To celebrate the launch of UWE Bristol’s Professor Andrew Spicer’s new book Sean Connery: Acting, Stardom and National Identity, join Professor Spicer for an illustrated talk on the Scottish star.

An iconic star best known as the screen’s ‘first’ James Bond, over a forty-year career Sean Connery played a range of memorable roles such as his ageing, over-the-hill Robin Hood in Robin and Marian (1976). Reinventing himself as the father-mentor, Connery enjoyed a second period of superstardom from the mid-1980s onwards including The Rock (1996).

In this wide-ranging talk, Andrew Spicer will discuss Connery’s career, including his little-known 1950s television work, his contribution to the Bond franchise and his twenty-year struggle to escape being in ‘Bondage’, and the gradual development of a mythic persona that modulated into an all-encompassing ‘screen legend’ marred by his misogyny.

Connery’s acting style and the significance of his complex embodiment of national identity, including his public role as an activist campaigning for Scottish independence, will be discussed. In a broader consideration of stardom as a cultural phenomenon, the talk will emphasise the importance of situating stars within their economic, professional and historical contexts as they struggle for creative control over their careers.

This talk is based on Spicer's book Sean Connery: Acting, Stardom and National Identity (Manchester University Press, 2022), which you can buy at the talk for £15. You can catch a screening of The Hill after the event.

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