FAREWELL, ROGER MOORE The wittiest 007 charmed as the spy who laughed at himself.
The wittiest 007 charmed as the spy who laughed at himself
If Roger Moore was nervous stepping into James Bond’s shoes for the first time, he didn’t show it. Instead, on the set of 1973’s Live and Let Die, the debonair Englishman focused on helping Bond girl Jane Seymour get over her jitters. “He was very caring to me,” Seymour tells WHO. “I was 20 years old and terrified of the whole experience and he teased me terribly, but at the same time he watched out for me.” When the two met up at a charity event last year, they spent a long time reminiscing. “His memory was brilliant,” says Seymour, 66, adding that Moore was “loving, funny, just Roger. He never lost that twinkle. He was always a gentleman.”
Moore, who died in Switzerland on May 23 at age 89 after a short battle with cancer, worked hard to create the dashing persona that served him well for 12 years as a seductive secret agent. While his predecessor, Sean Connery, brought real menace to the part, Moore poked fun at his pretty-boy image and gave Bond audiences a licence to laugh. But in one of his final interviews, he told Britain’s The Telegraph he wasn’t naturally selfconfident. “In my teens I was very insecure,” he said, “and so I invented Roger Moore.”
That Roger Moore led a jetsetting life, onscreen and off. The son of a London policeman worked as a model, finding fame as Simon Templar, a thief who stole from crooks, in TV’S The Saint. After Connery stepped down as 007 Moore starred in seven Bond films, keeping his tongue firmly in his cheek and an eyebrow quizzically arched. He never claimed to be much of an actor, joking that his “range has always been something between the two extremes of ‘raises left eyebrow’ and ‘raises right eyebrow.’”
Moore’s love life was nearly as colourful as Bond’s. After an early marriage to actress and ice skater Doorn Van Steyn, he wed Welsh singer Dorothy Squires, who threw a brick through his window and sued him when he left her for his third wife, Italian actress Luisa Mattioli. He settled down happily with his fourth wife, Swedish socialite Kristina Tholstrup, whom he wed in 2002. In his later years, he became a champion for children and was knighted for his work with UNICEF in 2003. After his death, his children with Mattioli— Deborah, Geoffrey and Christian—said their father considered his work with the organisation his “greatest achievement.”
Famous friends fondly remember Moore’s wit. “We had an unusually long relationship
filled with jokes and laughter,” Connery said in a statement. Longtime manager Gareth Owens told WHO Moore “was a sensitive soul underneath and always said that this idea of not taking himself too seriously was a self-defence mechanism” that kept him in good graces with fans and critics alike. “In theatrical terms, I’ve never had a part that demands much of me,” Moore told The New York Times in 1970. “The only way I’ve had to extend myself has been to carry on charming.” Nobody did it better.