The lost world of screen star Sean Connery

Published on Thursday 17 June 2010 23:17

IT IS fast becoming unrecognisable from the industrial heartland where he was brought up almost 80 years ago.

• Screen legend Sean Connery visited his birthplace in the much-changed Fountainbridge area. Picture: Jane Barlow

Which might explain why Sir Sean Connery admitted feeling "absolutely lost" on his return to Edinburgh's Fountainbridge area yesterday.

The James Bond star returned to unveil a new home for a plaque erected to mark his childhood home – and throw his weight behind plans for a national creative industries hub in the capital.

After being given a guided tour of the regenerated area where he grew up, he declared: "What a transformation."

The 79-year-old, who spent around half an hour posing for pictures and signing autographs at the former Scottish & Newcastle brewery site, was honoured with a plaque erected by the Scottish Film Council in 1997, to mark the Centenary of Cinema, despite the star's reported reluctance to be recognised while he was still alive.

Yesterday he said: "I'm looking forward to the whole thing being finished, when the rest of the brewery comes down."

His visit coincided with the unveiling of detailed plans for a Centre for the Moving Image (CMI), which is being billed as a cinematic nerve centre for entertainment and ideas.

Edinburgh is to be promoted as a international centre of excellence for filmmaking, broadcasting, animation, advertising and developing computer games.

Backers hope it will encourage film-makers to use Edinburgh as a major location, rear a new generation of talent, and help attract more production companies and other creative firms bodies to the city.

Although the CMI will not have a physical home initially, it is hoped a landmark building will be created over the next few years, with part of Scottish & Newcastle's old brewery land in Fountainbridge an early front-runner for the project.

The Lloyds Banking Group announced last week that it was abandoning plans to create a major new office complex on the site. It will be put on the market later this year if and when a new masterplan for the land next to the Union Canal is approved.

A brand new street and hundreds of homes are already being built on the other side of the road, where Sir Sean's plaque has been hung.

After the unveiling, Sir Sean said: "I don't know how many of you have been to the old Empire Theatre. The new cinema there is staggering.

"The sooner we get to work on the next stage the better.

"I am honoured that the Centenary of Cinema plaque recognises my work in the world of film.

"And it is fitting that film, which has played such a major part in my life, will play an important role in the regeneration of Fountainbridge."

The city's long-running Filmhouse cinema and the Edinburgh International Film Festival will both come under the umbrella of the new body, which has been set up as a limited company in the last few months.

A chief executive for the CMI, which will be similar in form to the National Theatre of Scotland, is expected to be unveiled next month, although film-maker Leslie Hills, who was behind award-winning films about artist Andy Goldsworthy and musician Evelyn Glennie, has already been installed as the chair of the new body.

Sir Sean has agreed to put his name to the CMI concept and said it was the next step for the film industry in the city following the "staggering" work to transform the Festival Theatre into a venue for gala movie premieres.

A landmark new building for the Filmhouse, including a 300-seater venue for premieres, had been proposed six years ago for nearby Festival Square, off Lothian Road, but the idea never got off the ground.

Sir Sean added: "For 25 years Edinburgh's Filmhouse has been at the heart of the area in which I grew up.

"As its activities expand, with the creation of the Centre for the Moving Image, it will continue to help change and improve the lives of people living and working here."

It emerged earlier this year that the film festival had won a 250,000 from the Scottish Government to install digital and film projection equipment, sound systems and a temporary screen for one-off galas at the 1,600-capacity Festival Theatre, in Nicolson Street.

Leading industry figures are now training their sights on the CMI project, described in the job description for the chief executive as "a nerve centre of curatorial, educational, inclusive, radical, category-smashing ideas about movies and all forms of the moving image."