Jason Connery is, as the saying goes, his father's son, his father being a guy named Sean. But come Monday night he'll be his father's creator, or something like that.
Is there a psychiatrist in the house?"I suppose Freud would have a field day with this one," murmured young Connery politely, with no visible sign that he's probably already addressed this issue no more than, say, 30,000 times.
You'll remember that Sean Connery played James Bond, the dashing 007, in seven movies from "Dr. No" to "Never Say Never Again." Other actors followed, but Connery did it for keeps, the way he does everything.
Monday at 6 p.m. on the TNT cable channel, his son, Jason, has the title role in The Secret Life of Ian Fleming, a frolic about the man who created Bond and gave him life in 14 novels. The movie hangs fiction over the facts of Fleming's life the way the tent hangs over tent poles. It stops after World War II, as Fleming walks away to a new start in life, mumbling something about writing a book, which, of course, turns out to be his first Bond novel, "Casino Royale."
Fleming actually had no secret life, or nothing to base a movie on. He liked to hint otherwise later, when Bondmania was in full cry, but his stints with Reuters news service and British Naval Intelligence were not bottled in Bond. The movie attributes to Fleming a lot of derring-do he never did, planting hints about Bond's origins and characteristics every so often as a running joke.
Co-starring David Warner, Patricia Hodge and Kristin Scott Thomas, "The Secret Life of Ian Fleming" will be repeated at 10 p.m. Monday, plus six more times during the week.
Jason Connery knows what you're thinking. He's heard it all before ... something about a young actor hitching a ride on Daddy's coattails. In Los Angeles recently to promote the movie, to be released in Europe as a feature film, Connery admitted that he can't blame people for thinking it. The 27-year-old actor who spent all of his adult life carefully avoiding his father's shadow has now jumped smack in the middle of it.
If his career of nine years taught him anything, it's that comparisons between father and son are inevitable and "it doesn't matter if I'm playing a Chinese hairdresser." If that's true, he reasoned, then "let's REALLY give them something to compare."
Father and son do have one role in common - Robin Hood. Sean was Robin past his prime, leading a medieval over-the-hill gang in the 1976 film "Robin and Marian." Jason played the Sherwood Forest bandit whose prime was yet to come in "Robin Hood," an English series brought to this country by Showtime in the mid-'80s. Robin and the merry men resembled a motorcycle gang with good intentions.
That was an important break for the younger Connery. The series was seen globally and "made people more aware of me around the world, rather than just Britain and Europe. It was also the first time I'd ever been exposed to the media. It was daunting, but very exciting, too."
Jason is only four years younger than Sean was when he played Bond in "Dr. No," but seems much younger. He's shorter and slighter than his father and there's still a strong boyish streak in him.
Connery never met Fleming, who was 58 when he died at Golden Eye, his Jamaican estate, in 1964. Ironically, he missed most of his father's years in Bondage, too.
"`Diamonds Are Forever,' the last of my father's Bonds apart from `Never Say Never Again,' was finished in 1971, when I was only nine," he explained. "I was just too young to be aware of all the rest of it. Besides, my father is a very level-headed, private person. At home it was just a case of him being my father."
Actually he wasn't particularly close to his father until he became a fellow working actor. Connery's parents - his mother is actress Diane Cilento ("Tom Jones") - divorced when he was 10. His father moved to Spain and Jason lived with his mother on a farm in Wiltshire. Later, she moved to Australia and he went to boarding school in England.
"Under those circumstances, you learn to be independent fairly quickly," he said. "He (his father) made it clear that he wanted to give me the best possible start in life, but after that I was on my own."
Connery co-starred with his mother six years ago in an Australian film, "The Boy Who Had Everything," and has worked consistently in Europe in a variety of films, with forays into the United States for a miniseries, "The First Olympics: Athens 1896," and a feature film, "The Lords of Discipline."
Through it all, he said his father never offered him much specific advice.
"All he said was something like, `If you really want to act, then you will. And if you don't, then you'll soon find out that you don't."'
There have been many offers over the years for father and son to work together, but for now Connery is dubious.
"Numerous offers, sure, but really not very good ones," he said. "It would be nice, I suppose, but, well, I just don't know."
Incidentally, what about that poll in People magazine that named the senior Connery "the sexiest man alive"?
"I'll tell you," replied Jason, "I just hope it runs in the family."