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By Root 362 0

spending most of his spare time on the links. Trying to take an interest in my friend’s all-consuming hobby, I asked him what playing golf on a Moroccan golf course was like and he told me that if you lost your ball in the lake you couldn’t get it back because the crocodiles would have it. I could just see Sean working himself up over losing that ball so I didn’t enquire further . . . I was a bit puzzled as to why he seemed quite so obsessed with the game but after a while I found out why. He had met a beautiful French woman on the course, someone who shared his passion for the game . . . Michelene went on to become his second wife.

As I’ve mentioned before, Sean Connery is the second reason I don’t play golf. Unlike my other golfing friend Sidney Poitier, Sean is not the kindest, gentlest person in the world and my lack of grasp of the sport would not make him sad as it did Sidney, it would just make him angry. In fact, Sean has a terrible temper and when he tried to teach me golf he was so incensed by my performance, he grabbed my club and broke it in two. I have never played golf since and I never will because I do not want to upset two of my best friends.

Sean lives full time in Nassau these days, but we stay in touch regularly. The last time we met we had dinner in London and had a great time reminiscing about the old days, the struggles we’d had, meeting each other in the dole queue . . . We had the same old laughs – he’s a very funny guy – and I reminded him about how tough he’d been on the way up. I thought I was quite tough but I was never anywhere near as tough as Sean was. There was one time in the early sixties, when we were in a London club together and it was amateur night and people were standing up to sing. They weren’t very good, but they were only kids trying their best. There was a group of drunks behind us and they started taking the piss out of the kids and Sean spoke to them a couple of times politely, asking, ‘Will you give the kids a chance? They’re trying to make their way in life.’ Finally Sean had had enough and he got up, said, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ and knocked all four of them out. I didn’t even leave the chair. I tell you, you wouldn’t mess with Sean unless you were very silly.

The relationship that developed between the two Johns, Chris Plummer, Sean and me made for a very special atmosphere on set. This was just as well, because The Man Who Would Be King was a hard picture to make. I had picked up terrible diarrhoea and had to play most of my scenes with half an eye on the location of the portable toilets – not that they offered much of a refuge. I remember rushing over to them once, desperate, and being knocked back by the unbelievable stench and the cloud of flies. The attendant, who was reading the paper, apparently oblivious, had forgotten the disinfectant. I bawled him out for this, but he just shrugged. ‘Come back at lunchtime,’ he suggested. ‘The flies will have moved on to the kitchen by then.’ You couldn’t fault the logic . . .

Chronic diarrhoea and – for me – a mild but frightening typhoid attack from breathing in filthy dust and dried camel dung were unpleasant enough, but neither Sean nor I were ever in real physical danger. The closest Sean got to it was shooting the last scene of the film, where his character is executed by being forced to stand on a rope bridge above a ravine before the ropes are cut and he plunges to his death. The bridge was built specially, but it seemed to both of us to be swaying in the breeze in a rather too convincing manner. I couldn’t manage more than a few steps, but Sean had to go right out into the middle. ‘It’s leaning to the right,’ he said to John Huston. ‘It wasn’t doing that yesterday.’ ‘Ah – that’s because yesterday you didn’t have to walk on it and today you do,’ said John. ‘You’re looking at it from a different point of view.’ I could see Sean weighing this up, but there was no way he wouldn’t accept the challenge and he turned round and walked straight out to the middle of the bridge. His character has to sing as the ropes are cut and