007 WITH FOUR FORMIDABLE WIVES
HIS voice was unmistakeable, a deep V8 purr like a sports car running on honey for fuel. And his acting style was unique, too — no other actor had such a narrow range and yet did so much with it and to such effect.
Sir Roger Moore, who has died aged 89, claimed his only talent was for ‘walking in front of cameras’ and used to joke that he had just three expressions: left eyebrow up, right eyebrow up, and both eyebrows up at the same time.
But self-deprecation was his hallmark and the comments did not do justice to his status as one of the best-loved actors of his generation.
The numerous TV shows and films he starred in were the envy of his peers; from the Fifties hit Western series Maverick, to swashbuckling in Ivanhoe, Swinging Sixties stardom in The Saint, and Seventies savoir faire in The Persuaders — and, of course, the ultimate big screen role, James Bond. Moore nurtured his talent all the way to mega-stardom.
In every role, he was essentially the same, a gentleman adventurer. Succeeding Sean Connery as 007 in 1973, he smoothed away the character’s cruel streak and replaced it with wry humour. He refused to be seen enjoying violence; instead, his Bond became imbued with Moore’s own sense of fun.
That love of fun extended far beyond the camera. Moore was one of the most notorious practical jokers in the movie business as director and co-stars, including Clint Eastwood discovered, often to their cost.
Every film reviewer would reach for the same adjectives to describe Moore’s characters: suave, debonair, gallant. And he had a face and physique that the camera — and female fans — adored.
As a child, however, he was too tall, chubby and cripplingly shy. He never forgot how his father, George, a policeman, once described him as ‘a sack of s*** tied up round the middle with ugly’.
Moore was an only child, born on October 14, 1927, and brought up in a two-bedroom flat in Albert Square, Stockwell, in South-West London.
He was a sickly boy and, aged five, fell ill with a fever so bad that the GP told his parents: ‘I’ll be back in the morning to sign the death certificate’.
Years later, Moore discovered his father had sold his motorcycle to pay the doctor’s bill.
Moore left school at 15 and, with a talent for drawing, went to work at a Soho movie publicity house as a trainee animator making wartime propaganda films. Moore’s job was to take the cans of film to an Army office in nearby Mayfair — where, by a long coincidence, the technical adviser was another future movie star of quintessential Englishness, a Lieutenant-Colonel David Niven.
The job didn’t suit Moore, who was frequently late and then fired after he lost a can of processed footage. Desperate to pay his way, he decided to try his luck on screen as an extra. His first film was Caesar And Cleopatra, released in 1945, with Vivien Leigh.
In a red toga and sandals, Moore — by now a strapping, blue-eyed youth — caught the eye of director Brian Desmond Hurst.
Hurst saw a potential leading man and urged the boy to apply to drama college. George Moore, a frustrated amateur actor himself, agreed to find the fees.
It was at RADA that 17-year-old Roger Moore met his first wife, an ice-skater, who was six years older and had a toddler son. She had appeared in several films under her professional name Doorn Van Steyn (her real name was Lucy Woodard). Moore was besotted, even learning to ice skate to be near her. They were married in 1946, when Moore was 18, at Wandsworth Town Hall.
His acting career stalled following national service and by 1950, he had resorted to posing as a knitwear model, and was living in one room with Doorn in her parents’ house.
Forced to endlessly tour as an ice-skater to pay their bills, she was disappointed in him as a husband and actor. ‘You’ll never be a star,’ she told him scathingly. ‘Your face is too weak, your jaw’s too big and your mouth is too small.’
‘All we ever did was row,’ Moore later said. Once, she emptied a pot of tea over his head. Another time, she dumped his clothes in the bath. The marriage ended with a blazing public row — when she bit his hand — outside a West End theatre where Moore was an understudy.
Moore’s professional break came, not on stage or set, but at a drunken party at the Bexley mansion in Kent of singer Dorothy Squires, then the most famous female solo star in the world.
Her parties were famous for excess and sex, and Squires took an instant shine to the handsome jobless, 24-year- old who was 12 years her junior. He flirted with her outrageously and later that night took her to bed. She was smitten and vowed to make him a star in America, putting her own career on hold.
They travelled to New York in luxury on the Queen Mary, but since Moore’s divorce from Doorn Van Steyn — she learned he’d left her after she returned from a tour — had not been finalised, he went in the guise of her manager.
Through Squires’s contacts, he quickly got TV work and roles on Broadway. In July 1953, they wed in front of a very ‘drunken justice of the peace’ in New Jersey.
On their return to England, Moore, now with American polish and sophistication, got his first West End part. In the same week, two major offers followed — the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and a seven-year Hollywood contract with MGM to make his screen debut alongside Elizabeth Taylor in The Last Time I Saw Paris.
‘It was not a difficult decision,’ he said. ‘I chose the one that paid the most.’
Squires went with him but, with her young husband surrounded by starlets in California, she soon became ferociously jealous. To avoid arguments, which he hated, Moore took up the guitar: when his wife started shouting, he would strum chords and ignore her. One night, she smashed it over his head.
The yawning gulf in years between Squires and her boyishly handsome husband did not help. ‘Don’t forget to invite Roger Moore and his mother,’ was one of the crueller jokes among the Hollywood set.
It wasn’t until the late Fifties, that Moore, then, 31, got his first starring role — on British TV in the swords- and- chivalry series Ivanhoe. He proved ideal for the conveyor belt of television, word perfect and never temperamental. He also had a great face for close- ups at a time when most shows consisted of cuts from face to face because TV screens were so tiny.
Ivanhoe’s success led to renewed interest from America in 1959 and a role in The Alaskans — a show that sounded the death knell for his marriage to Squires.
Moore became infatuated with Dorothy Provine, his blonde costar and when he began calling for ‘Dorothy’ in his sleep, Squires knew that it wasn’t her. To him she was only ever Squires or Dot.
But for a time she was mollified when Moore took over from James Garner on the hit western Maverick. It was proof that her young husband was a star in the ascendant.
Moore worked opposite Clint Eastwood, who once confided that he wasn’t able to laugh on cue. Moore was bemused: think of something funny, he suggested. Clint couldn’t, so Moore started telling him jokes, with no effect.
It became a challenge, with Roger the compulsive prankster doing everything he could to make Eastwood even crack a smile. ‘It was bizarre,’ he mused later. ‘I
‘Your face is too weak, your jaw is too big’
Stars clamoured to be seduced by Moore on screen He said Connery and Craig far outshone him
mean, who doesn’t know how to laugh?’
Maverick was hugely popular in Italy, and in 1961 Moore flew to Rome — while Squires was on tour in Australia — to play Romulus in Il Ratto Delle Sabine, the mythical story of the Rape of the Sabine Women. His co- star was Luisa Mattioli, 28, beautiful, emotionally explosive … exactly the sort of girl Moore couldn’t resist.
He spoke no Italian and she spoke no English, but ‘language was no barrier,’ Moore said wryly, and Luisa soon became pregnant.
They settled back in London, but Moore did not dare tell Squires he’d left her. Instead, it fell to his GP back in Bexley to break the news.
She refused to believe it until she intercepted letters addressed to Moore from Italy and had them translated. They were from Luisa and graphic proof of her husband’s infidelity. One letter allegedly described Luisa’s wish to lick Moore all over, adding: ‘You say Dorothy does not believe in our love. Show her this letter.’
Squires, in a move that appalled even her close friends, refused to give her husband a divorce — and instead sued him for loss of conjugal rights. She stoked gossip further by hurling abuse at Moore and Luisa whenever she could — on one occasion, smashing the French windows of the home the couple shared.
None of this damaged Moore’s career in the slightest. In 1963, he had landed a part he’d hoped to play for years, that of Simon Templar — dashing hero of the famous Saint novels by Leslie Charteris.
The character might have been invented for him: at his father’s urging, Moore had tried to buy the rights to the books.
The Saint was a ladies’ man who behaved impeccably, even when he was being a cad. It was his turn as Templar that confirmed Moore as TV’s most glamorous leading man and an international star.
Leading actresses clamoured to be seduced by him on screen — Julie Christie, Shirley Eaton, Kate O’Mara and Jane Asher were all Saint girls.
Moore achieved the television pinnacle when he was paid to direct as well as star in episodes.
But his irrepressible humour caused problems. In one scene, where the Saint was supposed to be running alongside a car — an expensive effect to shoot — he held up a piece of paper with the word ‘STOP’ written on it. As the producer, Monty Berman, signalled ‘Why?’ Moore flipped the paper over. It read: ‘Because my d*** is caught in the door.’ The crew collapsed, the take was ruined. Berman never forgave him.
Squires hadn’t forgiven him either. At a BAFTA dinner in 1968, the compere Kenneth More made a friendly joke about Moore and ‘his wife, who is much more attractive than he is’. Luisa, of course, was still not his wife. Squires sued Kenneth More and ITV, too, for broadcasting it. After that court case, she gave up and granted Moore his divorce.
Moore, however, never got over his guilt at betraying the woman who made his career, and 30 years later, when Squires was dying from lung cancer, he paid for her care.
By 1970, with The Saint finished, Moore was driving an Aston Martin DBS on screen as yet another insouciant English swashbuckler, Lord Brett Sinclair in The Persuaders, opposite Tony Curtis.
Devised as an action comedy, the show sometimes veered into farce. In one episode, Moore played Lord Brett and three of his relatives — a mad general, a bad-tempered admiral and Lady Agatha, Brett’s aunt. ‘Eerily,’ he said, ‘when I dragged up, I looked like my own mother.’
Bond didn’t come his way until 1973 when he was 45 and he threw himself into a fitness regime, worried that the public would never accept him as Connery’s replacement, and that his limitations as an actor would now be exposed world-wide.
Instead, Live And Let Die became the most successful Bond movie: made for about £4 million, it took £75 million at the box office. Before its release and uncertain of its success, Moore took on another role in the a film adaptation of a Wilbur Smith novel, Gold.
Because this meant filming in South Africa, under apartheid, British trade unions threatened to blacklist all Moore’s future movies. His retort was to make the movie with a crew of black and white technicians, defying the government’s racist laws: it was, he believed, a far better way to confront apartheid.
His next Bond movie was The Man With The Golden Gun opposite Maud Adams and Britt Ekland — Mud and Birt, as he called them. Then came his favourite, The Spy Who Loved Me.
‘I always played the part for laughs,’ he insisted. ‘My attitude was to share the joke with the audience — my Bond was a lover and a giggler.’
Four more outings as Bond followed, ending with A View To A Kill. The films were dismissed by movie snobs as expensive hokum, but Moore’s humour defused the criticism.
And when the satirical puppet show Spitting Image made a latex caricature of him that did nothing but wiggle its eyebrows, it was Moore who laughed louder than anyone.
After Bond, he rarely worked. He had no need: a tax exile living in the South of France, in Monaco, and in the ski resort of CransMontana in Switzerland, he preferred his role as a Unicef ambassador — his commitment to charity earning him a knighthood in 2003. He was also a fierce campaigner for animal rights.
Moore’s taste for the quiet life extended to his fourth marriage, too — despite his attraction to fiery women.
Tired of arguments with the volatile Luisa, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, he left her in 1993, abandoning her at Geneva airport and later phoning to say he was in a relationship with her closest friend, a Swedish widow and socialite named Kristina ‘Kiki’ Tholstrup whom he married in 2002.
Luisa reacted much as Squires had before her. ‘He dead to me,’ she said of Moore. ‘He seriously mad. Now he is nobody. He does not exist.’
It was during this time, that Moore made his first phone call to Squires in two decades. Speaking of Kiki, she asked him: ‘Have you found the right one at last, Roger? Is this the one for you?’
Moore replied: ‘This is the one.’ He later settled the divorce from Luisa for £10 million.
In 2008, Moore published his autobiography, My Word Is My Bond, which revealed little more than his gift for the priceless anecdote. Critics compared it to David Niven’s acclaimed memoir, The Moon’s A Balloon.
It was a compliment that thrilled Moore, who often said Niven was the friend he missed most. ‘Gone to the cutting room in the sky,’ he would say.
He claimed he had never sat through one of his own Bond movies — ‘not something I’d pay 3s 9d to watch’ — and that Connery and Daniel Craig had far outshone him in the role.
He dismissed his success as 99 per cent luck, with the remaining 1 per cent a scrap of talent he was lucky to have.
But, secretly, Roger Moore loved being 007. He never tired of being recognised as the character, and was delighted to be addressed as ‘Mr Bond’.
When critics complained he had been too flippant for a spy, he retorted that no real espionage agent could expect to survive when every barman in the world recognised him and knew how to make his signature martini cocktail.
‘Come on,’ Moore would chortle, ‘it’s all a big joke.’ And so was his whole life — the most successful and enjoyable joke in cinema, for the actor and his fans alike.