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If you’ve only ever experienced Sean Connery as James Bond, you’re missing out. As my colleague Nick Schager pointed out, Connery was “far from a one-trick pony.” In fact, the salt of the earth Scotsman made a concerted effort to venture beyond the Bond franchise, telling the New York Times in 1987, “The reason Burt Lancaster had a longer, more varied career than Kirk Douglas was that he refused to allow himself to be limited.”
Thanks to an adventurous second half career stretch, Connery now belongs in the same category of actors with limitless range as Lancaster. Starting in the ‘70s he starred in films that saw him portraying everyone from a down and out Chicago police officer to a post-apocalyptic assassin. Below are five films you can stream right now that prove Sean Connery could do more than kill bad guys and seduce beautiful women … though he was pretty great at those things too.
‘Zardoz’
It’s the year 2293 and a flying stone face named Zardoz has convinced a savage species called Brutals to kill each other, promising them immortality for doing so. So goes the plot of Sean Connery’s first foray into science fiction. In “Zardoz,” Connery plays Zed, a Brutal warrior who learns the dark truth about the false god Zardoz and life beyond his native wasteland.
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‘The Untouchables’
In “The Untouchables” Sean Connery turns in an Oscar-winning performance as Jim Malone, an Irish-American police officer who goes out on a limb to help Prohibition enforcer Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) bring Al Capone (Robert De Niro) to justice in the corrupt city of Chicago.
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‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’
As Indiana Jones’ stubborn and distant father, Connery added a new, emotional element to the popular “Indiana Jones” franchise. The film provided Connery with an opportunity to embrace his nerdier side. In it, he plays an eccentric professor of Medieval literature who is captured by Nazis while searching for the Holy Grail.
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‘Hunt for Red October’
In this underwater thriller, Sean Connery plays a Russian submarine captain who secretly plans on defecting to America. It’s up to Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) to figure out the captain’s true intentions before the Russians do. While Connery’s Russian accent could use some work, his steely performance adds necessary tension to the film’s high stakes plot.
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‘The Rock’
The Rock was by far the most outrageous action movie Sean Connery ever participated in. Directed by special effects enthusiast Michael Bay, “The Rock” sees Connery playing an Alcatraz escapee who accepts a pardon in return for his assistance in a hostage crisis unfolding in the infamous island prison.
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Abigail Covington
Abigail Covington is a journalist and cultural critic based in Brooklyn, New York but originally from North Carolina, whose work has appeared in Slate, The Nation, Oxford American, and Pitchfork
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