Oh, happy birthday Sean. You were always sexy, moreso after you got rid of the rug. These were wonderful films, and I still loved these Bond series best of all of them.

macho macho man! Happy Birthday!

Sean Connery will always be the only James Bond to me.

Terrific!! Sean Connery fit the role to perfection. What a great character….even those few short scenes, so alluring and magnetic.

I never was a big fan of the James Bond films, but I fell in love with Sean Connery after watching a film that starred him as Robin Hood and Audrey Hepburn as Marian. I can’t remember the name of the film, but it was so romantic. Also, he didn’t wear that awful rug on his head.

For a 78 year old, he’s still macho. Happy birthday, Sean C. 007. I also like you in The Highlander.

Ah yes…such class and distinction. He’s in a league all his own. Happy birthday! :)

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/jun/25/1 in the Guardian, also on Connery’s birthday, in 2000: In May, Scottish newspapers carried some quotes from Connery’s first wife, Diane Cliento, contained in a forthcoming biography of the star by Geoffrey Wansell. In the book, she alleges that Connery badly beat her in a Spanish hotel room in 1965. Connery is considering whether to sue, but no action has been taken so far. Yet there has never been any denial of his public quotes about the legitimacy of hitting women, which Connery has sprinkled through his press record over the last 35 years. ‘To slap a woman is not the cruellest thing you can do to her,’ he said in a Vanity Fair interview in 1993. So how come WOWOWOW is celebrating HIS birthday? Surely it would be better to let this man’s birthday’s pass unnoticed?

Here’s some more from the same article: Connery’s deepest connotations are, like it or not, the cold and steely sexisms of the Bond films. Watch them again, as this new century picks up speed, and you’ll want to push the cultural accelerator to the floor (unless, that is, you’re still a fully paid-up Loaded lad). Did men really loathe women so much then? Has there even been a more humped-and-dumped, silenced-and-ignored, slapped-and-strangled sequence of screen females than the Bond girls? It would be wrong to say that the kind of anti-modern masculinity Connery represents has no market any more. There’s a lot of anxious dreaming out there, especially among the male info-class - enough for Hollywood to dig down deep into its bag for some of its oldest tricks. For example, Russell Crowe has everything necessary to assume full Conneryhood. The brick-shithouse physical presence. The roughneck post-colonial identity (Scotland or Australia: pick your global backwater). The biographical hints of bad temper and real violence: brawling outside hometown bars, intimidating wussy co-stars on set. And it’s impossible to watch Gladiator without imagining the young, ex-body builder Connery slicing his way through all those corpses. But like those not-quite-real crowds in that not-quite-real coliseum, fighting those not-too-convincing lions and tigers, there’s something not-at-all-believable about this vision of masculinity - heroically violent, passionately patriarchal - making any kind of a comeback. This is gender tourism, for women as well as men: a virtual-reality experience, where it all seems charged and powerful - until you take the Roman helmet off. You could almost call the experience, with a small c, a kind of connery. Take it as a new word - referring to a fake and bogus machismo, a compensatory sexist pleasure, for modern people too wise and weathered to take it seriously. And delivered with a dark, testosteronal growl that, to these faintly regretful ears, just isn’t needed any more. Goodbye, Sir Sean (enjoy the gong). But we’re shaken and stirred no more.

I’m of a tough Irish family where my father was one of five boys. O’Keefe men are physically strong and fearless - most were lifelong soldiers or police officers. You may not like the mold from which they are struck, but they were our warriors when we needed them and their masculinity was as real as their lust for life. Our Scottish cousins share this heritage, Sean among them. May the road rise to meet him.