FAREWELL SIR ROGER:
Thanks to his role as Simon Templar in The Saint and his seven appearances as OO7, SIR ROGER MOORE became one of the most successful actors of his generation
BORN in south London to a policeman called George, as he was, there was probably not much doubt that Roger Moore would grow up to be a quintessential Englishman. And so it proved. He had the delivery and manners of a duke. His suits were perfectly cut, his cravats impeccably knotted and he was self deprecating in the extreme.
Asked to account for his remarkable success, Sir Roger – he was knighted in 2003 for his charity work – once said: “During my early acting years I was told that to succeed you needed personality, talent and luck in equal measure. I contest that. For me it’s been 99 per cent luck. It’s no good being talented and not being in the right place at the right time.”
He found himself in that fortunate position at the age of 45 when he was hired to succeed Sean Connery as James Bond in Live And Let Die. He went on to portray 007 in another six films, confounding the deadly efforts of cartoon baddies such as Mr Big, General Orlov and Hugo Drax time after time.
But yesterday the real-life Sir Roger succumbed to the one adversary he could not beat: the Big C. He died at the age of 89 after a short battle with cancer, the first of the seven actors who have played the super suave British secret agent to meet his maker.
While Sir Roger’s tenure as Bond stretched to 12 years, there was much more to him than his most famous screen persona. As an actor he enjoyed success in Ivanhoe, The Saint and The Persuaders on television before accepting his licence to kill. In his (not so) private life he was married four times and had three children. And a philanthropic bent led to him ending his days as a much-loved Unicef ambassador, who was so affected by the poverty he saw in the course of his work that he once remarked: “I can never leave the tap running while cleaning my teeth.”
IT WAS a remarkable career for a man who set out with much lower expectations. One of his father’s police duties was to produce sketches of accident scenes to be used in evidence in court and the young Roger himself started out with artistic ambitions. He left school at 15 to work as a trainee animator at Publicity Picture Productions but was sacked a few months later when he failed to collect a can of film.
Friends introduced him to the world of film extra work and this whetted his appetite for acting. He duly went to Rada (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and was set for a life in repertory theatre when he was called up for national service.
By now he had married a fellow Rada student called Doorn van Steyn. But worn down by money worries and his wife’s lack of confidence in his acting ability Moore left her for Dorothy Squires, a Welsh singer who was 13 years his senior.
They decided to try their luck in New York and, after achieving some success on US television, Moore was offered a contract with MGM. After a number of unmemorable films, the man himself concluded: “At MGM, RGM (Roger George Moore) was NBG [no bloody good].”
Winning the title role in Ivanhoe resurrected Sir Roger’s reputation, however, and his career took off in the 1960s, with a string of parts in high-profile productions. This period also saw the emergence of wife number three, an Italian actress called Luisa Mattiolli, with whom he went on to have a daughter and two sons.
In 1973 he won the part that was to make him a multimillionaire. On the face of it Sir Roger was not a natural for the role of the gun-toting Bond. When he was 14, a friend accidentally shot him with an air rifle, an incident that triggered his lifelong hoplophobia – a fear of firearms.
From the outset he was determined to play 007 for laughs: “My whole reaction was always – he is not a real spy,” he said. “You can’t be a real spy and have everybody in the world know who you are and what your drink is. That’s just hysterically funny.” It proved to be a winning formula, leading to a string of hits including The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. When it was suggested Ronnie Biggs play a cameo role in the latter when they were filming in Brazil, Sir Roger made it clear that, as the son of a London copper, he would have no truck with the then fugitive Great Train Robber.
After a “life-changing” diagnosis of prostate cancer in 1993, he left Luisa for the Danish socialite Kristina “Kiki” Tholstrup and they were married in 2002.
“I’ve not planned my funeral,” Sir Roger once said. “I’m not the Queen. A procession through the streets of Stockwell would be nice, I suppose.”
And so richly deserved.