Sean Connery married in Gibraltar twice, in 1962 and again in 1975, and the wedding nobody writes about is the first one. The 1975 ceremony with the painter Micheline Roquebrune is the one that gets listed. It sits on every roundup of famous weddings on the Rock, usually with the date 6 May attached to it. The 1962 wedding to the Australian actress Diane Cilento gets a clause, if it gets anything. That is the wrong way round, because the 1962 one is the better story and it is the one where the version you will read elsewhere falls apart on contact with a calendar. We went looking for what can actually be documented, and then we went to the Department of Immigration and Home Affairs to find out what a couple doing the same thing this month would face. Both halves turned up something worth knowing. Connery married Diane Cilento in Gibraltar in November 1962. [Biography](https://www.biography.com/actors/sean-connery) records it as a secret ceremony on the Rock that month. [Wikipedia's account](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Connery) gives the years, 1962 to 1973, and the separation in 1971, without naming the place. Here is where the retelling goes wrong. The widely repeated version, including Biography's own entry, says he married Cilento while he was filming From Russia with Love. He cannot have. Principal photography on that film began on 1 April 1963 at Pinewood, four months after the wedding, and wrapped on 23 August 1963. In November 1962 there was no Bond film in production at all. What there was, was a hit. Dr. No had its premiere at the London Pavilion on 5 October 1962 and went out across the rest of the United Kingdom three days later. So Connery married in Gibraltar roughly six weeks into being famous, at the exact moment the first Bond film was turning a jobbing Scottish actor into something else. That is a better fact than the one everybody prints, and it is checkable. Gibraltar has kept its own Bond connections since, including [the Living Daylights locations you can still walk to](/blog/james-bond-living-daylights-gibraltar-filming-locations). None of them involve the registrar. The second wedding is the famous one. Connery married Micheline Roquebrune, a French Moroccan painter he had met at a golf tournament in Morocco in 1970, and the marriage lasted until his death on 31 October 2020. The year and the place hold up across sources. The precise date does not. Wedding industry pages and fan sites give 6 May 1975 with confidence, and we could not find it in a primary record, a contemporary newspaper report or any established reference work. Wikipedia gives 1975 and no day. Newsweek gives 1975 and no day. The same pages that supply the 6 May date also, in places, call Roquebrune his third wife. She was his second. So we will not print 6 May as a fact. The year is 1975, the place was Gibraltar, and if you want the day you will need the register entry, which the Department of Immigration and Home Affairs holds and will search for a fee. > Two Connery weddings, more than a decade apart, both in the same small territory, and the most repeated detail about either of them is one we cannot verify. The reason is a single clause of statute. Under section 13 of the [Marriage Act](https://www.gibraltarlaws.gov.gi/legislations/marriage-act-504), a Special Licence can be granted that lets residents and non residents alike marry in Gibraltar, with no residency period to serve first. That is why [John Lennon and Yoko Ono landed, married and left inside a morning in March 1969](/blog/john-lennon-yoko-ono-wedding-gibraltar-story) after French rules had told them to wait weeks. It is why Connery could do it twice without arranging his life around it. The Ballad of John and Yoko put the arrangement into the charts, and [the song still carries the line about getting married in Gibraltar near Spain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_John_and_Yoko). There is one condition, and it is the operator's part of this story. A non resident couple must prove to the Registrar that they are spending at least one night in Gibraltar, immediately before or immediately after the ceremony. A minimum one night stay is required by law. The August 2026 guidance notes spell out what counts as proof, and the wording changed. It now reads: a Gibraltar hotel bill or Gibraltar apartment booking. The February 2025 version asked for a hotel bill or hotel booking form. An apartment booking confirmation is now named in the [government's own document](https://www.gibraltar.gov.gi/uploads/Department%20of%20Immigration%20&%20Home%20Affairs/Marriages%20&%20Civil%20Partnerships/CEREMONY_-_GUIDANCE-NOTES_-_August_2026__2_.pdf) as acceptable evidence, which is worth knowing before anyone books a room they do not want purely to satisfy a registrar. Whatever you use, the proof has to carry the name and address of the host, a telephone number and email, the names of the guests, the address of the stay, the length of the stay and the total p