CONNERY TO RELEASE 'SCOTS--THEMED AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Story from The Journal - Edinbugh's student newspaper.

Following a celebrated acting career spanning some 50 years, Sir Sean Connery is set to release his autobiography.The legendary 77-year-old film veteran has tempted fans over the past five years with talk of the release of his memoires; however, the book, entitled Being a Scot, has recently been completed and is due to be published this autumn. The 300-page book, co-written by Conner’s lifelong friend, filmmaker Murray Grigor, combines an account of Connery’s life with the actor's personal take on the history and culture of Scotland and will display over 400 photographs from his collection.

Publishing briefs suggest that Being a Scot will include various details of the James Bond star’s life and career, from being born into a poor working-class family in Edinburgh’s Fountainbridge to learning how to play golf with Goldfinger co-star Gert Frobe and weekending with fellow Scottish entertainer Billy Connolly. This is the third time Connery has attempted to publish an autobiography. In 2003 he canceled an agreement with Scottish writer Meg Henderson, and two years later pulled out of a deal with renowned biographer Hunter Davies, famous for penning the memoirs of celebrities including The Beatles and Paul Gascoigne, in 2005.

Indeed, the difficulties which have plagued previous attempts struck mid-way through the completion of Being a Scot when Connery and Grigor were reported to have clashed with publisher Jamie Bying, of Scottish publication company Cannongate, after work on early chapters took several months.

The completed version will now be released by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, part of the Orion Publishing Group.The book offers an account of Connery’s impoverished childhood in Edinburgh, which he spent earning money as a milk delivery boy. Later, as a young man, Connery worked as a doorman at the Oddfellows Hall, as it was then known, on a salary of two pounds an hour.

The Orion Publishing Group’s website reveals just how much of an emphasis Connery places on Scottish national identity in the book, analysing what it is to be Scottish on a number of different levels. It said: “Being a Scot is a vivid and highly personal portrait of Scotland and its achievements, which is self-revelatory whilst full of Sir Sean's desire to shine light upon Scottish success and heroic failure. “His personal quest with his friend and co-writer Murray Grigor has been to seek answers to some perplexing questions. How did Scots come to devise so many new sports and games, or raise others to new heights? What gave fire to the Gothic tendency in Scottish literature? Why have so many creatively inventive and influential architects been Scots? Where did Scotland's unreal blend of psychotic humour originate? And what about the national tradition of self-deprecation sometimes called the Scottish cringe?

"Sean Connery offers a correction to misconceptions that many believe are part of the historical record whilst revealing as never before his own vibrant personal history.”Grigor claims that the book “really reflects the life and film achievements of this extraordinary man. It reflects topics of Scottish culture, high and low.” Weidenfeld and Nicolson publisher Alan Samson said: “I am very excited about this book. There’s a book called England Made Me; this is how Scotland made me.”Adding, "We can't pretend it's something it isn't. It is not a book of titillating revelations about the women in his life, nor will it be sold that way."

Extract from Being a Scot:

"My first big break came when I was five years old. It's taken me more than seventy years to realise that. You see, at five I first learnt to read. It's that simple and it's that profound. I left school at thirteen. I didn't have a formal education... It has been a long return journey from my two-room Fountainbridge home in the smoky industrial end of Edinburgh opposite the McCowans' toffee factory. There was no bathroom with a communal toilet outside. For years we had only gas lighting. Sometimes the light in the shared stairway would be out after some desperado had broken the mantle to bubble gas through milk for kicks."