Iconic 'James Bond' actor Sean Connery dies aged 90: A life in pictures

Scottish movie legend Sean Connery, who shot to international stardom as the suave British agent James Bond and went on to dominate the silver screen for four decades, has died aged 90, the BBC and Sky News reported on Saturday.

Connery was raised in near poverty in the slums of Edinburgh and worked as a coffin polisher, milkman and lifeguard before his bodybuilding hobby helped launch an acting career that made him one of the world’s biggest stars.

He will be remembered first as British agent 007, the character created by novelist Ian Fleming and immortalised by Connery in films starting with ‘Dr No’ in 1962. He would introduce himself in the movies with the signature line, ‘Bond - James Bond.’

But Connery was unhappy being defined by the role and once said he “hated that damned James Bond”. Tall and handsome, with a throaty voice to match a sometimes crusty personality, Connery played a series of noteworthy roles besides Bond and won an Academy Award for his portrayal of a tough Chicago cop in ‘The Untouchables’ (1987). He was 59 when People magazine declared him the “sexiest man alive” in 1989.

Connery was an ardent supporter of Scotland’s independence and had the words “Scotland Forever” tattooed on his arm while serving in the Royal Navy. When he was knighted at the age of 69 by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth in 2000 at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, he wore full Scottish dress including the green-and-black plaid kilt of his mother’s MacLeod clan.

Some noteworthy non-Bond films included director Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie” (1964), “The Wind and the Lion” (1975) with Candice Bergen, director John Huston’s “The Man Who Would be King” (1975) with Michael Caine, director Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989) and the Cold War tale “The Hunt for Red October” (1990).

Born Thomas Connery on August 25, 1930, he was the elder of two sons of a long-distance truck driver and a mother who worked as a cleaner. He dropped out of school at age 13 and worked in a variety of menial jobs. At 16, two years after World War Two ended, Connery was drafted into the Royal Navy, and served three years. “I grew up with no notion of a career, much less acting,” he once said. “I certainly never have plotted it out. It was all happenstance, really.” Connery played small parts with theatre repertory companies before graduating to films and television. It was his part in a 1959 Disney leprechaun movie, ‘Darby O’Gill and the Little People,’ that helped land the role of Bond.