Lana Wood, famous for playing the Bond girl Tracy Leanne in Thunderball in 1965, has spoken for the first time about her infamous 1964 affair with Sir Sean Connery, the notorious star of the franchise.
The affair ended after three years when he lost his temper.
From 1964 to 1965, Wood (later referred to as Ms Wood) and Connery (later known as Mr Connery) had a three-year relationship that weaves some serious scandal in the 1966 blockbuster, Dr No, on which Connery was originally to play Bond.
“I was an actress and very good-looking and he was a movie star,” she explains. “We became close and moved in together.”
At one point, it was reported that the affair was serious. The pair apparently holidayed together in Italy, in 1965, in a ship that was moored in the Adriatic. Some reports claimed that they dated co-stars, but Wood tells us that wasn’t true. “We were very, very close and we were never in a public position,” she said.
Wood says the break-up took place after Connery became angry with her for going to the scene of a traffic accident in London where he was flying and for persuading her to throw a henchman off a plane. She was in the business.
Lana Wood in Thunderball.
Lana Wood and Sean Connery in Thunderball
Connery, who was a politician at the time, couldn’t understand why this beached henchman had not been pushed.
“It was very sad and sad for me because I was loved by Sean, and he was really my lover,” she says. “He knew that I loved him and we shared very fond feelings.
“When it ended, it was very, very sad for me. I was alone at the time. I was 16 years old, and it made me very, very sad. I felt that we’d done a wonderful job.”
She recalls that she tried to change the circumstances around their relationship, contacting Connery’s family to try to clear the air.
“When the relationship ended, I tried everything I could to make it right,” she says. “I went through all of his sisters and uncles. I was really trying to make things right and he obviously wasn’t OK with that. That was the end of the matter.
“I couldn’t do anything to make things right because he was too old, and I knew he didn’t want to do anything to make it right. That was why it ended.”
Wood, who was a part of the group The Pinettes – a band from Canada which also contains The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne – was named a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.
Speaking about the organisation’s members, she says: “You have The Beatles, a lot of jazz musicians, many people who’ve played on the Rolling Stones’, people who have been great friends of The Rolling Stones, and a lot of the people who started the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin.”
On Radio Times, Wood explains that she also went on to have a relationship with an astronaut who worked for Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong.
“I think he was very handsome,” she says. “And very proper. I know we had to have a sexual relationship because if we were kept apart, then he would have stayed a door bumper.”