The sincere Scot – Visual biographies of cinema’s greatest stars

Why is the only non-American winner of the AFI’s prestigious Life Achievement Award a Scotsman? Perhaps because Sean Connery’s career, though international in scope and global in appeal, made him a genuine movie star without any pretensions or pandering to fashion. Indisputably, Connery’s incarnation of James Bond catapulted him to stardom and lay the foundation for the most successful franchise in motion picture history. Together Bond and Connery became larger-than-life; but it was Connery, not Bond, whose powerful presence went on to permeate scores of other roles. Connery can be as cool and charismatic as Steve McQueen, as elegant as Cary Grant, or as generous as Frank Sinatra. Said Audrey Hepburn: There are only two great stars in my recollection who have not been changed by massive success: Lassie and Sean Connery.

The Movie Icon series: People talk about Hollywood glamour, about studios that had more stars than there are in heaven, about actors who weren’t actors but were icons. Other people talk about these things, TASCHEN shows you. Movie Icons is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of cinema. These 192-page books are visual biographies of the stars. For each title, series editor Paul Duncan has painstaking selected approximately 150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are. These images are accompanied by concise introductory essays by leading film writers; each book also includes a chronology, a filmography, and a bibliography, and is peppered with apposite quotes from the movies and from life.

Paul Duncan has edited 50 film books for TASCHEN, including the award-winning The Ingmar Bergman Archives, and authored Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick in the Film Series.

Film producer, critic and historian Alain Silver is the author of 20 books on cinematic topics, including The Noir Style, LA Noir, the Film Noir Reader series, and Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra, and Katharine Hepburn for TASCHEN’s Icon series. His audio commentaries on classic film noir DVDs include Call Northside 777 and Double Indemnity. A member of the Directors Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America, he graduated from UCLA with degrees in film production and critical studies.