Sir Sean Connery has struck a deal with one of the country’s leading publishers to write a book about his life and his views on Scotland.
Connery’s Scotland will be jointly published next year by Scotland’s two top publishers, Edinburgh-based Canongate and Polygon.
His agent told The Scotsman that the book would be “like sitting round the 75-year-old actor’s dinner table and hearing his anecdotes”.
The book will be published in the UK in September next year to mark the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England.
The Scottish film-maker Murray Grigor, recent winner of a Creative Scotland Award, is also collaborating on the book. It has already been partly written, and the two men met this weekend for a five-day brainstorming session in the Bahamas.
Sir Sean said: “Our goal is to produce a very readable, visually stimulating and hopefully intriguing HIS-story of Scotland, with personal discoveries.”
The comment underlined that it was his story as well as Scotland’s, a Canongate publicist said.
The book is expected to run from a new take on the “real” Macbeth – a peacekeeping king far removed from Shakespeare’s villain – to Connery’s experience of how oddly Scotland is seen abroad.
Some of his Hollywood friends have thought Brigadoon was a documentary. Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, in which Connery starred, knew of Scotland’s history as a story of Templars, Masons and a slew of bloody intrigues.
The book is going to draw on archive photographs and images. Chapters will explore Scottish humour, literature, art, architecture, sport, and above all Edinburgh, where the young Sean Connery was born, bred and famously worked as a milkman. It aims to run from Scotland’s knack for developing new sports, games and inventions to the “Scottish cringe”.
Mr Grigor worked with Connery on the award-winning documentary, Sean Connery’s Edinburgh, and this book also grew out of a documentary project.
There is plenty of biographical material to draw on. In recent years, the actor has laboured to produce an autobiography. But he pulled out of one deal with his childhood friend Meg Henderson, then broke with a second writer, Hunter Davies.
Last year, the actor who became a global star as result of his portrayal of James Bond, announced he was quitting Hollywood after making 77 films – from Diamonds are Forever to The Hunt for Red October. He blamed “idiots” in the studios who decided what films to fund.
Connery also recently announced he was pulling out of the Festival of Politics after the Presiding Officer, George Reid, said he planned to ask “tough questions” about his views on women.
The actor always strongly denied any rough treatment of his first wife, Diane Cilento, though she suggested he bullied her in a tell-all book.
He will, however, be back in his home town as patron of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, when the event marks its 60th anniversary this year.
The book will represent a milestone in Scottish publishing and is a major venture for Canongate and Polygon.
The Canongate publisher, Jamie Byng, said: “We are absolutely thrilled to be publishing Connery’s Scotland. Not only is it going to be a fascinating and revelatory book about Scotland but Sir Sean is a natural storyteller with his own great story to tell.
“Co-publishing with Hugh Andrew and his team at Polygon adds another exciting dimension to what is going to be one of the biggest publishing projects Canongate has ever been involved in.”
TIM CORNWELL, Arts Correspondent
news.scotsman.com
