AutoBondographically: Connery’s new memoir

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Actor Sean Connery will launch his autobiography ‘Being A Scot’ in August at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Festival director Catherine Lockerbie told Canada’s CBC that ‘this book has gone through more permutations than James Bond has had shaken-not-stirred martinis: different co-writers, different publishers.’ The memoir, she continued, will include Connery’s thoughts on ‘many aspects of Scottish culture and life, including sport, architecture and, of course, the gothic tendency in Scots literature.’

While Connery is best remembered for his turn as the high-living super-spy James Bond, he’s also been bookish on film. Notably, in ‘The Name of the Rose,’ the adaptation of Umberto Eco’s novel, Connery played William of Baskerville, a literate monk who tries to save a precious library from burning.

But Connery has had a penchant for literary adaptations for his entire career. In 1961, he was in TV versions of both ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Anna Karenina.’ Later Connery literary projects ‘The Hunt for Red October,’ ‘The Longest Day,’ ‘Marnie,’ ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’ ‘A Bridge Too Far,’ ‘A Fine Madness,’ ‘Shalako,’ ‘The Russia House,’ ‘The Molly Maguires,’ ‘The Anderson Tapes,’ ‘The First Great Train Robbery,’ ‘A Good Man in Africa,’ ‘Wrong is Right,’ ‘Family Business,’ ‘Just Cause,’ and ‘Rising Sun’ were all adapted from books; ‘The Hill’ and ‘The Offence,’ from plays; ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ from a Rudyard Kipling story; and ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ from a comic book. That’s around 80% of his body of work, a hyper-literary run.

And James Bond, despite his filmic success, started out the hero of the novels by Ian Fleming.

Carolyn Kellogg