Most actors who play James Bond become Bond, and it takes the rest of their career to escape it. Connery never really escaped it, but he was the only one who never seemed to need to. The style he built as Bond and the one he wore away from the cameras were close enough to each other that the character never felt like a costume. It felt like a version of him wearing better suits.
He came from Edinburgh, from a working-class family, and spent his early years doing jobs that had nothing to do with the film industry. Milkman, lorry driver, coffin polisher, bodybuilder. In 1953, while attending a bodybuilding competition in London, a fellow competitor mentioned that the King’s Theatre was holding open auditions for a production of South Pacific. Connery went along, was placed in the chorus, and worked his way up to understudy of the lead.
Over the next decade he picked up bit parts across film and television, building a modest reputation while two producers named Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli were quietly trying to solve a much bigger problem.
They had acquired the rights to Ian Fleming’s Bond novels and received authorisation from United Artists to bring Dr. No to the screen. They needed a Bond. Their first choice was Cary Grant, who agreed, had the contract drawn up, and then revealed he would only commit to one film. Saltzman and Broccoli wanted a franchise. Grant was out. Patrick McGoohan was considered. David Niven, who was over 50 at the time. Roger Moore, who Broccoli felt was too young and a shade too pretty. Fleming himself pushed for Richard Todd. A newspaper contest run by the Daily Express produced six finalists, all of whom screen-tested. None of them worked.
Then Connery came in for lunch.
He showed up looking dishevelled, wearing unpressed clothes. Broccoli’s wife Dana had persuaded her husband to give him a chance anyway, and so the three of them sat down. By the end of the meal, Connery had the part without ever taking an official screen test. He had been assertive, confident and completely at ease, which was enough. What sealed it was the moment he left. As he walked back to his car, Saltzman and Broccoli watched him through the window. “He moved,” Saltzman said, “like a jungle cat.”
Fleming was furious. He referred to Connery as the working-class Scot and told the producers he was looking for Commander Bond, not an overgrown stunt-man. His girlfriend Blanche Blackwell tried to change his mind. Fleming wouldn’t hear it. He changed his position the night of the Dr. No premiere, walking out of the cinema a convert. He was so won over that in his next Bond novel, You Only Live Twice, he gave James Bond Scottish ancestry to mirror the man playing him.
Connery's Iconic Bond Suits
Director Terence Young, who also saw what the producers saw in Connery, took him under his wing before filming began. He took him to his own hairdresser, and then to his tailor, Anthony Sinclair on Conduit Street, to be fitted properly. Sinclair’s approach across the first five Bond films, Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice, was built around one principle: cut to the man, not against him. Connery was tall, broad-shouldered and athletic, and the suits reflected that without constraining it. Fitted through the chest and waist, natural shoulders with no padding, trousers cut with a slight taper. Soft construction rather than rigid structure, which gave them ease of movement that matched the character wearing them.
The shirts came from Turnbull and Asser on Jermyn Street, the shoes were black Oxford brogues resoled and re-heeled rather than replaced, and the tuxedo he wore in Dr. No, a single-button peaked-lapel dinner jacket with a barrel-cuffed dress shirt, remains one of the most referenced pieces in the history of menswear. Every actor who has played Bond since has been measured against the image of Connery descending the Casino Royale staircase in it.
Off-Screen Fashion
Away from Bond, Connery dressed almost nothing like the character. Where Bond was always formal, always constructed, Connery in real life leaned toward what the Italians would call effortless. A checked tweed or houndstooth jacket over a fine cashmere turtleneck became his personal signature through the 1960s and 70s, a combination that has come back in menswear with enough force in recent years to suggest nobody ever really moved on from it. In his later years in the south of France and the Bahamas, loose linen shirts and tailored shorts that looked considered without looking dressed.
He understood instinctively that how clothes fit matters more than what they cost, and that a man who looks comfortable in his clothes always reads better than one who appears to be wearing them.
He died in Nassau in October 2020, aged 90. Fleming, who had called him an overgrown stunt-man and refused to accept him as Bond, gave his creation Scottish blood because of him. The suits Anthony Sinclair cut in 1962 are still being referenced by tailors today. Not a bad legacy for a working-class Scot who showed up to the most important lunch of his career in unpressed clothes.
