My Lucky Life

He started as a knitwear model and became the suavest James Bond. William Langley pays tribute to Roger Moore.

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As he grew older, Sir Roger Moore had to give up many of the things he most enjoyed – skiing, tennis and drinking martinis. One pleasure he refused to abandon was explaining why he was the worst actor ever to become a major star. “I was hopeless,” he would say, lounging with 007-like nonchalance on a Monte Carlo sun terrace. “My expressions ranged from eyebrows raised to eyebrows lowered or, if I really tried, both of them doing different things.”

The inability to take himself too seriously was part of what made Sir Roger, who died of cancer on May 23, aged 89, one of the best loved movie stars of the age. While other actors obsessed over their work, the former knitwear model tended to see his whole career as a hoot and never stopped wondering how he got so lucky.

Yet the self-deprecation did him an injustice. Roger Moore is the main reason the James Bond movie franchise is still alive and kicking today. When Sean Connery declared he was finished with the role in 1971 (only to return as Bond in 1983’s Never Say Never Again), it was feared audiences would never accept another 007 and the producers considered pulling the plug on the series. Instead, they approached Roger, who was then 45 and starring in TV’s The Persuaders! with Tony Curtis.

Roger’s version of Bond was cheesier and more credulity-stretching than Connery’s, but his first effort – 1973’s