Diane Cilento

Elizabeth Diane Cilento was born on 2 April 1932 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the fifth of six children of Phyllis (née McGlew) and Raphael Cilento, both medical practitioners. Four of her siblings also pursued careers in medicine, while her sister Margaret became an artist. Her paternal great-grandfather, Salvatore Cilento, had emigrated from Naples, Italy, in 1855. After being expelled from school in Australia, Cilento continued her education in New York while living with her father. She subsequently won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and relocated to Britain in the early 1950s.

Following her graduation from RADA, Cilento secured stage work almost immediately and signed a five-year contract with producer Alexander Korda. Her first leading film role came in the British production Passage Home (1955), opposite fellow Australian Peter Finch, and she appeared the same year in The Woman for Joe, playing a Hungarian character. She worked steadily in British films through the end of the decade.

Cilento's Broadway career spanned from 1955 to 1960, during which she appeared in three productions: Tiger at the Gates, The Good Soup, and Heartbreak House. Her performance as Helen of Troy in Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates earned her both a Theatre World Award in 1956 and a Tony Award nomination for Best Supporting or Featured Actress in a Dramatic production.

Her film work brought her international recognition in the 1960s and beyond. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Tom Jones (1963) and appeared in The Third Secret the following year. Cilento starred alongside Charlton Heston in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and with Paul Newman in the western Hombre (1967). She also took a supporting role in The Wicker Man (1973), a production through which she met playwright Anthony Shaffer.

Cilento was also a published author. She wrote the novel The Manipulator in 1967, followed by Hybrid in 1970, and published her autobiography, My Nine Lives, through Penguin Books in 2007. She also wrote the film The Last Tango with Rudolph Valentino, set in Sydney in 1975, about a woman who maintains a shrine devoted to Valentino.

In the 1980s, Cilento settled in Mossman, north of Cairns, where she constructed an outdoor theatre called Karnak in the tropical rainforest, using it as a venue for experimental drama. In 2001, she received the Centenary Medal for distinguished service to the arts, with particular recognition for her contributions to theatre.

Cilento married Andrea Volpe, an Italian, in 1955, and the couple had a daughter, Giovanna, born in 1957; they divorced in 1962. Later that year she married actor Sean Connery, with whom she had a son, Jason, born in 1963. The couple separated in 1971 and divorced in 1973. In 1985, Cilento married Anthony Shaffer, and they remained together until his death in 2001. Cilento died of cancer at Cairns Base Hospital on 6 October 2011.