Sir Roger Moore: 'So much of the 1960s was about chain smoking and Playtex bras'

Was Coward right? Does Sir Roger really reckon Moore is less? And what, for example, motivates Britain’s most debonair man? Now 89, at an age when most of his contemporaries are taking their close-ups in that great film studio in the sky, he is touring the country with an autobiographical show. Why bother? Why not stay at home in Switzerland or Monaco and wave to the passing billionaire yachts which float past on filched pensioner money?

And there are his relationships. He’s been a ladies man, for sure, but why so keen to marry so many of them (four with three children in total)? Why commit to matrimony when divorce can prove so costly?

At a swish London W1 club, Moore looks as suave and stylish as he did when he played Brett Sinclair in The Persuaders in 1971: white shirt, pink tie, navy blazer and dark flannels. Yes, his hair is a few shades further from grey than it has a right to be but he could still work as a model (as he did during the lean years) if the knitting pattern people came calling again.

An easy question to start. What’s the secret to looking great, Roger? “Good life, good wife,” he says, before smiling and adding: “And only ever one at a time.”

Moore’s vocal delivery may be slightly more languid these days, but it only serves to make him sound cooler. As a matter of interest, how does he rate his current Coolest Man competitor in the form of Mad Men’s Jon Hamm?

“Good series, Jon Hamm’s,” he acknowledges. “But so much of the 1960s was about chain smoking and Playtex bras and pointed tits.” Moore grins at the realisation he’s gone slightly off piste but continues. “I remember those days when women wore all those foundation garments and girdles and God knows what, and struggling to find that spare bit of flesh beneath the French knickers and the stocking tops.” He sighs of his failed expeditions to sexual nirvana. “But you never got much further up than that.”

Since we’re on the subject, does he feel women have become too free with their favours?

Moore dodges the morality issue, instead taking a more practical analysis. “Tights have ruined all those little pleasures for us." He adds quickly: “That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?”

Sounds honest. And Moore, it seems, is more honest than most in the business. But does he really not take himself too seriously or is it part of his shtick? “Nobody else has taken me seriously. Why should I?”

Mmm. This can’t be entirely true, I suggest. The handsome young actor joined MGM Studios in 1954 on a seven-year contract but was dumped unceremoniously after two years and a series of duds. Surely he must have a deep, inner resolve, to get back on the acting horse, which he did with Ivanhoe in 1958?

“Yes, I’ve had people crapping on my doorstep,” he says, “but I’m not bitter. You’ve got to have a sense of humour, otherwise the first time you see yourself on the screen you’ll be ready to commit suicide. You think, ‘How awful I am.’”

Come on, Roger. Continuity in the business alone suggests an innate self-belief. Roger George Moore however insists he wasn’t born confident. “I was nervously shy,” says the son of a policeman and a housewife, who grew up in London's Stockwell. Was it because he was an only child? “Possibly," he says, a mischievous eyebrow darting upward. “I think that’s why I played with myself a great deal.”

On screen Moore appeared cooler than a Mint Imperial but that, he says, was acting. Shyness meant he wouldn't even go into a restaurant on his own and it wasn't until he returned to Hollywood in 1959, this time to Warner Bros to make The Miracle, that he met the man whom he says altered his entire outlook on life.

“In the film I played the Duke of Wellington’s nephew at the Battle of Waterloo. But surprisingly, the studio insisted I work with a voice coach, Joe Graham, because my voice was said to be too English.

“Joe talked to me a great deal then quizzed me: ‘Why, Roger, if you are 6ft 1in, do you only stand 5ft 10in?’ He then asked when I spoke to people who had gone to university if I felt worried I may mispronounce a word. I said that was possible and he said: ‘That’s the problem. You have to stand taller. You have to do something with what you’ve been given. And the reason they say you are too English is because you don’t open your mouth. Subconsciously, you are afraid you will use the wrong word. And it doesn’t make them better than you because they’ve had the good fortune to be able to study.'”

Moore grew taller with every day spent with Graham. “He was with me all the time when I worked on the film, and when I got the chance to do two more movies and the Maverick series I asked to have Joe with me.”

But if the actor was professionally insecure, surely he was more confident with the ladies? Even the suit of armour he wore in Ivanhoe looked bed-crumpled. And by the time he became The Saint in 1962 the halo was ironic. This was the man every shorthand typist in the land wanted to marry.

Moore’s deep voice becomes more serious. “No. It may sound silly but I didn’t know I was attractive to them. I think that’s why I invented the confident, suave character Roger Moore.”

He smiles as his mind goes into flashback. “I remember when I was around 15 and a half, during the war, I met this 19-year-old blonde girl with very white teeth, and God she was tall, at the Locarno in Streatham. We found ourselves in this doorway during the blackout.

"I was doing quite well, right up until the moment the Old Bill came along. ‘Ello, ello, what’s going on 'ere?’ It was obvious, but then he asked me how old I was, and I lied. Then he asked me to produce the card which would explain why I wasn’t in the army. And I couldn’t, so the blonde learned my true age and said, ‘I’m off.’ So it didn’t leave me feeling too confident with the ladies.”

He married young. Moore met his first wife, Doorn Van Steyn, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art aged 17 and married her at 19. “It was a mistake. We were too young. And it went wrong. For once, it wasn’t my fault. Then I met Dorothy Squires, who was wonderful. A lovely singer.” Squires was older. “Yes – nine years older, and very funny, with a great sense of humour. We laughed a lot. And there was a lot of passion.”

For passion you can read tempestuous battles and bricks being hurled through windows when Squires discovered Moore to be less than a saint. “When I moved to Hollywood she would go off and I’d be left alone.”

With temptation? He sidesteps the question with a little tale about actor Ty Hardin, who was married to a beautiful girl but was caught one day comforting the sad Scandinavian au pair. And he carried on comforting her every time she sobbed, until his wife could take no more. Clearly Moore did his share of comforting. Did this include the screen goddesses of the day such as Lana Turner, whom he starred alongside in The King’s Thief? “Edmund Purdom, an English actor who was my neighbour and who couldn’t pronounce his Rs, tried to put me off her a little bit after I told him I’d be working with her. ‘Well, that should be jolly nice for you, if you don’t mind a bit of sex before scenes and a bit of dwinking.’

“Lana and I got on well but to be honest I was scared stiff. She was married to Lex Barker [best known for playing Tarzan in five films from 1949 to 1953], who was built like a brick s***-house. I remember one day on set she had a sore neck and I gave her a bit of a rub and turned round and there was Lex. Later in London, where she was filming with Sean Connery, she invited me to a party at her rented house in Hampstead. I danced with her and was having a nice time and suddenly saw her new boyfriend Johnny Stompanato watching us from a doorway. Two weeks later he was deported from England and later killed by Lana’s daughter.”

Did his Joe Graham-developed character help him cope with the huge acting egos in the business? “Yes, there were a lot of arseholes,” he says, smiling. Was Tony Curtis, his mercurial co-star in The Persuaders, difficult? “Tony had problems sticking to the script,” he recalls. “And he didn’t want to do plot lines. So we had to change the characters. I was the one who carried the plot and he liked to ad lib. We had a lot of laughs but I’m so grateful to him because Tony was so anti-smoking, and when I had a first meeting with him in his enormous mansion on Sunset Boulevard he gave me a book on lung cancer.

“Soon after, on a flight to the Bahamas, which because of delays took nearly 24 hours, I had been chain smoking and I got off the plane and coughed up blood. I was convinced I had lung cancer, thanks to Tony’s book. It so frightened the life out of me and I stopped.”

Moore has had several health scares. “I don’t drink because I’m diabetic. Then something in my liver had to be removed. And I’ve got a pacemaker.” Does that mean sex is his only vice? “God’s taken care of that,” he says, with a wry shrug. “I’ve had my prostate removed.”

He adds, smiling: “Perhaps I should call the show Tales of a Hypochondriac. But no, I’m not a hypochondriac. I don’t think I’m ill. I’ve actually had the lot. So the Glasgow audience have to be prepared I may have to be defibrillated.”

It’s entirely obvious women have proved to be a huge motivating factor in Moore’s life, highlighted by the twinkle which appears in his eye as he talks of the loves of his life and the beauties he’s worked with. But did he feel he had to be married? “Have you never been married?” he asks. No, I say. Never quite followed through. “Well, I’m an honourable person,” he offers. As opposed to me? He laughs and adds: “If you have your way with the ladies then you should be prepared to marry them.” Such chivalry. “I find it very difficult to say no.”

Indeed. He wooed his fourth wife, Kristina Tholstrup, while still married to Luisa Mattioli, the mother of his three children. “Yes, perhaps, but I’ve found one I’m very happy with.” He laughs. “This is a very rare day she has let me out of her sight.” Surely she trusts him now? “I don’t think it’s trust,” he says, with a little guffaw. “But at a certain age you have to stop farting around.”

Is he an eternal optimist when it comes to romance? Moore answers by singing the chorus of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. But what he loves almost as much as women is money. He takes out a plastic £5 note and looks at it adoringly. “Do you have these in Scotland?” he asks. Then he takes out several more and plays with them. “I used to love Fridays in the theatre when you got paid, nine or ten quid, and I’d go straight to the tobacconist and buy a packet of Passing Cloud cigarettes, which had an obvious green box, and I’d sit at the top of the bus and produce the packet so everybody could see it. And in case they didn’t know I was an actor, I’d produce a copy of my latest script and start learning my lines. I’d then get on the Tube and do the same thing.”

If he loves money so much, how did it feel to part with the £10 million divorce cheque he reportedly wrote out to Mattioli? “What?” he exclaims. “I never wrote a cheque for that amount. My hand would have seized up in a cramp!”

The conversation wanders. We talk about his pal Sean Connery, whom he hasn’t spoken to for a year or so. We talk of how he would have died for Peter O’Toole’s role in Lawrence of Arabia. We chat about the flak he got after his comments in a French magazine when he said he didn’t think the black actor Idris Elba would make a great Bond. “They tried to say I was a racist but it’s the same as saying could there be a female Bond,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Moore laughs a great deal during conversation. But that doesn’t hide a vulnerability which even Joe Graham couldn’t cure. He worries a little about the audiences, he admits, recounting how acts have failed in the past in Glasgow, with Des O’Connor fainting through fear, and recoiling at the stories of audiences at the Panopticon Theatre who once fired rivets at the performers. “Do you think they’ll throw things at me?” he says. Only love and kisses, I say, and he’s smiling again.

Cleary Moore doesn’t want to retire. “Old actors. Don’t. The phone just stops ringing. And what else would I do but this? I can’t play the hero any more and my knees hurt.”

He needs to perform. He needs to be with people, to engage. And why not? He’s a fantastic raconteur but there’s another reason for his appearances. He wants to share his natural delight, his optimism, with the world. “I always think tomorrow is going to be better than today,” he says, smiling, the line delivered to soft perfection.

An Afternoon with Sir Roger Moore is at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow on November 25