Diane Cilento life and biography

Diane Cilento was an Australian theatre and film actress and author.

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.

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.

Films:

All Hallowe'en (1952)
Wings of Danger (1952)
Moulin Rouge (1952)
Meet Mr. Lucifer (1953)
The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp (1954)
Passing Stranger (1954)
Passage Home (1955)
The Woman for Joe (1955)
The Passionate Stranger (1957)
The Admirable Crichton (1957)
The Truth About Women (1957)
Jet Storm (1959)
The Full Treatment (1960)
The Naked Edge (1961)
I Thank a Fool (1962)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Third Secret (1964)
Rattle of a Simple Man (1964)
Once Upon a Tractor (1965)
The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)
Hombre (1967)
Negatives (1968)
Z.P.G. (1972)
Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973)
The Wicker Man (1973)
Duet for Four (1982)
The Boy Who Had Everything (1984)

Writings:
1968: Manipulator
1972: Hybrid
2006: My Nine Lives

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