Delanceyplace: James Bond's Work Ethic
"At the age of twenty-four, Sean Connery had his first exposure to acting - a minor part in a touring company of South Pacific - as well as an offer to play soccer for Manchester United. Still trying to escape the poverty of Scotland and reasoning that his athletic career could only last a few years, Connery plunged into a program of self-improvement,'' writes Christopher Bray.
None of [his career] might have come to pass had Connery not palled up with Robert Henderson, the touring version of South Pacific's Captain Brackett, and an actor with more than a passing interest in the history of his craft and the theatrical tradition sustaining it. As 1953 became 1954, Connery and Hen- derson shared lodgings during the show's nine-week stint at the Manchester Opera House and the older man (born in Michigan in 1904, Henderson was a couple of years senior to Connery's father) took the younger man under his wing.
The tutelage began when the two men were walking home one night and Henderson casually mentioned Ibsen. Who's Ibsen? asked Connery. Henderson explained saying that, if he were interested, Connery should read Hedda Gabler or The Wild Duck or even Men We Dead Awaken. 'I was so impressed by actors and how articulate they were,' Connery later recalled. 'How much they seemed to know about everything. I was impressed by most people I met. I was impressed by people that could express themselves. I had no confidence in terms of intellect at all because I'd had absolutely no exposure to it.' And so, the next morning he took himself off to the local library and started working his way through Henderson's reading list. When he had finished, he returned to his mentor for more suggestions.
Henderson was taken aback: 'Most young men are keen to be stars,' he would say years later, 'but they're also dead lazy.' Not this young man Connery, though, who took Henderson's next batch of suggestions - among them works by Proust, Stendhal and Tolstoy - and earnestly worked his way through them, too. Also in that second list of required reading was a work of non-fiction - Constantin Stanislavsky's My Life in Art.
Now this is not one of Stanislavsky's works of high theory. For the most part it is a memoir of a young man growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia. But the book, first published in 1924, was hot once more because of something that had been going on in the American theatre and cinema. Marlon Brando's work - particularly his work as Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan's movie version of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) - had made Stanislavsky's acting technique (the Method, Stanislavsky's preferred term - or the System) famous all around the world. ...
Late [each] night, when the show was over and he was back in his lodgings, he would carry on working his way through the classical repertoire. The mornings he gave over to self-administered elocution lessons, reading aloud into a tape recorder and listening to the results with a disgusted grimace. Movie critics might have joked about the mouthful of marbles through which Marlon Brando mumbled his every utterance, but Brando's slips and slurs were crystalline in their clarity when set beside Connery's twisted Scots vowels. One of his South Pacific co-stars, Millicent Martin (fifty years later a regular on the U.S. sitcom Frasier), could understand so little of what Connery said that she believed he came, like Brando's Kowalski, from Poland.
Afternoons, meanwhile, Connery spent studying other touring shows. He watched anything and everything, from mainstream comedies and thrillers through Shakespeare, to the latest avant-garde productions. He was, Henderson would remember, a quick study, picking up a trick here, a tic there and all the while refining that Edinburgh brogue, though never let it be said that Connery is one of those stars who merely got lucky. The popular imagination likes the idea of the untutored star because it means that success is almost accidental and therefore potentially available to all. But regardless of his lack of formal training, Sean Connery worked very hard at his craft."
Author: Christopher Bray
Title: Sean Connery
Publisher: Pegasus
Date: Copyright 2011 by Christopher Bray
Pages: 24-28
Sean Connery: A Biography
by Christopher Bray by Pegasus
Hardcover
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