What Is Sean Connery’s Net Worth?
Sean Connery didn’t make the most James Bond movies, the late Roger Moore did. Connery technically wasn’t even the first person to play James Bond. All the same, he will forever be identified as the iconic secret agent, even though his career apart from Bond is quite distinguished.
The sum total of Connery’s storied career has given him a net worth of nine figures, and since 2006, he has enjoyed a well-deserved retirement even as his most famous character celebrates 58 years on movie screens.
The name is Connery, Sean Connery
Sean Connery originally appeared as James Bond in 1962’s Dr. No. Although that was the first feature-length James Bond movie, Connery was not the first man to play Bond.
Trivia mavens like to point out there was a TV movie made of Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel, in 1954, with Bond played by Barry Nelson. However, Connery was also technically not the first Bond in Dr. No. In the gun-barrel title sequence of that movie, Bond was played not by Connery, but by stuntman Bob Simmons.
Dr. No was not Connery’s first film. Retrospective clip packages like to point out that one of Connery’s early credits was in the Disney movie Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
No one would dispute that Bond made him famous, and Connery went on to play the part in five more official Bond movies: From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and Diamonds are Forever. He famously took a break from the franchise, sitting out 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with Bond played by George Lazenby.
For years, Connery insisted he would never return to the role of Bond, although he did it in the knowingly titled Never Say Never Again. However, that was not made by the same production company that made most of the Bond movies. A producer named Kevin McClory held the rights to the story Thunderball, and Never Say Never Again was a remake of that film.
Sean Connery is more than 007
James Bond cast a very long shadow, much to Connery’s chagrin. However, he was making a name for himself in non-Bond movies while the Bond series was still ongoing. The same year that Goldfinger came out, 1964, Connery also starred in Marnie, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most controversial films.
After Connery gave up Bond the first time, his notable credits in the 1970’s included Murder on the Orient Express by Sidney Lumet, John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King and Robin and Marian, where he played Robin Hood opposite Audrey Hepburn.
One of his crowning moments came when he won an Oscar for 1987’s The Untouchables, where he played a streetwise cop helping Kevin Costner catch Al Capone.
One of Connery’s most famous latter-day roles was playing Indiana Jones’ father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and that was notable because the Indiana Jones series grew out of Steven Spielberg’s desire to direct something akin to a Bond movie. Although Henry Jones isn’t just an older version of Bond, the character trades on the audience’s memories of Connery as Bond.
Sean Connery relaxes at the dawn of his 90s
Connery worked steadily on through to the early 2000s, with his final feature film being The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in 2003. He officially announced his retirement when he accepted the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 2006.
The fourth Indiana Jones movie could not lure him back to the movies, with Connery saying at the time that “retirement is just too damned fun.”
According to the site The Richest, Connery has amassed a net worth of $120 million. That figure could have been even higher had he accepted the role of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings movies, but retirement trumped Peter Jackson, just as it trumped Steven Spielberg.
Now, with Connery set to turn 90 this year, and with the James Bond franchise reaching 58 years with No Time to Die, Connery can safely say never again, but the association will always remain with his iconic image of the secret agent.
