What was the real reason that Sean Connery chose to enjoy his golden years in retirement?
What final message did Betty White deliver to her fans?
Keep watching for those memorable stories and more from celebrities who made it to 90
and beyond.
In rock 'n' roller Chuck Berry's autobiography, he recalled hearing himself on the radio for
the first time in 1955.
As he put it,
"I picked ['Maybellene'] up while driving home from Dad's house in the station wagon.
There is no way to explain how you feel when you first hear your first recording for the
first time in your first new car."
"And the Lord had answered my blessings."
He couldn't have imagined the success he would go on to have.
But it wasn't all good times, as Berry went to jail twice for transporting women across
state lines for "immoral purposes."
The time behind bars dimmed the light inside of him.
As Carl Perkins, a musician who toured with Berry, recalled,
"Never saw a man so changed.
[...] He was cold, real distant and bitter.
It wasn't just jail, it was those years of one-nighters, grinding it out like that can
kill a man, but I figure it was mostly jail."
On his 90th birthday, exactly five months before he died, Berry announced that he'd
be releasing one last record, his first in 38 years, and then truly retire.
He managed to finish the album, though he didn't live to see it released that June,
as he died on March 18, 2017 of natural causes.
Lena Horne was a superbly talented singer and actor who was unfortunately continually
denied opportunities simply because of her race.
As she told an interviewer in 1990,
"The whole thing that made me a star was the war.
Of course the Black guys couldn't put Betty Grable's picture in their footlockers.
But they could put mine."
Over the course of her career, Horne still spoke out about racism and was heavily involved
in the civil rights movement.
She was eventually able to find peace with how her race had defined her life in so many
ways due to bigotry.
When she turned 80, she told an interviewer,
"My identity is very clear to me now.
I am a Black woman.
I'm free.
I no longer have to be a 'credit.'
I don't have to be a symbol to anybody; I don't have to be a first to anybody.
I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become.
I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."
Horne died on May 9, 2010 of congestive heart failure at the age of 92.
Cicely Tyson risked a lot to follow her dream of being a performer.
As she told NPR in 2021,
"My mother did not want me to be an actress and she said I could not live in her house
and do that.
But in my gut, I knew there was something there that I was put here to do.
And she didn't speak to me for a couple of years."
Considering that she ultimately racked up three Emmys, a Tony, and an honorary Oscar
over the course of her career, it's safe to say her decision was worth it.
As Vanessa Williams declared in a 2013 interview,
"She's our Meryl Streep.
She was the person you wanted to be like in terms of an actress, in terms of the roles
she got and how serious she took her craft.
She still is."
That same year, when Tyson was in her late 80s, she returned to Broadway, and her performance
in The Trip to Bountiful won her a Tony.
During her acceptance speech, she declared,
"It's been 30 years since I stood onstage; I really didn't think it would happen again
in my lifetime, and I was pretty comfortable with that.
Except that I had this burning desire to do just one more.
'One more great role,' I said.
I didn't want to be greedy.
I just wanted one more."
"Where's my Trip to Bountiful?"
Tyson passed away on January 28, 2021 at the age of 96.
Ruby Dee wasn't afraid to take on the hardest acting roles around.
And while she faced racial discrimination, she didn't let that stop her from playing
parts that were traditionally played by white women.
In 1971, she won an Obie Award, which is basically the Off-Broadway version of the Tonys.
Reviewers were effusive, with The New York Times declaring,
"Ruby Dee [...] is giving the finest performance I have ever seen.
It is complete — it has the quickness of life about it.
Never for a moment do you think she is acting."
Alas, Dee was often underappreciated because of her race.
As she once told an interviewer,
"I'm sick of being offered scripts about hookers or goody-good nurses!
Black women fall in love and have adventures and secrets and are just as driven and gutsy
as a lot of white ladies in middle America."
Dee was also known for her long, loving marriage to fellow actor Ossie Davis and her tireless
work in the civil rights movement.
In 2008, she explained her desired epitaph to Jet Magazine.
As she put it,
"If I leave any thought behind, it is ... we were in this thing together, so let's love
each other right now.
Let's make sense of things right now.
Let's make it count somehow right now, because we are in this thing together."
Dee died on June 11, 2014 of natural causes at the age of 91.
If you ask anyone who ever saw Katharine Hepburn to describe how talented she was, you should
be prepared to hear some of the most effusive praise ever spoken by any human.
Upon her passing, the Washington Post called her "an actress of breathtaking talent."
The illustrious Tennessee Williams referred to her as "a playwright's dream — a dream
actress."
And iconic director Frank Capra summed it up succinctly by plainly stating,
"There are actresses and actresses — then there is Hepburn."
Over the course of Hepburn's career, she was honored by her peers with plenty of hardware,
as she was nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards 12 times between 1934 and 1982,
winning four of them.
Hepburn was classically modest about her talents, reportedly once saying,
"[Acting is] the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living.
After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four."
But regardless of that opinion, she loved her job.
As she once said,
"Work is the only thing that ever made anyone happy.
The notion that work is a burden is a terrible mistake."
Hepburn continued working into her eighties, but eventually her health declined too much
for her to continue performing.
She died on June 29, 2003 at the age of 96 after suffering from a variety of medical
issues.
While Doris Day is often remembered as someone who was similar in real life to the roles
she played, she adamantly disputed that she was anything like her characters.
As she claimed in Doris Day: Her Own Story,
"My public image is unshakably that of America's wholesome virgin, the girl next door, carefree
and brimming with happiness.
An image, I can assure you, more make-believe than any film part I ever played.
But I am Miss Chastity Belt, and that's all there is to it."
The sweet-as-pie nature of Day's roles meant that audiences often failed to recognize just
how supremely talented she was.
As the bandleader Les Brown once said,
"As a singer Doris belongs in the company of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra."
And while Day's films may seem full of outdated gender stereotypes to modern viewers, at the
time they were shockingly revolutionary.
According to film critic Molly Haskell, instead of taking on parts in which she was asked
to be a quiet, submissive woman,
"[Day was] challenging, in her working-woman roles, the limited destiny of women to marry,
live happily ever after, and never be heard from again."
Outside of acting, Day was passionate about animal rescue, and she even started her own
foundation.
She passed away from pneumonia on May 13, 2019 at the age of 97.
Her manager announced that there would be no funeral of any kind, because Day "didn't
like death."
Unlike some other long-lived actors, Scottish thespian Sean Connery retired well before
he needed to.
After an illustrious career playing James Bond and many other memorable roles, he left
Hollywood behind in 2003.
That was the year that he starred in the comic book adaptation The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen.
It was his final film and a notorious flop, and he reportedly said that director Stephen
Norrington should be "locked up for insanity."
Connery didn't even return for the fourth Indiana Jones movie, as he wrote on his website,
"If anything could have pulled me out of retirement, it would have been an Indiana Jones film.
But in the end, retirement is just too much fun."
However, rumors claimed that the real reason was creative differences with director Steven
Spielberg.
And according to actor Michael Caine, a friend of Connery's,
"The movie business retired him because he didn't want to play small parts about old
men and they weren't offering him any young parts in romantic leads."
Connery passed away on October 31, 2020 at the age of 90.
His deep connection to his homeland was celebrated, with the former first minister of Scotland
Alex Salmond declaring,
"[Connery was] the world's greatest Scot, the last of the real Hollywood stars, the
definitive Bond.
Sean Connery was all of these things but much more.
He was also a staunch patriot, a deep thinker, and outstanding human being.
'Scotland Forever' wasn't just tattooed on his forearm but was imprinted on his soul."
Marlene Dietrich was born in Germany in 1901 and got her start singing and acting in clubs,
as well as performing in German films.
Her breakout role got her a Hollywood contract, and then she developed into one of the most
iconic sex symbols in cinematic history.
By the 1940s, Dietrich was a huge star.
And during that wartime period, there was no internal conflict when it came to the country
of her birth fighting against her adopted country, as she was for the U.S.A. all the
way.
Nine years after she arrived, just as the war was starting in 1939, she became a citizen.
As she reportedly said,
"America took me into her bosom when I no longer had a native country worthy of the
name."
Dietrich even did her part for the war effort.
As her grandson Peter Riva told Closer Weekly,
"She was happiest serving the Allied troops during World War II.
She called them 'my boys' for the rest of her life, and they responded accordingly."
Dietrich died of kidney failure on May 6, 1992 at the age of 90.
Her body was buried in Berlin, although not all Germans were happy about that.
A headline on the front page of The BZ newspaper even announced,
"Marlene's grave spat on."
Even though the war had ended long ago and the Nazis were no longer in power, some Germans
still saw Dietrich as a traitor.
Betty White had an extraordinarily long career in Hollywood.
She was most famous for her hilarious sitcom gigs on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The
Golden Girls, but her list of credits is as deep as the ocean.
It even includes such oddball appearances as an episode of WWE Raw.
In her later years, she was rediscovered by younger generations, especially after she
hosted Saturday Night Live in 2010, following a viral Facebook campaign, which led her to
joke about how she hadn't previously heard of the social media site.
"And now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time."
Whenever White's name trended on Twitter, fans would freak out until they checked to
make sure that she was okay.
Eventually, she was trending because she was indeed no longer with us, as she died on December
31, 2021 from the effects of a stroke she suffered the week before.
She was 99, less than three weeks shy of her 100th birthday.
She'd taped a thank you for all her fans 11 days before she died, intending to release
it on her birthday, in which she announced:
"I just want to thank you all for your love and support over the years.
Thank you so much, and stick around!"
Many birthday celebrations had to be canceled or altered due to White's passing.
But after her death, a charity drive to raise money for her favorite cause of animal welfare
resulted in almost 400,000 people donating $12.7 million and counting to animal rescue
organizations.
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