From indie films to Indy’s dad

Actor Sean Connery will launch his autobiography, “Being a Scot,” in August at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Festival director Catherine Lockerbie told Canada’s CBC that “this book has gone through more permutations than James Bond has had shaken-not-stirred martinis: different co-writers, different publishers.” The memoir, she continued, will include Connery’s thoughts on “many aspects of Scottish culture and life, including sport, architecture and, of course, the gothic tendency in Scots literature.”

Although Connery is best remembered as super-spy James Bond, he’s also been bookish on film. Notably, in “The Name of the Rose,” Connery played a literate monk who tries to save a library from burning.

But Connery has had a penchant for literary adaptations for his entire career. In 1961, he was in TV versions of “Macbeth” and “Anna Karenina.” Later Connery projects such as “The Hunt for Red October” and “Murder on the Orient Express” were all adapted from books; “The Hill” and “The Offence,” from plays; “The Man Who Would Be King” from a Rudyard Kipling story; and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” from a comic book. That’s around 80% of his body of work, a hyper-literary run.

And James Bond, despite his filmic success, started out the hero of the novels by Ian Fleming.

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-- Carolyn Kellogg