He had also immersed himself in Stanislavsky, Shaw, Ibsen and Tolstoy - and while these are writers any half-way serious actor must address, his hunger for intellectual self-improvement took him as far as james joyce and Finnegans Wake. (Didn't he find it impossible? "No, no, I loved it, because it's marvellous language and because the most erudite scholars have the same problems with it.") A photograph taken in 1964 shows Connery standing on a pier, wearing only sky-blue shorts. In his right hand, at head height, he holds an unidentifiable open book. He reads it. This would be just another of those sexy movie-mag pictures in which bodily display is made less outré by a little outdoor action, until you recall all the books, all the serious television plays. If it celebrates the corporeality which struck others from the outset, it also signals his true inferiority.

The mid-80s would see his rebirth as a significant marquee draw. Since then, all his best roles have been booklovers, from William of Baskerville, the monk detective using reason to solve a murder mystery in The Name of the Rose (1986), to Mason in The Rock, with his book-lined cell - Mason, trained by British Intelligence, would "rather be a poet". (In 1966 he had played the frustrated poet Samson Shillitoe in A Fine Madness, a character so obsessed by books and writing that writers' block drives him into mis-anthropic rage.) Then there's one of his best performances, a role moving from the world of thinking into the world of action: in Indianajones and the Last Crusade (1989), he's Indy's dad, Professor Henry jones, a bookish eccentric who has apparently lived his whole life in a library yet can - in a funny, pivotal scene - down an attacking aeroplane, in a stunt inspired by Charlemagne.

This bibliophilia is all the more intriguing when we learn that it has sometimes been emphasised in the scripts - or inserted into them - at Connery's behest. Professor Henry jones was originally introduced on page 70 of the screenplay - yet the way the film is made, his entry comes somewhere around page 20. On The Rock, as executive producer, Connery hired Ian LeFrenais and Dick Clements to beef up his characters sation. "Yeah, I put those things in," he says. "The books counterpoint what you are in the film." Is there a link between the booklover and the rebel? The actor taught himself. He likes other self-made people. Together, these attributes give us the gospel according to Connery: people who have talent should not be held back by social inequalities; and conversely, people should not succeed simply because they are born into privi-lege. Meritocracy, in a word, is the structuring principle behind his best films. (It's also what the Scottish International Educational Trust, a charity he co-founded, is about: in 1971, he donated his salary from Diamonds Are Forever - at $1.25 million the highest then earned - to the charity, which helps bright young Scots without resources to fund their learning.)

So here I am, at home on my sofa - and Sean Connery is here too. I'm interviewing him for a television programme (Scene By Scene, based on the Edinburgh Film Festival's events of the same name). Three cameras will run as we watch key scenes from his movies, with a handset to freeze or slo-mo. I will grill him on what we're watching.

His face, besides being handsome, is very interesting. His eyebrows are unusually arched, like facial quotation marks, adding irony to his expression. His mouth is very wide, the opposite of primness, and is emphasised by his post-Bond moustache. He's always had a vertical line on either side of his mouth, which somehow brack-ets it from his face. He has never really looked boyish, and despite being just 12 and seven years older respectively, has played the fathers of both Harrison Ford and Dustin Hoffman.

We are drinking wine and watching Dr. No. When the moment on the beach arrives, Connery turns to me and says, "Ah, Ursula. I still see her when I'm in Rome. She's still beautiful."