Credit: Far Out / Gramercy Pictures / United International Pictures
Tue 25 August 2026 20:15, UK
Half of the films that Sean Connery made pretty much speak for themselves whenever they came out.
He was one of the true legends of the film world during his generation, and not many people would have been able to play a character as iconic as James Bond and be able to make equally iconic performances across the rest of their filmography as naturally as he did. But sometimes the greatest victories that you can have as an artist is to make something that’s a bit more funny than anything else.
That’s not to say that Connery didn’t take his films seriously. Some of his performances deserve to go down as the greatest of all time, but sometimes the biggest parts of what makes a film work is what’s going on in the background as opposed to the foreground. And even if Connery didn’t have much to work with on a few films, it all came down to the kind of actors that he was surrounding himself with.
He knew that he was capable of working with some of the legends of the acting world, and even when working on the third Indiana Jones movie, he slid into the role of Indy’s father with no trouble at all in Steven Spielberg’s hands. But long before he was in the major blockbusters of the 1980s, there was a certain period where Connery came dangerously close to being typecast as Bond.
Some of the biggest parts of his career came from him playing the iconic spy, and while that was all well and good, no one wants to find themselves playing one character for the rest of their lives. Connery deserved to be remembered for far more than that, and The Man Who Would Be King was the first time where he had a chance to stretch with a text that seemed tailor-made to set him apart from Bond.
And it’s not like he didn’t have the right people on the job working with him. Michael Caine was one of the best scene partners that he could have asked for, and since the whole thing was based on the Rudyard Kipling novel of the same name, it felt like the right change of pace to get Connery out of a slump. The movie was already one of the best at the box office that year, but if you look in the background, Connery was far more concerned with the amount of money that was still owed him from working on the movie.
It’s no secret that many studios could be stingy when it comes to the little details, but compared to the massive success of the film, Connery was most proud of being able take Allied Artists for all they were worth once he found out that he didn’t get paid in full, saying, “I am happy to say that I sued Allied Artists for cosmetic book-keeping and they’re bankrupt.” And it’s not like they were shaving a little bit off the top of his paycheck, either.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
This was hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line here, and Caine was right there with Connery trying to get what was owed to them. And while Allied Artists did try to countersue both actors for over $21 million, you can pretty much put the pieces together as to what happened when you look at the kind of legacy that they’ve left behind compared to both Connery and Caine in the years to come.
Connery was still proud of his performance, but while the art behind a movie should be the most important thing, the acting legend had a much greater message he wanted to share with the world. You can be great at your job, but no one gets to be a legend for free, and Connery was doing everything in his movie to make sure crooks in the industry got what was coming to them somewhere along the line.
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