise would be near-heresy. I haven't seen all his movies, but among my favourites are: amateur psychotherapist Mark Rutlege from Marnie, train robber Edward Pierce in The First Great Train Robbery (he did all his own stunts - it's un-fucking-believable!), space Marshal William T. O'Niel from Outland, monk William of Baskerville who gives Umberto Echo's The Name of the Rose incredible heart, immortal warrior Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez from Highlander, his Oscar-winning portrayal of Chicago cop Jim Malone from The Untouchables, crotchety senior archaeologist Henry Jones Sr. in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Russian submarine Captain Marko Ramius (still with the Scottish accent) from The Hunt for Red October and ex-MI-6 agent John Patrick Mason in The Rock.
Now I'm going to watch all those again and discover some more of his best. You should too.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/sean_connery
***
After writing this post - it was brought to my attention that Sean Connery made some statements in Playboy in 1965 and then again in a 1987 Barbara Walters interview (defending the original Playboy statement) about how slapping women was sometimes warranted.
I really hate when someone I've respected has done shit like this. Yeah, he was born in 1930, yeah, he was a product of his generation with all its attending thoughts about how women could/should be treated, but outside of consensual kink, slapping women isn't and hasn't been a good thing to do for a LONG time. And yeah, in 2006, he recanted his statement, but then said that the original quote in Playboy had been taken out of context. This is not a man who took ownership of a belief that was wrong nor did he admit to the error of his ways.
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