Diane Cilento

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Diane Cilento
photographed in 1954
Born	5 October 1933 (1933-10-05) (age 76) Brisbane, Australia
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1950–present
Spouse(s)	Andrea Volpe (1956–1960) Sean Connery (1962–1973) Anthony Shaffer (1985–2001)

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

Her parents, Sir Raphael Cilento and Lady (Phyllis) 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.

in I Thank a Fool (1962)

She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Tom Jones in 1963 and appeared in The Third Secret the following year, but she allowed her film career to decline following her marriage to actor Sean Connery, the second of her three husbands, to whom she was married from 1962 to 1973. They are the parents of actor Jason Connery. In Connery's James Bond film You Only Live Twice, she doubled for her husband's co-star Mie Hama in a diving scene because Hama was indisposed.

In 1956, she was also nominated for a Tony Award for Best Supporting or Featured Actress (Dramatic) for Helen of Troy in Jean Giraudoux' Tiger at the Gates.

She starred with Paul Newman in the 1967 western film Hombre.

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.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Diane Cilento

• Diane Cilento at the Internet Movie Database
• Interview
• From Stardom to Sufism - interview with Cilento by Rachael Kohn on ABC Radio National May 2006 (MP3/Podcast available)

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