Sean blasts Hollywood idiots

Angry: Sir Sean Connery

10 April 2012

He is an undisputed screen icon, the star of 77 films. For many he remains the definitive James Bond.

But while Sir Sean Connery can still command £10million a movie, he says it would take a 'Mafia-like offer' to persuade him to make another.

In an interview with a New Zealand newspaper, the actor blames Hollywood's studio bosses for his decision.

He said: 'I'm fed up with the idiots . . . the ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who green-light the movies.

'I don't say they're all idiots. I'm just saying there's a lot of them that are very good at it [being idiots].

'It would almost need a Mafia-like offer I couldn't refuse to do another movie.'

Sir Sean was the first actor to earn $1million a film, for Diamonds Are Forever.

Between 1990 and 1999, he made 13 films, including The Hunt for Red October and Entrapment, a thriller alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Steven Spielberg has said he is one of 'only seven genuine movie stars in the world' - although a self- deprecating Connery has said that was only because he demands so much money.

It is two years since he was last on the big screen, when he was paid £10million to play adventurer Allan Quatermain in The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.

This year he was paid a rumoured $1million (£570,000) just to do the voiceover for a new computer game based on his hit From Russia With Love.

Sir Sean has spent the past two years working on an autobiography. He was persuaded to produce a book after being given a £1million advance from HarperCollins, but he pulled out of the deal when writer Hunter Davies took over the project, and the actor realised he wanted to write a warts-and-all account.

It was claimed that Mr Davies wanted to pursue allegations that the star abused his first wife, actress Diane Cilento, and had a string of affairs during his 50-year career.

Rather than discuss these matters, the 74-year-old star returned his cheque to the publisher.

Sir Sean told the New Zealand Herald it cost him a 'stonking amount of money' to pull out of the deal because the project was already underway. The actor has had his fair share of controversy in the past.

He caused an uproar in 1987 when he said in an interview with Barbara Walters that it was OK to hit a woman if she deserved it or needed it to keep her in line.

He had said similar things in a November 1965 interview with Playboy magazine.

Sir Sean said: 'I realised I was going to be spending the best part of my life, and probably the rest of my life, trying to correct these inaccuracies, and I can't be bothered.'

He also told the daily newspaper he did not regard his childhood as extraordinarily deprived.

Born in Edinburgh, he had a milk round at nine.

He later became a coffin-polisher by day and a body-builder by night before breaking into films in 1955.

He said: 'It's like people say, "Oh, it must have been terrible living in a tenement with no hot water", and all that stuff.

'But, as a child, I don't think you know that, because what do you compare it with?

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