SITTING on a low stone wall, sweat trickling down my back in the Bahamian heat, it took a minute to register the huge shadow which blocked the sun.

"Fidelma…Sean," he smiled, extending a hand and leading me to a golf buggy parked around the corner in this millionaires’ Disney gated enclave, Lyford Cay.

As one of the few women in the world neither shaken nor stirred by the actor, it was a shock to realise all that was said about him was true.

He moved in his own forcefield; a vortex of sheer sexual magnetism although pushing 70 then; a charming raconteur as he took me on a tour of the estate before heading to his surprisingly modest bungalow and lunch served by a Moroccan factotum.

The dining room looked over the pool and beyond to the famous golf course. To the right Micheline’s studio filled with huge, vibrant paintings including studies of her husband.

Over the next few days, lunches and drinks and hours of convoluted, humourless interviews, I saw another side of the "world’s sexiest man."

Desperate to be taken seriously politically, this autodidact indulged in long discourses often losing their thread; referred to numerous papers to highlight his case for independence and pulled out copious files from filing cabinets.

One was in my name but I never found out what was in it.

We’d had several telephone calls before this meeting. I’d been passed undeniable proof that he’d been spitefully denied a knighthood because of his support for the Scottish National Party. Labour later tried to spin it as being about his alleged wife abuse – always denied – but I knew different and had the evidence.

It was a major story and gained me, for a time, entrance into his inner sanctum. I grew used to his phone calls. No, that’s not true; one never got used to that whispering, sibilant "Sean here".

Meeting him and Micheline for drinks at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, he reduced my teenage son to a tongue tied, blushing ingenue by telling him: "Ah, Pierce, I’ve heard a lot about you."

We partied after the premiere of the risible Entrapment with Catherine Zeta-Jones leading a bewildered Michael Douglas around like a tired, lost little boy.

In the VIPs’ VIPs’ room at Prestonfield House, a refreshed Connery bounced over and off a sofa next to me, nimbly caught by his bodyguard before he landed on Alex Salmond.

I preferred this playful Connery realising he was happier in the company of men and not being eyed as a prize for the taking, despite his known past dalliances.

At a lunch between the two of us in the Cay club house, the fiery French Moroccan Micheline told me of some of the lengths women went to get close to him.

Tiny, she was pushed out of the way by women in airports; ignored at parties as women blatantly propositioned him. Few understood she was his gatekeeper and the driving force behind his knowing his worth.

A superbly talented artist, impeccably connected, she gave up a lot for Connery while recognising his limitations. Filter-less she gave me a no holds barred interview but the man’s equally fiercesome publicist – Nancy Selzer – asked me to tone it down. For once I agreed as that hadn’t been the deal.

As I pored over my notes that week at my beach side hotel, I wished she’d been the only interview.

None of the man’s rambling sentences came to a logical point. I had to trace their genesis and work forward and cut and splice. The words were ponderous, full of their own importance but with little self-awareness.

I finally produced, I think, four full pages for the Mail on Sunday, a much weightier product then, but it left me strangely unsatisfied.

I wanted more of the man, not the frustrated politician but the truth was the man wanted less of the man, sick of the role.

As I probed further, he got mildly irritated. "I thought this was a serious political interview. You’re a serious political journalist."

Oh dear, who told him that?

He wanted a role in Scotland’s independence but not the discomfort of living there.

"I can’t do cold any more," he told me. "I don’t want to."

He rose above such taunts; mildly pointed out he paid his tax dues in the UK; paid heavily into his Scottish foundation; did not abuse women and was sick of explaining himself.

I actually admired his stance – this was a man who knew his own worth in everything.

One day he picked me up at the hotel taking me on a tour of Providence before returning to the house. He enjoyed telling me scurrilous gossip of some of the well-known residents.

He was enjoying my enjoyment and I realised he still got a kick out of how far he’d come. But never felt grateful for it. He’d done it himself – he owed nothing and nobody, nor they him.

I admired that too. RIP big man. You were bigger than all of them to the end.