Biography
Cilento's parents, Sir Raphael Cilento and Lady (Phyllis) Cilento, were both distinguished medical practitioners.
At an early age she decided to follow a career as an actress, and after a period living with her father in New York, Cilento won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and moved to England in the early 1950s. She soon secured roles in British films and worked steadily until the end of the decade. In 1956, Cilento was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Supporting or Featured Actress (Dramatic) for Helen of Troy in Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates.
She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance inTom 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 had one son, 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.
She starred with Charlton Heston in the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy, and with Paul Newman in the 1967 western film Hombre.
In 1985, Cilento married Anthony Shaffer, a playwright, who wrote the script of The Wicker Man; she met him when she appeared in the film in 1973, and he joined her when she returned to Queensland in 1975. During the 1970s, she studied Sufism under the British spiritual teacherJohn G. Bennett.
Cilento continued working as an actress, both in films and in television and, in the 1980s, settled in Mossman, north of Cairns, where she built her own outdoor theatre, named "Karnak", in the rainforest. The venture allowed her to participate in experimental drama.
In 2001 she was awarded the Centenary Medal, for "distinguished service to the arts, especially theatre".
In 2006, Cilento released her autobiography, My Nine Lives.
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