Sexy? It's all in the hand-shake

The growly Scots accent had added to Sean Connery's reputation as being a little grumpy. Picture / Dean Purcell

Sir Sean Connery has wandered into the hotel lobby looking like one of those rich blokes you see in hotel lobbies. Which is to say, he doesn't look rich. Or famous. Whatever famous looks like.

Being famous means if you ask at a hotel reception desk for Sean Connery, you throw the place into a flap. "There is no person of that name staying here." I tell him later that I'd blown his cover and that I should have asked for Jimmy Bond. He is far too famous to have to put up with such lame jokes but he says, gamely, and hardly rudely at all, "Well, I don't know if you would have found me. You're not very skilful."

Famous people are often dressed down and he is in a sweatshirt with the name of a golf club on it, a cashmere jumper slung over his shoulders. He's a sex symbol, you know, and I'm interested in this because I don't think I've seen one so close up before.

I'd always thought talk about a sex symbol at 74 a bit strange. So I made sure to have a thorough look at him. He looks pretty good for his age, that's for sure. But sexy? I wasn't certain about this until I shook his hand. (And blokes really shouldn't read this bit.) I'm embarrassed to admit that shaking hands with Connery is like taking a big slug of a very good single malt: smooth as silk, punchy as peat and it travels slowly down until it hits you in the knees. God knows how he does it.

Ahem. That's quite enough of that. You'd think he'd have had quite enough of it, too. When he's having his picture taken, he says: "Do you want me to look intelligent?" "No, no," I say, "we want you to look sexy, of course."

"Too late," he says, with that sexy crinkly thing he does with his eyes, "you're too late for that."

He has long been much amused by his inclusion on Sexiest Men Alive lists. "Oh, well, tsk, you know, when the guy called me about that from, I can't remember, it was People magazine or something ... and said, 'You've been voted the sexiest man alive', I remember that I said, 'Well, terrific'. And the word alive stuck in my mind and I said, 'Well, there can't be that many sexy ones dead'." He's told that one before, and the People mag award was in 1989 but he still makes various lists and, no, of course, while "they take it very seriously, you can't. Not at all." His wife thinks it's funny, too, "and I'm sure she doesn't agree with it".

He has that growly Scots accent which has, no doubt, added to his reputation for being a bit of a grumpy bugger. He almost lived up to that, although I think anyone's entitled to be a grumpy old bugger when they're "well, near enough 75". And, actually, he is less grumpy than slightly detached from the idea of being Sean Connery and having to talk about being Sean Connery.

He deals with this by telling amazingly discursive stories on any topic. I ask him whether we should talk about the rugby, or avoid talking about the rugby. To which he replies, "Oh, listen, I have no problems with talking about the rugby ... ". And ends up with a yarn about how he was part of a group which was supposed to be dropped off at one radio station, was taken to another, and "we walked in the door and went upstairs and nobody stopped us and ... a chap suddenly said, 'How did you get in here?' and, 'Where's security?', as though it was our fault. Well, apparently he read the riot act."

He is amused by this, and so would anybody be - except possibly the unidentified "chap". It's not every day James Bond breaches security at a radio station in Auckland.

He has never been shy about making his opinions known and he spends quite a bit of time talking about being "fed up with the idiots ... the ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who greenlight the movies". There are not, I say, too many actors who get away with calling the bigwigs in Hollywood idiots. At this, he pauses, and fixes me with a stern look. Then he says, "I don't say they're all idiots. I'm just saying there's a lot of them that are very good at it."

He is very good at being a movie star and Steven Spielberg has said, "There are only seven genuine movie stars in the world today, and Sean is one of them". I wondered what he thought Spielberg meant by genuine. Also, of course, I was sucking up. He's said he'll give me 20 minutes. We get 45 minutes, which he notes, and I say, "I know. I just kept talking." And he says, mock growling, "And don't think I didn't notice". The Spielberg quote he swats away by equating status with his asking fee: "Well, that's only because of your price." And what, I ask, is his current price? "Well, ha, that's nobody's business but mine."

It would, he says, "Almost need a Mafia-like offer I couldn't refuse" to do another movie.

He turned down Gandalf in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. "Yeah, well, I never understood it. I read the book. I read the script. I saw the movie. I still don't understand it." He says he is very impressed with both Jackson - "he obviously understands nuts and bolts", and so is obviously not one of the idiots - and the movie. "Whereas I would be interested in doing something that I didn't fully understand, but not for 18 months."

He is in the country as part of the International Advisory Board of Independent News and Media, Tony O'Reilly's company, which indirectly owns me. So I assume Connery has had his arm twisted to do this interview. When I put this to him, he gives me one of those pure Bond looks which indicate our hero is about to, charmingly, blow you away. I find this inordinately thrilling.

He was supposed to have been writing his memoirs. "I said I never would and then I thought about it and I said 'I'm going to do it' and then I started." Also, I say, he was offered a stonking amount to do it, rumoured to be a seven-figure sum. "Yeah," he says, "and it cost me a stonking amount of money not to do it - because I'd already put the wheels in motion."

And now he's put them out of motion because, he says, it turned out there had been 10 books written about him and the guy (ghostwriter Hunter Davies) "started to run with the ball with all this stuff".

Connery says he "realised I was going to be spending the best part of my life, and probably the rest of my life, trying to correct these inaccuracies, and I can't be bothered". Davies is known for his grumps-and-all accounts, so you can read what you will into that.

Connery spoke to the Guardian last year when he was still planning to write the thing and the resulting piece described him as being "mildly perplexed" at the way his life had turned out. He is, in turn, mildly perplexed by any such observation. "Perplexed?" he says. "A word I don't think I would use. Anyway, who told them I was perplexed?" I say I think it was an observation and he furrows his brow and says, "Yeah, well, I don't know where they get that".

What was meant by this, I think, was that he has had a strange sort of life: from tenement kid doing a milk round at 9, to coffin polisher to body builder to James Bond to celebrity. A life you might well look back on with some degree of amazement - if you were writing your memoir, but he's not, so perhaps he isn't much interested. He says, "Well, I don't know if you'd call it strange. It's like people say, 'Oh, it must have been terrible living in a tenement with no hot water' and all that stuff. But, as a child, I don't think you know that because what do you compare it with? And then growing up from the time of 9, there was the war, then all that working. I've worked since I was nine. I left school at 13. I was in the Navy at 16 1/2 so, yes, it's been kind of eventful, but with no qualifications."

Oh, I don't know. He's picked up a few along the way. Such as the ability, at his age, of making women (and not a few men) go quite silly at the idea that I was going to meet him.

Funny that. After all, it's only Sean Connery. No, really. Of course I've washed my hand.