Do we like Sean Connery?
Our score: 3 out of 10. He repeatedly defended slapping women in his own words, but he also left real, lasting good in Scottish education and ocean causes.
Thomas Sean Connery was born in Edinburgh in 1930 and worked as a coffin polisher, a milkman and a bodybuilder before acting. He became the first big-screen Bond and played 007 in seven films over more than four decades. He won an Oscar for playing a Chicago cop in The Untouchables and was knighted in 2000.
The big black mark is his own mouth. In a 1965 Playboy interview he said he didn't think there was “anything particularly wrong about hitting a woman”, and called an open-handed slap justified in some circumstances. That's not a clip taken out of nowhere; it's what he told a magazine, in his own words.
Then there's his first marriage. In 2005 the Irish Examiner reported that Diane Cilento was about to publish a memoir alleging he physically and mentally bullied her during their 11-year marriage. Connery always denied it, and no court ever ruled on it. Women's Agenda noted that a violent incident she described fell just weeks before his 1965 remarks, so where you land is your call.
On the money side, he was caught up in Spain's long-running Marbella property scandal, nicknamed the “Goldfinger case”. In 2014 a court there shelved the case and dismissed all charges against him, with the judge saying there was no evidence he was involved in illegal dealings. So that one's a clean slate for him.
On the harm check beyond women, we found nothing from him on gay or trans people, migrants or race, so we won't invent anything. He didn't work on recent projects with the usual culture-war crowd either, since he'd stopped acting years before he died. On the planet side he joined the advisory board of the ocean group Sea Shepherd in 2011.
The good stuff is real. His family set up the Sean Connery Foundation after his death, and in 2022 it planned to give £6 million to causes in Scotland and the Bahamas, including a university ocean institute, dyslexia support and young filmmakers. That doesn't cancel what he said about women, but it counts.