Simon goes to an eyebrow-raising event

‘Roger was a much-loved man, kind and funny and totally not up himself ’

RECENTLY I WENT TO a celebration of the life of Roger Moore. It’s a life well worth celebrating. Firstly, for his glorious light-hearted approach to playing heroes – Ivanhoe, The Saint, Bond, all of them in different costumes but ingeniously with the same performance. Secondly, for his outstanding work for Unicef, and last, but not least, for singlehandedly reviving the underrated art of eyebrow-raising.

The 1960s and ’70s were a fallow time for the eyebrow; mavericks like De Niro and Pacino were doing whole films without so much as a flicker. Young actors were going through a phase of ‘eyebrow vérité’. Even Dirk Bogarde, the most sardonic of eyebrow-raisers, who had given us some mouth-watering raisings (of both left and right) forsook them totally for Death in Venice. Facial hair was generally running amok, eyebrows were being allowed to meet unplucked above the nose – we were witnessing the grim dawn of The Monobrow.

During his eyebrow workshops, the legendary Gustav Schphouter always tried to instil in us young actors that ‘it’s through the eyebrow that we tap into the façade behind the truth’. Some say it was he who taught Roger his mantra for the raising of eyebrows, ‘The left is for innuendo and the right for outrage’

Be that as it may, it was a wonderful celebration of Roger’s long and happy life. He was a much-loved man, kind and funny and totally not up himself – he was probably a better actor than he let on, not that you’d necessarily want to see him as King Lear.

The Countess of Wessex was there for the event and the Prince of Wales was represented. Dame Joan Collins had come to pay tribute to her old friend. She looked dazzling as always, unnipped or tucked, with the smile of a girl half her age. She concluded her address with an anecdote that in the hands of anyone bothered with political correctness might have gone belly up, for the punchline included the c-word preceded by the f-word. Twice. One of each might just have been acceptable, but a brace of them on a Sunday afternoon could be taken as lèse-majesté. That woman certainly has b—s. I can’t imagine any of the other theatrical dames risking it – please, not the Dench anyway.

The story goes that while Joan was filming one of her sex romps, The Stud or

The Bitch, back in the shoulder-padded days of the ’80s, she was taken ill. The studio doctor went to examine her and declared, ‘Don’t worry, Miss Collins, a couple of days on your feet and we’ll have you back in bed again in no time.’

Simon Williams will be appearing with Lucy Fleming in Posting Letters to the Moon next week at The Ustinov Theatre, Bath; theatreroyal.org.uk