Irreverent
and knowing as James Bond: Sir Roger Moore obituary
Actor
who brought humour, panache and suavity to his starring roles in The
Saint, The Persuaders! and seven James Bond films
by Ryan Gilbey
Sir Roger Moore, who
has died aged 89, considered himself to be only the fourth best actor
to have played Ian Fleming’s secret-service agent James Bond on
screen: in his estimation, he came in behind Daniel Craig (whom he
called “the Bond”), Sean Connery and George Lazenby. Though Moore
was rarely regarded as the best or most definitive Bond, his
inimitable humour and panache made him many viewers’ favourite. His
tally of seven films – beginning with Live and Let Die (1973) and
ending with A View to a Kill (1985) – equalled that of Connery,
though Moore occupied the role for a longer consecutive period. He
was eloquent on the distinction between their portrayals. “Sean
played Bond as a killer and I played Bond as a lover,” he said.
Only on Fridays did he resemble a cold-blooded mercenary: “That’s
the day I received my paychecks.”
His casting was
sometimes erroneously considered to be the catalyst for a new-found
levity in the series; in fact, the two films prior to his arrival (On
Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 1969, and Diamonds Are Forever, 1971)
had already tipped the tone towards silliness. What Moore did very
cannily was to underline the absurdity of Bond himself. “My whole
reaction was always – he is not a real spy,” he said. “You
can’t be a real spy and have everybody in the world know who you
are and what your drink is. That’s just hysterically funny.”
Irreverence and
knowingness were integral to his interpretation. But he also seemed
far more plausibly endangered as Bond than Connery had ever been.
Part of the viewer’s affection and even concern for him could be
attributed to his advanced age: Moore was already 45 when he was cast
as Bond, whereas Connery made his debut at 32 and Craig was 37. This
contributed to the sense that Moore’s wellbeing was actively at
risk on screen. Subjected to punishing levels of G-force on a flight
simulator in Moonraker (1979) or dismantling a bomb while dressed as
a clown in Octopussy (1983), he looked uniquely vulnerable.
Clambering up the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge in A View
to a Kill seemed inadvisable behaviour for a man of 56.
His range was
modest, as he was the first to admit. He credited his success to “99%
luck”, and singled out the 1970 supernatural thriller The Man Who
Haunted Himself, in which he played a businessman who appears to be
living two lives, as “the only film I was allowed to act in”.
Such self-deprecation only encouraged critics to contribute their own
jibes: Anthony Lane of the New Yorker said that Moore “needed a
stunt double for his acting scenes” in the Bond films.
Moore became an
object of mild mockery after the 1980s satirical TV show Spitting
Image featured a puppet of him that expressed its emotions solely
through its eyebrows. The joke proved robust, but not everyone
realised that Moore had cracked it first. “The eyebrows thing was
my own fault,” he said. “I was talking about how talentless I was
and said I have three expressions: eyebrow up, eyebrow down and both
of them at the same time. And they used it – very well, I must
say.”
He was born in
London, to Lily (nee Pope), a housewife, and George Moore, a police
constable whose responsibilities included drawing accident scenes to
be used in evidence in court. Roger himself had artistic ambitions
early in life. He left school at 15 to accept a job as a trainee
animator at Publicity Picture Productions, but was sacked a few
months later when he neglected to collect a can of film.
Tagging along with
friends in 1945 to auditions for film extras, Moore was picked to
appear in a non-speaking role as a legionnaire in Caesar and
Cleopatra, starring Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains. The film’s first
assistant director, Brian Desmond Hurst, took Moore under his wing
and encouraged him to audition for Rada. When Moore was accepted,
Hurst paid his fees. He left at 18 to become a supporting player in
the repertory company of the Arts theatre, Cambridge, before he was
called up for military service. Posted to Germany, he succeeded in
getting a transfer to the Combined Services Entertainment unit. In
1946, he had married Doorn Van Steyn, a fellow Rada student.
After three years in
the army, Moore returned to acting, landing small roles in theatre
and film, as well as appearing as a model for knitting patterns and
in photo stories. He moved to New York City in 1953 with his second
wife, the singer Dorothy Squires (Moore and Van Steyn had divorced
earlier that year), and began getting acting work on US television.
He signed a contract with MGM and was cast in a series of unmemorable
films, including The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) and Interrupted
Melody (1955). Returning to Britain, he took the lead in a 1958
television adventure series adapted from Walter Scott’s novel
Ivanhoe.
Other regular TV
roles of increasing size followed, including two western series, The
Alaskans and Maverick, before Moore finally became a bona fide star,
playing the crime-fighter and playboy Simon Templar in the popular
television crime series The Saint. Produced by Lew Grade, it ran from
1962 until 1969. Moore, who also directed nine episodes, brought a
suavity to the part which makes it a clear precursor of his work as
James Bond; even his habit in early episodes of looking directly at
the camera prefigures the later Bonds, where he all but winks at the
audience.
Two years after The
Saint ended, Moore was cast once more as a playboy adventurer in
another Grade TV series, The Persuaders!, in which he was teamed with
Tony Curtis. The odd-couple pairing (Moore, as Lord Brett Sinclair,
was dapper; Curtis, playing Danny Wilde, was a ruffian) and the
action staged in glamorous locations made the series a hit. Moore
also directed two episodes. During this period, he was appointed the
head of Brut Films, an offshoot of the cologne manufacturer. He tried
unsuccessfully to entice Cary Grant to make his acting comeback in a
Brut production, but succeeded in recruiting him as one of the
company’s advisers. Moore was also instrumental in the making of A
Touch of Class, the 1973 romantic comedy for which Glenda Jackson won
her second Oscar.
His brief tenure as
a mogul was abbreviated when he signed a three-film contract to play
James Bond, a part which demanded no adjustment to the persona he had
already established. Live and Let Die, an attempt to modernise the
series with gritty blaxploitation trappings, still had its share of
daftness; in one scene, Bond escapes across water using a row of
alligators as stepping stones. Moore’s performance here and in his
second outing, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), was cool and
confident.
But it is his third
Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), which is rightly considered
his pinnacle. The writing, direction and production design were
impressive, the action more than usually taut, and the balance of
comedy and suspense acutely judged – as in the iconic opening
sequence in which Bond escapes falling to his death by opening a
parachute emblazoned with the Union Jack. (The film was released in
the Queen’s silver jubilee year.) Moore appeared relaxed but never
complacent. He even came up with some of the movie’s nicest
touches, such as the moment when Bond, emerging from an underwater
drive, deposits a small fish out of his car window.
In between the Bond
films, Moore moonlighted in other roles, including Gold (1974), a
mining adventure shot in Johannesburg, the romantic comedy That Lucky
Touch (1975) and the war movie Shout at the Devil (1975), co-starring
Lee Marvin. But nothing came close to eclipsing his day job.
Outside the Bond
series, he rarely deviated from action, appearing in quick succession
in Escape to Athena (1979), North Sea Hijack and The Sea Wolves (both
1980). The Wild Geese (1978), a clunky, crypto-racist thriller about
ageing mercenaries, was unusual in showcasing a more brutal side to
Moore. Though he was seen pushing villains to their deaths in The Spy
Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only (1981), nothing compared to the
opening scene of The Wild Geese, in which he kills a drug dealer by
forcing him to ingest large quantities of cocaine at gunpoint.
Moonraker (1979),
among the silliest of the Bond series, was rushed into production to
capitalise on the Star Wars-inspired craze for all things
space-related. Moore had a gas playing a mummy’s boy who believes
himself to be Roger Moore in the US ensemble comedy The Cannonball
Run (1981), before returning to Bond in the comparatively sober For
Your Eyes Only and the positively quaint Octopussy. Moore bowed out,
not before time, with A View to a Kill, where he looked
understandably wary to be sharing the screen, not to mention a bed,
with the ferocious Grace Jones.
Though the producer
Albert R “Cubby” Broccoli suggested in his autobiography that
Moore had refused to accept that his time in the role was over, the
actor later denied this. Once free of Bondage, Moore lost his
appetite for acting and took on only a handful of roles, few of them
distinguished. He had been due to return to the stage in Andrew Lloyd
Webber’s Aspects of Love in 1989, but dropped out shortly before
opening night, blaming inadequacies in his singing voice.
He joined his friend
Michael Caine in Bullseye! (1990), a pitiful Michael Winner comedy in
which they played two characters apiece. He also appeared in The
Quest (1996), directed by its star, the action hero Jean-Claude Van
Damme, and in the Spice Girls’ vehicle Spice World (1997). He had a
supporting part in the two-hour pilot for a new series of The Saint
(2013), but the show was not commissioned. In 2012, he undertook a
highly successful UK stage tour of An Evening With Roger Moore, in
which he reflected on his life and career.
Moore devoted much
of his time to being a goodwill ambassador for Unicef; it was for
this humanitarian work that he was knighted in 2003. He had left
Britain in the late 1970s to avoid what he considered the prohibitive
tax rate for high earners, and took homes in countries including
Switzerland and Monaco. Money continued to be much on his mind: his
2008 autobiography, My Word Is My Bond, is peppered with variations
on the line “a rather nice deal was agreed with my agent”.
Moore admitted to
being a lifelong hypochondriac; among those to whom he expressed
thanks in the acknowledgments of his autobiography are five GPs, four
cardiologists, two dermatologists and a proctologist. He visibly
enjoyed his time as Bond and expressed only occasional regrets about
his career. “I spent my life playing heroes because I looked like
one,” he said. “Practically everything I’ve been offered didn’t
require much beyond looking like me. I would have loved to play a
real baddie.”
He is survived by
his fourth wife, Kristina Tholstrup, whom he married in 2002, and by
three children – Deborah, Geoffrey and Christian – from his third
marriage, to the actor Luisa Mattioli, which ended in divorce.
• Roger George
Moore, actor, born 14 October 1927; died 23 May 2017
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