Witty, dashing and sardonic
Sir Roger Moore, actor: b London, October 14, 1927, m Doorn van Steyn (diss 1953), (2) Dorothy Squires (diss 1968), (3) Luisa Mattioli (diss 1996), (4) Kristina Tholstrup, 3c; d Switzerland, May 23, 2017, aged 89.
Sir Roger Moore won international celebrity in the 1960s as the immaculately clad Simon Templar in The Saint, a television role that led to his being cast as James Bond, the secret agent with a licence to kill, in a hugely successful series of feature films.
Playing the debonair Templar with something of the cool sophistication of George Sanders, Moore brought to the role the unctuous charm of a male escort coupled with the abiding image of a man of action whose deathdefying feats left his immaculate good looks (not to mention his halo) totally unruffled.
But critics invariably derided his limited range; Moore himself, describing actors as ‘‘hunks of meat in front of a camera’’, admitted to using ‘‘only two expressions when acting’’. One of these, the quizzically raised eyebrow, loomed large in his portrayal of James Bond, a role which he took over from Sean Connery.
Lacking both Connery’s sex appeal and aura of menace, Moore was once asked what he thought he could bring to the part. He replied: ‘‘White teeth.’’
But Moore had little in common with the fearless heroes he portrayed on screen. The actor described himself as a ‘‘devout coward’’ and recalled that during the filming of violent scenes he was made nervous by the presence of prop firearms. ‘‘I hate loud bangs,’’ he said. ‘‘Every time I had to fire a gun during filming I blinked. They always had to go through the film and edit out the frame where I closed my eyes.’’
During a career spanning four decades he remained, almost to the last, the romantic leading man. Even at the age of 56, after 13 years as Bond, Moore continued to allow himself to be persuaded to participate in love scenes with girls 35 years his junior.
Roger George Moore was born in 1927 in Stockwell, south London, the son of a policeman whose job was to draw plans of crime scenes to be produced in court cases; his mother was a cashier in a restaurant in the Strand.
Overweight as a child (he lost the weight in adolescence), he nearly died from double bronchial pneumonia. He left school before his 16th birthday to start work as a paint and trace artist and tea boy at a film company. ‘‘I only lasted a year,’’ he remembered. ‘‘I don’t think my tea was up to scratch.’’
A friend suggested he make some money as an extra at Denham Studios, then filming Caesar and Cleopatra .He auditioned and started work the same day. After only three days as an extra, Moore was approached by the co-director Brian Hurst, who offered to pay his drama school fees. With his help Moore applied for a place at Rada.
Moore had a greater interest in finding paid employment than in studying acting. He spent only three terms at Rada, before leaving the course to join a repertory company based in Cambridge.
Moore’s fastidiousness of dress and deportment while on stage earned him the nickname ‘‘the duchess’’, which persisted after 1945 when Moore began his National Service. To the surprise of his friends Moore was sent to officer training school. ‘‘I think it was mainly because I looked the part,’’ he recalled.As a noncommissioned officer he served in Germany and Italy, organising entertainment.
When he left the Army in 1947, a year after marrying a blonde figure-skater, Doorn van Steyn, Moore spent several months unsuccessfully looking for work.
Unable to find any other paid employment, he took jobs as a male model advertising Brylcreem and toothpaste as well as swimming trunks and various items of knitwear.
In 1952 he was modelling cardigans when he met the singer Dorothy Squires. A passionate affair with the singer (10 years his senior) culminated in his divorce from Doorn. In 1953 Moore and Squires visited Hollywood to publicise her cabaret act and to promote Moore’s acting career.
He was offered various film roles, including parts in The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), which starred Elizabeth Taylor, and Interrupted Melody (1955) starring Glenn Ford.
As Moore began to establish himself as an actor, his television work increased. During the 1950s he starred in the historical romance series Ivanhoe, the comedy-adventure The Alaskan and the popular Western comedy Maverick. After five years, however, he felt that he had ‘‘outgrown’’ Ivanhoe.
In 1961, now separated from Squires, Moore returned to Europe and accepted a part in an Italian potboiler, The Rape of the Sabines. His co-star was the Italian actress Luisa Matioli. ‘‘It sounds awful,’’ Moore remembered, ‘‘but I fell in love with Luisa at first sight.’’
While the couple were living in Italy, he was offered the part of Simon Templar in a television adventure series based on Leslie Charteris’s swashbuckling hero The Saint.
He starred in The Saint for seven years and it became one of the longest-running adventure series on television . ‘‘As always, I just played myself.’’
When the series went into colour in 1966, Moore became coproducer, bought a share of the rights and with them a cut of the show’s global sales, estimated at some $370 million, making him financially secure for life.
After his last appearance in The Saint in 1970, he accepted a role, as Brett Sinclair, in The Persuaders! opposite Tony Curtis. In an attempt to add humour to the series, Moore and Curtis were encouraged to ‘‘play to the camera’’. The result introduced an air of high camp to the expensive stunts and locations and may have proved a rehearsal for Moore’s later hamming in the Bond films.
In 1972, when Sean Connery no longer wanted to play James Bond, Moore was offered the role in Live and Let Die. Critics felt his first attempt at James Bond was ‘‘flat and lifeless": nevertheless the film grossed $126m. In his second Bond film, The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) Moore began to settle into playing the role for laughs. By The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), he was firmly established as ‘‘the amusing Bond’’.
He continued to play James Bond in four more films, Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983) and A View to Kill (1985). As the plots and locations grew increasingly outlandish and gimmick-laden, Moore took the ‘‘less is more’’ theory of acting to its limits.
Later films featured a high proportion of shots in which he stood completely still looking quizzically at the action. ‘‘When I was in The Saint,’’ he remembered, ‘‘I had two ‘looks’. In the Bond films I progressed to four.’’
In 1985 he finally accepted that he should stop playing a character 30 years younger than himself and Cubby Broccoli offered the role to Timothy Dalton.
In the late 1980s Moore took a break from film-making, returning in 1990 with Michael Caine in Bullseye! The story dealt with two confidence tricksters and despite the combined charm of Moore and Caine the film was a box office flop.
The following year Moore turned his energies to charitable endeavours on behalf of Unicef, visiting underprivileged children in Latin America and Brazil, becoming an official representative in 1992 and later an ambassador, visiting many countries on Unicef’s behalf.
In 2007 he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work on television and in film, appropriately located at 7007 Hollywood Boulevard.
– Telegraph Group