SEAN CONNERY A BIOGRAPHY [illustrated] - Michael Freedland
Soft cover.
Fine condition.
English language.
Contains various photographs.
A richly detailed biography of Sean Connery.
Author: MICHAEL FREEDLAND
Publisher: ORION
Year of publication: 1996
Pages: 374
Dimensions: 17,5 x 11 cm
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Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930) is a retired Scottish actor and producer, who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards, one being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, and three Golden Globes, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award.
Connery was the first actor to portray the character James Bond in film, starring in seven Bond films (every film from Dr. No to You Only Live Twice, plus Diamonds Are Forever and Never Say Never Again), between 1962 and 1983. In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His film career also includes such films as Marnie, The Name of the Rose, The Man Who Would Be King, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, Finding Forrester, Highlander, Murder on the Orient Express, Dragonheart, and The Rock.
Connery has been polled in The Sunday Herald as "The Greatest Living Scot" and in a EuroMillions survey as "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". He was voted by People magazine as both the “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1989 and the “Sexiest Man of the Century” in 1999. Connery was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to film drama.
Michael Rodney Freedland (18 December 1934 – 1 October 2018) was a British biographer, journalist and broadcaster of Jewish descent.
He began as a journalist on local papers in 1951, initially on The Luton News for which he was reporting in 1957 when he was the only journalist present when prime minister Harold Macmillan made his famous declaration that Britons had "never had it so good". Later he was on the staff of the Daily Sketch for a year before turning freelance in 1961. His broadcasting career began in the following year, and he wrote for The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, The Guardian, The Observer and The Economist.
As a biographer, he specialised in Hollywood and its entertainers, plus some prominent British subjects. His book on Al Jolson, originally published in 1971, reached its eighth edition in 2007. Freedland wrote over forty books, mainly biographies. He wrote and presented programmes for BBC Radio 2 in the UK on his subjects, including Elvis Presley, Bob Hope and Judy Garland. Asked about what to include in an individual's life history, the immediate concern was the Garland book, he said in 2010: "I am a great believer in telling it as it was. I am very certain of the need for warts and all. How else can you tell a full rounded story?"
Freedland's books included more general histories. Witch Hunt in Hollywood: McCarthyism's War On Tinseltown is an account of the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy and (the not directly connected) House Un-American Activities Committee. In Freedland's view: "For Communist read Jew. The hearings ... were as much (some would say more) antisemitic as anti-Communist. Hollywood was chosen for the attack because of the great publicity value the movie capital offered. It was also a great opportunity to get at the Jews of Hollywood."
Freedland was Jewish. His radio show, You Don't Have To Be Jewish, began in 1971, and was gradually extended in length. Initially broadcast by BBC Radio London, and later by LBC, it ran for 24 years.
Ben Helfgott: The Story of One of the Boys (2018) was the first of his books to relate to the Holocaust in some way. Helfgott, a weightlifter who competed for Britain in the Melbourne and Rome Olympics, was a survivor of the Buchenwald and Theresienstadt concentration camps.
