Australian actor Diane Cilento, ex-wife of Sean Connery, dies

Oct 7, 2011, 6:11 GMT

Sydney - Australian film actor Diane Cilento, nominated for a Tony Award for her role in Tiger at the Gates in 1956 and an Academy Award in the film Tom Jones in 1957, has died at the age of 79.

Her death late Thursday was announced Friday by her family.

She also earned fame as the wife of Sean Connery, who at the time of their 11-year marriage was playing James Bond. She later married playwright Anthony Shaffer, her third husband.

Cilento acted in 30 feature films, wrote two novels and a well-received autobiography.

A graduate of London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the Queensland native established her career in London and New York, working in the theatre as a writer, director and instructor as well as an actor.

Cilento starred with Charlton Heston in the 1965 classic The Agony and the Ecstasy and with Paul Newman in the 1967 cowboy film Hombre.

Promoting her 2006 biography, My Nine Lives, she said she wanted to be known for more than just having been Mrs Connery.

'They want to know what it's like being Mrs James Bond, but I've had a much more complicated and interesting life than just that,' she told the national broadcaster ABC.

She blamed Connery's landing of the James Bond role for the failure of their marriage.

'These things are so sudden,' she said. 'One minute you're a struggling actor fighting to get parts as truck drivers and boxers and things and the next you're the most smooth operator in the Western world. It was a huge contrast.'

In My Nine Lives, she detailed how Connery tried to prevent her working.

'I really wasn't prepared to dwindle into a wife,' she said.