Sean Connery reportedly tried to warn his friend, the writer Edna O'Brien, off experimenting with LSD – by telling her of his own experience with the drug.

The James Bond star is said to have told O'Brien of his negative LSD experience with RD Laing, the Glasgow-born psychiatrist.

In her new memoir, Country Girl, O'Brien describes a conversation with Connery on the eve of her meeting with Laing, at which she herself planned to take the drug.

She writes: "I had learned from Sean Connery ... that his own LSD trip with Laing – both being old friends from Scotland – had its own freight of terrors.

"Yet I did not cancel the appointment. It was as if in some way I believed I could go through with it and yet escape the terrible ordeal."

Connery's publicists have made no comment but the actor's first wife wrote in her autobiography that Laing persuaded him to sample LSD to help him deal with stress after starring in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger.

Diane Cilento alleged Laing gave Connery pure LSD and took one-tenth of the amount himself.

"It was his standard procedure with patients he felt were emotionally blocked," she wrote.

"No-one was privy to what happened over the next six hours, but I believe that, with his enormous reserve and armouring, Sean resisted the drug. As a result, he had to go to bed for several days to recover."