Sean Connery

Sean Connery was 32, with a Disney leprechaun picture and a bit part in a D-Day epic behind him, when Dr. No opened in 1962. He played James Bond six times for Eon Productions, through Diamonds Are Forever in 1971, and once more outside the series in 1983. Nobody who followed him has escaped the template he set: the tailoring worn like armour, the cruelty under the charm, the sense that the joke is mostly at the audience's expense.

What made him last was economy. He did very little, slowly, and let everyone else in the frame do the work. He also refused, apparently on principle, to modify his voice: a Soviet submarine commander, an immortal Spaniard, a Franciscan friar in a mountain abbey, all of them Edinburgh through and through. It should have been fatal. Instead it read as authority, and directors stopped fighting it.

The 1970s are his most interesting decade and his least watched: a bald mercenary in a hallucinatory science fiction film, a con man in a Kipling adaptation, an aging Robin Hood with nothing left to prove, a police interrogation drama so bleak it barely reached cinemas. Then came the elder statesman phase that made him rich again, playing mentors who are plainly better at the job than the hero: a Chicago beat cop, Indiana Jones's father, a career prisoner who knows the tunnels under Alcatraz. He retired from acting after 2003, collected a BAFTA Fellowship, a Golden Lion and the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and died in 2020.