Speaking out to the Sunday Times, she says her feelings were ‘never reciprocated’ by the Scottish actor, causing her to walk out of the two-year relationship
When James Bond was just taking off in worldwide popularity – never mind a British movie series – Lana Wood and Sean Connery were an item. Not an affair, but a relationship, there were even rumours of wedding bells.
Wood, who played Maggie in The Man With the Golden Gun, spoke about her relationship with Connery, now 84, to the Sunday Times. She said: “I found out that he was married and he was kind.” A woman who also played Strawberry Fields, the sultry lover of Mr Bond’s first incarnation, Jaws, in The Spy Who Loved Me, told of her shock that Connery was married to Amanda Byram. She said: “I asked if he was really married. And he was like, ‘Yes, I suppose so’.
“I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe he’s got a thing,’ and then I realised I was just reading into it all wrong.” Her notes from the relationship, revealed by Connery himself, reveal little about what actually happened.
Bond girls … Wood played Maggie in the Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun. Photograph: Allstar/PARAMOUNT
Wood claims that she and Connery had made plans to marry, but that this was called off at the last minute. “I’d spoken to a lawyer, and the timing is all right. Sean said we could meet and talk. So the three of us met. Sean was charming and he was happy. He said, ‘OK, we’ll get married.’”
However, she claimed that this plan was never actually implemented. “We both ended up unhappy. You don’t say, ‘I want to get married, and never get married,’” she said.
A 1996 interview in the magazine People suggests that Wood was just being pragmatic. Asked why she didn’t walk out on the relationship straight away, she said: “I thought: ‘Ah, these guys are just old bullshits. They’ll never love me, because they’re not that passionate and they’re not that passionate about, ‘What have you done today?’”
Byram and Connery, however, have rarely been accused of being unwilling to compromise on romance. She had a second son with her second husband, actor John Le Mesurier, who lived with her until her death in 1978. Their son, Jason, also played Bond on screen in GoldenEye.
Wood has even praised her former partner: “He just did that: he did, ‘X, Y and Z’. He did what he liked,” she said. “Because I am a mature woman who knows how to say no. So, with Sean Connery, I just never was asked back.”