Australian actress, director and writer, married at one-time to actor Sean Connery and the mother of their son, actor Jason Connery. A follower of Sufism, Cilento ran the open-air Karnak Playhouse which she built with her third husband, the late Tony Shaffer, in a rainforest sanctuary in Far North Queensland.
A gorgeous blonde, Cilento was memorable as Molly in Tom Jones (1963), which won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and the tart with a heart of gold in Rattle of a Simple Man (1964).
Her first husband was Andrea Volpe, married on 12 February 1955 in London and her second husband Sean Connery, married on 30 November 1962 in Gibraltar; they separated in 1970 and divorced the following year. She and Anthony Shaffer married in 1985 until his death on 6 November 2001. Her daughter, Giovanna Margaret Volpe, was born in 1957 and her son, Jason Joseph Connery, was born in 1963.
One of six kids born to Lady Phyllis and Sir Raphael Cilento, both eminent doctors, Diana studied violin and ballet as a youngster. Aiming for a career in dramatic arts, she left home for the U.S. on 2 April 1948 and arrived in Boston on 29 May that year. In New York, she studied with a number of teachers. Young Diane was impetuous, passionate, dramatic. Her early life was marked by intense peaks of emotion: her elopement with a romantic Italian at the age of 23, a nervous breakdown and suicide attempt, and twice fleeing marriages without warning.
After a period back in Australia, she located in England for a lead role in Dead on Course (1951). Her successful stage career included Broadway in the U.S., but she had only a few substantial films. In the year 1965, her celebrity reached its height with her husband Sean Connery as James Bond attracting feverish attention the world over. She starred with Charlton Heston in the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy, and with Paul Newman in the 1967 western film Hombre.
Seeking inner answers to her life, Diane began going to philosophical and meditation classes with a group of people whom she described as `bizarre.’ For a year she studied under John Godolphin (J.G.) Bennett, an English mystic and teacher (1897-1974). Bennett utilized ideas from Sufism in his teachings, mysticism that is described as the search for direct personal experience of the divine.
Cilento turned to writing in the late 1960s, publishing her first novel, The Manipulator, in 1967. After working in England as a stage director in the ’70s, she moved back to her native Australia in the ‘80s, where she appeared in an occasional film role, but has devoted most of her attention to the Karnak Theatre Company, an open-air venue in Far North Queensland.
In 2006, Cilento released her autobiography, My Nine Lives.
She died on the night of 6 October 2011 in Cairns, Queensland, Australia.
Link to Wikipedia biography