Diane Cilento

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diane Cilento (born October 5, 1933 in Brisbane, Australia), is a theater and film actress.

Her parents, Sir Raphael Cilento and Phyllis, Lady Cilento, were both highly respected medical practitioners. At a young age she decided to follow a career as an actress, and moved to the United Kingdom in the early 1950s. She quickly secured work in British films, and steadily worked until the end of the decade, without making a major impression with film audiences.

She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Tom Jones (1963), but allowed her film career to decline following her marriage to actor Sean Connery. Connery was the second of Cilento's three husbands, and they were married from 1962 until their divorce in 1973. They are the parents of the actor Jason Connery. In Sean's James Bond film You Only Live Twice, Diane also doubled for Sean's co-star Mie Hama in a diving scene because Hama was ill.

In 1985 she married Anthony Shaffer, a playwright, who wrote the script of The Wicker Man, a film in which she had appeared in 1973. During the 1970s she had studied under the British mystic and spiritual teacher John G. Bennett.

Cilento continued working as an actress, both in films and in television, and in the 1980s settled in Mossman, north of Cairns, Queensland, where she built her own outdoor theater — named "Karnak" — in the rainforest. The venture allows her to participate in experimental drama.

In 2006 she released her autobiography: My Nine Lives.