Sir Roger Moore
Dashing actor who shot to fame as The Saint before bringing wit and high camp to the role of 007
SIR ROGER MOORE, the film actor who has died aged 89, won international celebrity in the 1960s as the immaculately clad Simon Templar in The Saint,a television role that led to his being cast as James Bond, the secret agent with a licence to kill, in a hugely successful series of feature films.
Playing the debonair Templar with something of the cool sophistication of George Sanders, Moore brought to the role the unctuous charm of a male escort coupled with the abiding image of a man of action whose deathdefying feats left his immaculate good looks (not to mention his halo) totally unruffled.
But critics invariably derided his limited range; Moore himself, describing actors as “hunks of meat in front of a camera”, admitted to using “only two expressions when acting”. One of these, the quizzically raised eyebrow, loomed large in his portrayal of James Bond, a role which he took over from Sean Connery.
Indeed one American columnist went so far as to confer on him the Kabuki acting award “in recognition of the manner in which he has reduced all human emotions to a series of variations on one gesture, the raising of the right eyebrow”.
Lacking both Connery’s sex appeal and aura of menace, Moore was once asked what he thought he could bring to the part. He replied: “White teeth.”
But Moore had little in common with the fearless heroes he portrayed on screen. The actor, who claimed that he telephoned his parents daily while on location, described himself as a “devout coward” and recalled that during the filming of violent scenes he was made nervous by the presence of prop firearms. “I hate loud bangs,” he said. “Every time I had to fire a gun during filming I blinked. They always had to go through the film and edit out the frame where I closed my eyes.”
Moore’s relationships with women bore little resemblance to 007’s indiscriminate conquests. After two ineffective essays at matrimony, including a notably unsuccessful marriage to the singer Dorothy Squires (whom he later referred to as “that Squires woman”), Moore described himself as “a one woman man”.
He met actress Luisa Mattioli in 1962 and remained with her for nearly 30 years. He was married for a fourth and final time to Kristina Tholstrup when he was well into his seventies.
Nor did he ever pretend to be a great actor. In fact he claimed to have stopped acting in 1958 when he appeared in the television series of knightly derring-do Ivanhoe. “On television they don’t want acting performances,” he recalled, “they want personality performances. They want their heroes to behave predictably.”
In this Moore was supremely successful. During a career spanning four decades he remained, almost to the last, the romantic leading man. Even at the age of 56, after 13 years as Bond, Moore continued to allow himself to be persuaded, perhaps against his better judgment, to participate in love scenes with girls 35 years his junior – behaviour which, off screen, could only have gained him the reputation of a roué.
Roger George Moore was born on October 14 1927 in Stockwell, south London, the son of a policeman whose job was to draw plans of crime scenes to be produced in court cases; his mother was a cashier in a restaurant in the Strand.
Overweight as a child (he lost the weight in adolescence), he nearly died from double bronchial pneumonia, attended Hackford Road primary school and went on to a scholarship at Battersea Grammar, leaving before his 16th birthday to start work as a £3 10s-a-week paint and trace artist and tea boy at a film company. “I only lasted a year,” he remembered. “I don’t think my tea was up to scratch.”
A friend suggested he make some money as an extra at Denham Studios, then filming Caesar and Cleopatra. He auditioned at their Wardour Street office and started work the same day. After only three days as an extra, Moore was approached by the co-director of the film Brian Hurst. Hurst offered to pay his drama school fees, and with his help Moore applied for a place at Rada.
Moore had a greater interest in finding paid employment than in studying acting. In his first term he made his West End debut, playing a walk-on part in a production of An Italian Straw Hat at the Arts Theatre in 1945. He spent only three terms at Rada, before leaving the course to join a repertory company based in Cambridge.
Moore’s fastidiousness of dress and deportment while on stage earned him the nickname “the duchess”, which persisted after 1945 when Moore began his National Service. To the surprise of his friends Moore was sent to officer training school. “I think it was mainly because I looked the part,” he recalled. “I certainly had no ambition to be an officer.” As a non-commissioned officer he served in Germany and Italy, organising entertainment.
In December 1946, during his National Service, Moore was married for the first time to a blonde figureskater, Doorn van Steyn (born Lucy Woodard in London). When he left the Army in 1947 the couple lived in a bedsitting room in Streatham. Doorn, then working in an ice spectacular, supported the couple while Moore spent several months unsuccessfully looking for work.
Unable to find any other paid employment, he took jobs as a male model advertising Brylcreem and Colgate toothpaste as well as swimming trunks and various items of knitwear.
In 1952 he was modelling cardigans when he met the singer Dorothy Squires during a party at her house. Moore stayed the night and began a passionate affair with the singer (10 years his senior) which culminated in his divorce from Doorn and marriage to Dorothy Squires in 1953. Moore moved out of the council flat he shared with Doorn and into Dorothy Squires’s mansion.
Dorothy Squires was instrumental in establishing Moore as a new talent in the United States. In 1953 the couple visited Hollywood to publicise her cabaret act and to promote Moore’s acting career. Dorothy Squires enjoyed what she described as “out-manoeuvring the moguls”, but after some months in the United States it transpired that the handsome 25-year-old Moore was a more interesting proposition to agents than his 35-year-old wife.
He was offered various film roles, including parts in The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), which starred Elizabeth Taylor, and Interrupted Melody (1955) starring Glenn Ford.
As Moore began to establish himself as an actor, his television work increased. During the 1950s he starred in the historical romance series Ivanhoe, the comedy-adventure The Alaskan and the popular Western comedy Maverick. After five years, however, he felt that he had “outgrown” Ivanhoe. “I felt type-cast,” he said. “It was good fun but it wasn’t getting me anywhere.”
As acting commitments kept him in Hollywood, he saw less and less of Dorothy Squires and their marriage began to falter. On several occasions Moore admitted to being so afraid of his drunken, foul-mouthed wife that he spent the night sleeping in the garden rather than face her.
In 1961 Moore returned to Europe and accepted a part in an Italian potboiler, The Rape of the Sabines. His co-star was the Italian actress Luisa Mattioli, who was at that time preparing to step into Sophia Loren’s shoes as Italy’s top female star. “It sounds awful,” Moore remembered, “but I fell in love with Luisa at first sight.”
Luisa could not speak English, and Moore remembered communicating with drawings. “I think for the first year we were together,” he said, “Luisa thought I was a travelling bed salesman.” Moore accepted another Italian based film, No Man’s Land, and he and Luisa Mattioli set up home in Venice.
While the couple were living in Italy, Lew Grade of ATV, who remembered Moore in Ivanhoe, offered him the part of Simon Templar in a television adventure series based on Leslie Charteris’s swashbuckling hero The Saint, a character that had first appeared in a 1928 novel, Meet the Tiger.
Previously Moore had halfheartedly tried to buy the story rights from Charteris himself and was highly enthusiastic about playing the character. He starred in The Saint for seven years and it became one of the longest-running adventure series on television. “I just played it as I thought I could and should,” he said. “As always, I just played myself.”
Shown on ITV between 1962 and 1970, The Saint ran for 118 episodes and made Moore a star not just in Britain but in the 80 or so countries around the world to which the show was sold.
The star role had originally been offered to Patrick Mcgoohan, who turned it down because in the scripts Templar chased too many women. Moore played Templar with a memorably dry, twinkling style, and the mandatory arched eyebrow.
In an entertaining series of action capers, Moore as the perfectly coiffed Templar roved salubrious British and exotic foreign locales dealing with blackmailers, kidnappers, thieves and murderers, roaring around in a sleek yellow Volvo P1800, invariably squiring a different beautiful girl in every episode.
When the series went into colour in 1966, Moore became co-producer, bought a share of the rights and with them a cut of the show’s global sales, estimated at some £370 million, making him financially secure for life.
In 1962 he sought a divorce from Dorothy Squires. She refused and sued for “restitution of conjugal rights” which meant that Moore was liable to pay a fine if he did not return to the marital home. It was the beginning of long and bitter divorce proceedings which lasted more than eight years.
Luisa Mattioli became pregnant some months after the couple began living together and changed her name by deed poll. They had another child two years later. “I know some people thought we were wrong to have children out of marriage,” Moore said, “but I could not foresee Dorothy giving me a divorce for some time and we wanted children very much.” The couple were married in 1969 after Dorothy Squires had finally agreed to a divorce.
After he had made his last appearance in The Saint in 1970, he accepted a role, as Brett Sinclair, in The Persuaders! opposite Tony Curtis. In an attempt to add humour to the series, Moore and Curtis were encouraged to “play to the camera”. The result introduced an air of high camp to the expensive stunts and locations and may have proved a rehearsal for Moore’s later hamming in the Bond films. He designed his own natty suits, safari jackets and blazers for the production.
In 1972, when Sean Connery no longer wanted to play James Bond, Moore was offered the role in Live and Let Die. Critics felt that his first attempt at James Bond was “flat and lifeless”: nevertheless the film, made for $7 million, grossed $126 million at the box office. In his second Bond film, The Man With the Golden Gun (1974) Moore began to settle into playing the role for laughs. By his third film, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), he was firmly established as “the amusing Bond”.
Unlike Connery, Moore had no worries about being typecast as Bond, having survived seven years of typecasting as Simon Templar. “You’re always going to be associated with somebody,” he said, “you may as well be associated with a success.”
He continued to play James Bond in four more films, Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983) and A View to Kill (1985). As the plots and locations grew increasingly outlandish and gimmick-laden, Moore took the “less is more” theory of acting to its limits.
Later films featured a high proportion of shots in which he stood completely still looking quizzically at the action. “When I was in The Saint,” he remembered, “I had two ‘looks’. In the Bond films I progressed to four.” During those years he also turned up in adventure films such as Gold (1974), Shout at the Devil (1976) and The Wild Geese (1978), in which he played a cigar-chewing mercenary; and he contributed a drolly self-mocking cameo to The Cannonball Run (1981).
Although Moore occasionally expressed an interest in leaving the character of 007 to a younger actor, he was always persuaded into making another film by the promise of ever increasing fees. As a result of his appearances as Bond, Moore became one of Britain’s richest men with over £14 million in investments.
In 1985 he finally accepted that he should stop playing a character 30 years younger than himself and Cubby Broccoli offered the role to Timothy Dalton.
In the late 1980s Moore took a break from film making. In 1989 he was due to star in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest musical, Aspects of Love, but pulled out of the show four weeks before opening night. He admitted that he had lost his nerve over singing in public and felt that his voice was not strong enough for the demands of Lloyd Webber’s score.
“I was petrified,” he recalled. “I had such bad nightmares. I had to take a pill to knock myself out at night, but there was always that little coward struggling through to wake me up.”
In 1990 Moore appeared with Michael Caine in Michael Winner’s film Bullseye! The story dealt with two confidence tricksters and despite the combined charm of Moore and Caine the film was a box office flop. One critic described it as “astonishingly lousy”; another described the two leading performances as “feeble, lazy and self indulgent”.
The following year Moore turned his energies to charitable endeavours on behalf of Unicef, visiting underprivileged children in Latin America and Brazil, becoming an official representative in 1992 and later an ambassador, visiting many countries on Unicef ’s behalf.
Among his later films was Spice World in 1997, in which he played a debonair, pet-stroking Bond-style villain known as the Chief. That year he also appeared – as the voice on a radio broadcast – in an unsatisfactory thriller, The Saint, starring Val Kilmer and very loosely inspired by the original character.
After the collapse of his marriage to Luisa Mattioli, Moore married Kristina Tholstrup in 2002.
He abandoned his first attempt at an autobiography when the first 6,000 words were stolen, along with his luggage, at Geneva airport in 1992. Moore had become a tax exile when Labour returned to power in 1974, and latterly had divided his time between Gstaad and Monaco. At 81 his ghosted memoirs, My Word is my Bond, appeared in 2008. In his dotage he admitted to being drawn each morning to the obituary pages out of “morbid curiosity”. He had a second bash at autobiography in Last Man Standing in 2014.
Created a CBE in 1999, Moore was knighted four years later for the charity work which for more than a decade had dominated his public life. In 2007 he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work on television and in film, appropriately located at 7007 Hollywood Boulevard.
Roger Moore is survived by his fourth wife and his three children.
Sir Roger Moore, born October 14 1927, died May 23 2017