INTERVIEW:Roger Moore tells Róisín Inglethat he always played James Bond for laughs because that's the way he saw it - as a "comic strip"
SITTING IN A claustrophobically plush London hotel lobby, waiting for Roger Moore to arrive, I am hijacked by an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Give or take a few minor details of time and location, I have been in this scenario before.
Twelve years ago I sat waiting in a claustrophobically plush Dublin hotel lobby for the star of The Saint, The Persuaders!and Ivanhoe, not to mention seven Bond films, whom I was due to meet at 1pm. Being green and dedicated to landing my first big celebrity interview, I waited for three hours for him to arrive. When he did, I watched crestfallen as he took the lift straight up to his suite.
I explained myself to staff at reception; they rang up to Moore, who told them to pass on the message that he was "too tired" for the interview. At this point I may have muttered a dejected: "Oh, James!"
I probably would never have got over the slight except for the fact that at work the next morning there was a message on my phone from the Spy Who Stood Me Up: "My dear Róisín, this is Roger Moore. I am terribly sorry for not meeting with you yesterday. Please accept my apologies. Perhaps we can do it another time." I played it over and over to colleagues, none of whom had ever received an answerphone message from James Bond.
And now, 12 years later, here he is, wearing what appears to be his daytime uniform of gold-buttoned blazer, crisp shirt and striped tie. He has just had lunch - "Two poached eggs, bacon and tomato. I made a pig of myself" - and seems tired after what has been weeks of publicity engagements for his memoirs, My Word Is My Bond.
I remind him of our almost-encounter. Unsurprisingly, he has no recollection. "I must apologise," he says. "I think I must have been doing a commercial and may have had three or four hard days' filming." At 81 his voice still oozes irresistible Bond charm. There was no need for an apology, I tell him. "You are getting one whether you like it or not," he counters.
Moore's book is not one of those memoirs full of dirt-dishing and muck-raking. His guiding philosophy while writing it was "if you can't say something nice about someone, then say nothing". So instead of malicious gossip it's full of harmless but diverting showbiz anecdotes featuring the likes of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Lana Turner and Frank Sinatra, and dearly departed friends such as David Niven.
We learn about his childhood in Stockwell, in south London, and his hospital visits, including one when he was circumcised. "I was the only boy with a bandage on his pecker," he writes. His "little man" gets mentioned elsewhere in the book, too.
Moore was an only child, which, happily for him, meant his parents "had nobody else to concentrate on except me". He hero-worshipped his late father, George. "He was probably the cleverest man I ever met," he says. "He could do everything. He could act, build sets; he did magic tricks; he played the banjo."
George Moore was a police constable charged with drawing plans of crime scenes. "He did a lot of his work at home after I went to bed, and so he spent lots of time with me, going swimming and that kind of thing. When I was asked what I wanted to do for work when I grew up I would say I wasn't going to work, I was going to be a policeman, because it seemed as though my father never did much work at all," he says.
Moore's working-class upbringing was hardly charmed: he was evacuated during the second World War, and there were those childhood health issues - he still revels in his hypochondria. But he was secure in the singular love of his parents. Later he describes himself as "massively egotistical", and it's no stretch to deduce that his ego may have got early nurturing from being the beginning and the end of his parents' world.
No harm to the ego either, of course, was playing some of the biggest babe magnets on TV or film. A talented artist, he dabbled in animation and modelling, but he eventually fell in love with acting. He became one of the last contract stars at Warner Brothers and MGM, in Hollywood, and landed the part of Simon Templar in The Saint. He teamed up with Tony Curtis for another long-running series, The Persuaders!,in which he played the debonair Lord Brett Sinclair. By the time the Bond producers came calling, in the 1970s, he was already a well-known name.
Moore's approach to Bond couldn't have been more different from the gritty style of Sean Connery, who, he says, played the character exactly as Ian Fleming wrote it. But Moore saw the "big joke" in the character of a spy who was recognised the world over by hotel managers and by barmen who even knew the incognito agent liked his Martini shaken, not stirred. "I played Bond for laughs, for fun. I like to have fun, and I hoped the audience had fun, because that's the way I saw it - as a comic strip," he says.
Connery, a friend of Moore's, famously referred to the Bond role as "a monster" and grew to resent being defined by 007. "Yes, I think Sean was resentful. Well, he's a Scot, isn't he? He resented that they were making that extreme amount of money, and he didn't think he was getting a fair share of it," he says. "Also, before Bond he wasn't well known, and he became known as Bond, so he wanted to prove he could do other things. He must have mellowed since, though, because he took part in that South Bank Show Bond special recently. At least now he admits he was in it."
Moore never had any such qualms about Bond; the only blight on his seven-film run was a claim in the autobiography of his good friend Cubby Broccoli, the late 007 producer, that Moore resisted the end of his Bond tenure. Moore's final Bond movie, A View to a Kill, came in 1985, when the actor was a mature 57. "Sticks and stones," he says now, denying that he had to be persuaded to leave the Bond franchise. "If I was that sensitive I wouldn't get up in the morning."
Happily settled in Monaco with his fourth wife, Kristina Tholstrup, the world's biggest smoothie proffers brief accounts of his other marriages and dalliances throughout the book. He doesn't come off well in these sections - and, to his credit, he doesn't try to. The Welsh diva Dorothy Squires was so incensed by his betrayal of her that she refused to grant him a divorce for eight years. The ending of his marriage to the Italian actress Luisa Mattioli, the mother of his three children, is described in a brief paragraph where he leaves the family home to get together with Tholstrup, then Mattioli's friend, with barely a backward glance, never mind an explanation. He says he didn't want to talk about "the ladies in my life" in the book and is quick to get in his defence against any accusations of callousness before I can even broach them.
"I am a coward, I admit it. I am quite brave to admit I am a coward, so I am a brave coward," he says. Does he regret not being more communicative when he ended relationships without so much as a conversation?
"I am just not very good at it. Those conversations always ended in arguments, and I don't like arguments. I run 100 miles. My daughter says she learned a lot about me reading the book," he says. Such as what? "Well, I am not very good at communicating emotion in real life. My daughter always says: 'Stop patting me like a dog'. She will say something like 'I love you, Daddy', and I will pat her on the back, which is affection in my book, but she thinks I am treating her like a dog."
Where does he think that comes from? "I think it comes from my father," he says. "We only ever shook hands. I never kissed my father until he had a pacemaker put in. Before that I had never kissed him, which is odd, you know, because I kiss my sons all the time, and they kiss me. Over the years I've found that my reserve is something very personal. I find it difficult to communicate my true feelings. I can say I love, because I do love Kristina, but talking about it I always find hard. I hate gushing and gushing speeches."
I cut him some slack. "In those days," I say, "with so many beautiful leading ladies, it must have been hard" - "You might want to rephrase that," he says, smiling - ". . . to resist," I continue, embarrassed. "Well, I've never been caught. I would have been scarred if I was. There would have been a knife or a plate thrown at me," he says.
He doesn't take himself or his acting too seriously, referring to himself in the book as an aspiring actor. "I have got an Equity card that says I am an actor, but critics have never agreed with that. The only real acting I've done is trying to look brave when I am scared witless," he says, again getting his defence in before the critics, who often dismissed him as a lightweight in acting terms. Then he decides to give himself some small credit.
"I must be able to act, I suppose, because I couldn't have fooled everybody all the time, but the things I have done have just been an extension of my personality. They all looked like me and sounded like me. It was really extraordinary," he says, counterbalancing the faint self-praise with another joke. (He uses self-deprecation like a shield. Towards the end of the interview he describes himself as hugely selfish, but his work with Unicef over the decades - he was recruited by Audrey Hepburn - suggests true generosity of spirit.)
When it comes to talent, Moore believes any he does have is simply "on loan from a greater being". Is he spiritual? "I don't see how you can't be," he says. "Even the majority of scientists have to admit there is something out there beyond our ken. You only have to look at a leaf or an insect under the microscope to sense that it's the creation of some kind of intelligence." He explains a theory he subscribes to that he heard from a friend and mentor, Joe Graham, in California.
"He said we are all parts of a brain, the cells of which get divided. Intelligence is ours to learn. We store it away, and we are part of this brain, going around all the time, until we have satisfied the brain that the cell is full, and then we go back to the whole," he says. Suddenly, I feel as if I'm in a discussion with one of the more esoteric Bond villains. Then, thankfully, Moore continues: "I mean, I don't know about this theory for sure. I haven't had a chance to discuss it with the Pope."
He believes the Bond franchise is in good health. "They haven't made a mistake in 47 years," he says. He doesn't follow the films religiously but did get a DVD of Casino Royale "out of curiosity", because he wanted to prove that he was right and that the critics, who thought Daniel Craig didn't suit the part, were wrong. "And I was right, of course. He was terrific. His action scenes were quite exceptional. I would have been dead after 24 hours. I've never seen a body run so much," he says with a laugh. He says he would play a Bond villain if asked. "But I don't think I will be. It wouldn't work."
Ask who his favourite Bond is and you see why, if he hadn't gone into acting, Moore would have made a fine diplomat. "I haven't seen all of Pierce's films, but Sean created it, and I think Daniel is a worthy successor, and everybody was right in the time when they did it," he says, that tight smile and those twinkling eyes suggesting there is much more he could say on the subject if he chose.
Before I go I ask him to sign my copy of My Word Is My Bond, promising that I won't sell it on eBay like the people hanging outside the hotel clutching 40 identical photographs of him. "They ruin it for the genuine autograph hunters," he says. "I'm beginning to think Ringo Starr, with the 'peace and love and up yours' he gave to fans wanting things signed, has a point."
He signs my book with a flourish, though. "To Róisín. With my apologies for being 12 years late. Love, Roger Moore." Oh, James!
My Word Is My Bond, by Roger Moore, is published by Michael O'Mara Books, £18.99
MOORE'S SEVEN BONDS
Live and Let Die (1973)
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
Moonraker (1979)
For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Octopussy (1983)
A View to a Kill (1985)
FAVOURITE BOND GIRL
"Maud Adams, who was in The Man with the Golden Gun and played Octopussy. She was always on time and always knew her lines - very important."
FAVOURITE BOND VILLAIN
"I had a good professional relationship with all the villains. They got the best lines. A particular favourite would have been Christopher Walken playing Max Zorin in A View to a Kill."
FAVOURITE BOND MOVIE
"The Spy Who Loved Me,because it was the first one I worked on with the director Lewis Gilbert. We shared a common sense of humour. Also, our locations were wonderful, I remember learning to ride a wet bike in Sardinia before they had ever been seen on screen. Half the time I couldn't believe I was getting paid."