Diane Cilento

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diane Cilento

photographed in 1954
Born October 5, 1933 (1933-10-05) (age 74)
Brisbane, Australia
Years active 1950 -
Spouse(s) Andrea Volpe 1956-?
Sean Connery 1962-1973
Anthony Shaffer 1985 - 2001

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

Her parents, Sir Raphael Cilento and Phyllis, Lady Cilento, were both distinguished 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 soon secured roles in British films and steadily worked until the end of the decade without making a major impression with film audiences.

with Peter Finch during filming of Passage Home (1955)
with Peter Finch during filming of Passage Home (1955)

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 to 1973. They are the parents of the actor Jason Connery. In Sean's James Bond film You Only Live Twice, Diane doubled for Sean's co-star Mie Hama in a diving scene because Hama was indisposed.

In 1985, Diane Cilento 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.

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: