The young Sean Connery was known as a tough guy both on and behind the white canvas.

Stories about how he alone defeated six hooligans on the street as a teenager, or how during a filming he twisted the gun out of the hand of a mafioso who was jealous that the beautiful young man was playing against his girlfriend, have contributed to the myth. 

Connery, the bodybuilder from Edinburgh who tattooed the words "Scotland forever" on his arm, came to represent the masculinity of the old school: well-dressed but with a hairy chest, always with a slanted eyebrow and a dry joke under the martini glass. 

James Bond was his name, too.

The foremost Bond interpreter

It is said that Bond director Terence Young took the unpolished working class boy under his wings and taught him to behave in the salons with the degree of sophistication that would make the Bond character so iconic.

For many years he was the epitome of male coolness.

Without Sean Connery's Bond no Don Draper. 

Sean Connery was synonymous with the secret agent throughout the '60s.

Even today, he is often voted the best Bond interpreter. 

But Connery did not want to play Bond forever - he feared becoming a prisoner of his own creation.

After a long period of dissatisfaction with the attention surrounding the role, he declined the film On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but still allowed himself to be lured back to Diamonds are forever (1971). 

Whether he wanted to or not, Sean Connery became one of those actors who is a little difficult to separate from the character.

Still, he devoted most of his career to other films.

Refused Gandalf

Characteristic of his acting was his magnetism and a dry humor and a Scottish accent that invited many parodies over the years.

Sean Connery won an Oscar for his role as the hard cop Jimmy Malone in The Untouchables (1987) and did blockbuster roles in Hollywood in the 90's in films such as The Hunt for Red October (1990) and The Rock (1996). 

He had the ability to take aging with him in his roles and leaves behind a career that spans five decades.

Sean Connery retired from acting in the mid-00s, shortly after refusing to play the role of Gandalf in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy - a magician interpretation the world probably wanted to see. 

At his death, it's still James Bond everyone's talking about.

New view of Bond

And of course, the tuxedo-clad agent is a style icon with both finesse and raw strength whose power has not diminished (the film series has drawn in over sixteen billion dollars so far).

But with modern glasses, it is still difficult to break free from the violence against women and the misogyny that the charming agent has offered over the years, a pattern that has not gone unnoticed.

Later editions of James Bond are updated, slightly more polished than Sean Connery's. 

Yet it is his version the world will remember as the archetypal James Bond.

Few have become so associated with the masculine ideal of their time.