007 actor Moore dies
After a brief battle with cancer, British actor Roger Moore, the suavely insouciant star of seven James Bond films, has died in Switzerland. He was 89.
LONDON — Roger Moore, the suavely insouciant star of seven James Bond films, has died in Switzerland. He was 89.
The British actor died Tuesday after a short battle with cancer, according to a family statement posted on Moore’s official Twitter account.
“We know our own love and admiration will be magnified many times over, across the world, by people who knew him for his films, his television shows and his passionate work for UNICEF, which he considered to be his greatest achievement,” the statement said.
Moore’s relaxed style and sense of whimsy, which relied heavily on the arched eyebrow, seemed a commentary on the essential ridiculousness of the Bond films, in which the handsome British secret agent was as adept at mixing martinis, bedding beautiful women and ordering gourmet meals as he was at disposing of supervillains.
“To me, the Bond situations are so ridiculous, so outrageous,” he once said. “I mean, this man is supposed to be a spy and, yet, everybody knows he’s a spy. Every bartender in the world offers him martinis that are shaken, not stirred. ... So you have to treat the humor outrageously, as well.”
While he never eclipsed Sean Connery in the public’s eye as the definitive James Bond, Moore did play the role of secret agent 007 in just as many films as Connery did, and he managed to do so while “finding a joke in every situation,” according to film critic Rex Reed.
The actor, who came to the role in 1973 after Connery tired of it, had already enjoyed a long career in films and television.
He was remembered warmly by fans of the U.S. 1950s-’60s TV series “Maverick” as Beauregarde Maverick, the English cousin of the Wild West’s Maverick brothers, Bret and Bart. He also starred in the 1959 U.S. series “The Alaskans.” In England, he had a long-running TV hit with “The Saint.”
Born in London, the only child of a policeman, Moore had studied painting before enrolling in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He appeared opposite Elizabeth Taylor in 1954’s “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”
In 1973, he made his first Bond film, “Live and Let Die.” He would make six more, “The Man With the Golden Gun,” “The Spy Who Loved Me,” “Octopussy,” “Moonraker,” “For Your Eyes Only and “A View to a Kill,” over the next 12 years. And while the Bond of the Ian Fleming novels that the films were based on was generally described as being in his 30s, Moore would stay with the role until he was 57.
He continued to work regularly in films after handing over Bond to Timothy Dalton, but never with the same success.
In 1991, Moore became a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. “I felt small, insignificant and rather ashamed that I had traveled so much making films and ignored what was going on around me,” he said in describing how the work had affected him.
In 1996, when his UNICEF job took him to the World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, he disclosed that he too had been a victim.
“I was molested when I was a child, not seriously, but I didn’t tell my mother until I was 16, because I felt that it was something to be ashamed of,” he said.