Sir Roger George Moore (14 October 192723 May 2017) was an English actor. He was the actor to portray Ian Fleming's fictional secret agent James Bond in the Eon Productions/MGM Studios film series, playing the character in seven feature films: 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) and A View to a Kill (1985). Moore's seven appearances as Bond are the most of any actor in the Eon-produced entries.
On television, Moore played the lead role of Simon Templar, the title character in the British mystery thriller series The Saint (1962–1969). He played Beau Maverick in the American Western series Maverick (1960–1961), replacing James Garner as the lead, and starred with Tony Curtis in the action-comedy The Persuaders! (1971–1972). Continuing to act in the decades after his retirement from the Bond franchise, Moore's final appearance was in a pilot for a new Saint series that became a 2017 television film.
Moore was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1991 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 for services to charity. In 2007, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the film industry. He was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2008.
Early life
Roger George Moore was born on 14 October 1927 in Stockwell, London. He was the only child of George Alfred Moore (1904–1997), a Metropolitan Police officer based at Bow Street in central London, and Lillian "Lily" Pope (1904–1986). His mother was born in Calcutta, India, to an English family. He attended Battersea Grammar School, but was evacuated to Holsworthy in Devon during the Second World War, and attended Launceston College in Cornwall. He was further educated at Dr Challoner's Grammar School in Amersham, Buckinghamshire.
Moore was apprenticed to an animation studio, but he was sacked after he made a mistake with some animation cels. While there, Moore attracted an off-camera female fan following, and Hurst decided to pay Moore's fees at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Moore spent three terms at RADA, where he was a classmate of his future Bond co-star Lois Maxwell, the original Miss Moneypenny. During his time there, he developed the relaxed demeanour that became his screen persona.
At 18, shortly after the end of the Second World War, Moore was conscripted for national service. On 21 September 1946, he was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps as a second lieutenant. He was an officer in the Combined Services Entertainment section, eventually becoming a captain
Career
Early work (1945–1953)
Moore made his professional debut in Alexander Korda's Perfect Strangers (1945) alongside actors Robert Donat, Deborah Kerr, and Glynis Johns. Other early uncredited appearances include Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), Gaiety George, Piccadilly Incident (both 1946), and Trottie True (1949), in which he appeared alongside an uncredited Christopher Lee (both actors being cast by Brian Desmond Hurst as stage-door Johnnies).
In his book Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown, Moore states that his first television appearance was on 27 March 1949 in The Governess by Patrick Hamilton, a live broadcast (as usual in that era), in which he played the minor part of Bob Drew. Other actors in the show included Clive Morton and Betty Ann Davies. He had uncredited parts in films including Paper Orchid and The Interrupted Journey (both 1949). He was in the one-off programme Drawing-Room Detective on BBC TV (1950) and appeared in the films One Wild Oat and Honeymoon Deferred (both 1951).
In the early 1950s, Moore worked as a model,
Moore travelled to the United States and began to work in television. He appeared in adaptations of Julius Caesar and Black Chiffon, and in two episodes of Robert Montgomery Presents, as well as the TV movie The Clay of Kings (all 1953).
MGM (1954–1956)
In March 1954, MGM signed Moore to a seven-year contract. He started his MGM contract with a small role in The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), flirting with Elizabeth Taylor. He appeared in Interrupted Melody, a biographical movie about opera singer Marjorie Lawrence's recovery from polio, in which he was billed third under Glenn Ford and Eleanor Parker as Lawrence's brother Cyril. That same year, he played a supporting role in the swashbuckler The King's Thief starring Ann Blyth, Edmund Purdom, David Niven and George Sanders.
In the 1956 film Diane, Moore was billed third again, this time under Lana Turner and Pedro Armendariz, in a 16th-century period piece set in France with Moore playing Prince Henri, the future king. Moore was released from his MGM contract after two years following the film's critical and commercial failure. In his own words: "At MGM, RGM [Roger George Moore] was NBG [no bloody good]." Christopher Lee and John Schlesinger were among the show's guest stars, and series regulars included Robert Brown (who in the 1980s played M in several James Bond films) as the squire Gurth, Peter Gilmore as Waldo Ivanhoe, Andrew Keir as villainous Prince John, and Bruce Seton as noble King Richard. Moore suffered broken ribs and a battle-axe blow to his helmet while performing some of his own stunts filming a season of 39 half-hour episodes, and later reminisced, "I felt a complete Charlie riding around in all that armour and damned stupid plumed helmet. I felt like a medieval fireman."
Warner Bros. (1959–1961)
thumb|upright|right|Moore in 1960
After that, Moore spent a few years mainly doing one-shot parts in television series, including an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1959 titled "The Avon Emeralds". He signed another long-term contract to a studio, this time to Warner Bros.
In 1959, he took the lead role in The Miracle, He had also filmed a Maverick episode with Garner two seasons earlier, in which Moore played a different character, in a retooling of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 comedy of manners play The Rivals.
Moore's debut as Beau Maverick occurred in the first episode of the 1960–61 fourth season, "The Bundle from Britain", one of four episodes in which he shared screen time with his cousin Bart (Jack Kelly). Robert Altman wrote and directed "Bolt from the Blue", an episode featuring Will Hutchins as a frontier lawyer similar to his character in the series Sugarfoot, and "Red Dog" found Beau mixed up with the vicious bank robbers Lee Van Cleef and John Carradine. Kathleen Crowley was Moore's leading lady in two episodes ("Bullet for the Teacher" and "Kiz"), and others included Mala Powers, Roxane Berard, Fay Spain, Merry Anders, Andra Martin and Jeanne Cooper. Upon leaving the series, Moore cited a decline in script quality since the Garner era as the key factor in his decision to depart; ratings for the show were also down. Moore was originally slated to appear with both Jack Kelly and Robert Colbert in the series but by the time Colbert starred in his first episode, Moore had already left the series. Numerous early publicity stills of Kelly, Moore and Colbert posing together exist, however.
Moore was still under contract with Warners, who cast him in The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961), making love to a nun played by Angie Dickinson, and Gold of the Seven Saints (1961), supporting Clint Walker. He also went to Italy to make the adventure comedy Romulus and the Sabines (1961).
The Saint (1962–1969)
thumb|250px|right|upright=1.3|Roger Moore (left) with Earl Green in The Saint.
thumb|Moore posing with Egyptian actresses; [[Soad Hosny (first from left), Shwikar (second from right) and Sharifa Fadel at the Alexandria Television Festival in Alexandria, Egypt, August 1963.]]
Lew Grade cast Moore as Simon Templar in a new adaptation of The Saint, based on the novels by Leslie Charteris. Moore said in an interview in 1963 that he wanted to buy the rights to Leslie Charteris's character and the trademarks. The television series was broadcast by ITV in the UK between 1962 and 1969, and its overseas success made Moore a household name. After the strong performance in the US of the first two series in first-run syndication, NBC picked up the show in 1966. By early 1967, Moore had achieved international stardom. The series established his suave, quipping style which he carried forward to James Bond, and it also saw him exhibit his trademark raised eyebrow. Francis Blagburn in The Telegraph writes,