NOBODY DROVE IT BETTER
He was The Saint. He was James Bond. And, on screen and off, he drove some very cool cars. We look back at Sir Roger Moore’s motoring career
Sir Roger Moore, who died last week aged 89, was the sort of quintessentially English gentleman that now seems to be an endangered species. Suave, sophisticated, charming and with tongue generally planted firmly in cheek – and eyebrow often quizzically raised – his screen persona and charisma seemed to match his true character.
Most famous for two roles that fully deserve the word ‘iconic’ –
The Saint and James Bond – he nevertheless had a long acting career that began in 1945, although back then, he supplemented his income by modelling knitting patterns.
It was in the late 1950s that historical TV series Ivanhoe made him a household name. He portrayed Simon Templar in The Saint from 1962 to 1969, which saw him accompanied by the first of the cars with which he is inextricably linked: a white Volvo P1800.
The marque’s British presence wasn’t that great at the time but such exposure helped establish it in the UK far more effectively than any advertising campaign, at the expense of Jaguar, which had originally been approached to supply the star car. That Roger also drove Volvos in real life was a bonus both for him and the Swedish company.
After 1971’s The Persuaders – as Lord Brett Sinclair with a mustard-coloured six-cylinder Aston Martin
DBS purporting to be a V8 – he landed the role of James Bond. His lighter, funnier 007 eschewed Astons for Lotuses, to particularly great effect in 1977’s cinematic hit The Spy Who Loved Me.
Alongside the three biggies – Volvo, Lotus and Aston Martin – Roger’s film career encompassed a surprising range of transport. There was the decapitated AEC Regent double-decker bus in Live and Let
Die and Octopussy’s Mercedes-Benz W108 on rails, while a British Leyland Sherpa van provided the source for a stream of 007 quips in The Spy Who Loved Me. Crossplot, meanwhile, saw him in a vintage car rally, trying to evade a helicopter in an Opus HRF kit car pretending to be much older than it really was.
Intriguingly, a 1977 publicity shot during The Spy Who Loved Me production also revealed that his personal transport was a Midas Gold Rover SD1.
Post-Bond, and inspired by his friend, Audrey Hepburn, he became a UNICEF ambassador and did great humanitarian work. He was the first to admit that his film and TV oeuvre was hardly high art, though movies such as 1970’s The Man Who
Haunted Himself showed greater depths then he was often given credit for. However, he was rarely anything less than enormously entertaining.