The eyebrows have it

For anyone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, Sir Roger Moore was the ultimate James Bond: wry without undermining the suspense of the films, debonair but never distant, he seemed to relish his adventures every bit as much as the audience did. No other performer in the part was able to mix style and suavity with with the dash of silliness Moore brought to the role. And some of the dottiest on-screen touches – such as the unforgettable moment in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) when Bond lowers the window of his sleek white Lotus Esprit following an underwater drive and deposits a small fish which has somehow found its way inside the vehicle – were his idea. As was the choice to bring a certain warmth to the role after the remorselessness of Sean Connery. Moore was clear on the distinction between their interpretations: “Sean played Bond as a killer and I played Bond as a lover,” he said.

“He never really ski’d until his last Bond... and then you couldn't get him off the skis!”

Geoffrey Moore talks to us about his late father: his Bond wardrobe, how he learned his lines, his hidden talent as an artist, and his proudest role.

Not that he couldn’t be beastly when the need arose. But there was an essentially gentlemanly quality to Moore’s version of Bond. Humility and self-deprecation always played a large part in the actor’s appeal. Whenever anyone cracked a joke regarding his range or ability, chances were that Moore had got there first. Take the 1980s satirical TV puppet comedy Spitting Image, which represented Moore as an immobile face with a pair of sporadically twitching eyebrows. What most viewers didn’t realise was that the gag originated with him. “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.” Humour suffused his interpretation of Bond, whom he saw as an essentially comic character. After all, he reasoned, a man who can walk into any joint in the world only to find that the bartender already knows his favourite drink can’t be much cop as a secret agent.

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One thing he took seriously, however, were his clothes, as shown by many of the items in Bonhams’ October sale Sir Roger Moore: The Personal Collection, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of the actor’s 1973 debut as Bond in Live and Let Die. Featured in the collection is an array of dapper silk ties and cravats, as well as numerous suits and sunglasses. Several items will leap out for Bond enthusiasts. There is a mohair single-button dinner suit worn in Octopussy (1983), as well as two items from his final Bond film, A View to a Kill, from 1985: a white ski suit with fur-lined hood, jacket and trousers with pink tartan lining, and a mohair double-breasted dinner suit that he wore while clambering up the Eiffel Tower in pursuit of the singer Grace Jones, who played the assassin May Day. (She got away on that occasion, though the pair later shared a bed scene.)

From For Your Eyes Only (1981), which signalled a back-to-basics approach after the costly Star Wars-influenced space-age shenanigans of Moonraker two years earlier, there is the grey flannel three-piece suit that Bond wears in the pre-credits sequence, when he is almost outfoxed by a bald, wheelchair-bound villain, who was a dead ringer for his old arch-enemy Blofeld (though unable to be identified as such at the time due to a copyright dispute over the character). Also in keeping with his on-screen persona are the multiple sets of skis, including two pairs made specially for the actor by Lamborghini: for his feet only, you might say.

Moore got his start as a film extra and stage performer, and even worked as a model for knitwear patterns and photo stories in teen magazines. In other words, he already had an idea of how to present himself sartorially by the time he landed the roles that would come to define him. Between 1962 and 1969, he played Simon Templar, crime-fighter and gadabout, in The Saint. When that series ended, he starred opposite Tony Curtis as another playboy adventurer, Lord Brett Sinclair, in The Persuaders! On the latter show, Moore was credited with designing his own clothes but, as he explained in his autobiography My Word Is My Bond, that wasn’t quite the case. He had been on the board of directors of the milling company Pearson and Foster, which then offered to outfit him.

“I took them up on it for The Persuaders!, and made a few comments about the type of clothes I thought Brett Sinclair would wear. That secured me the credit.” His son, Geoffrey Moore, tells me he finds this typical of his father’s modesty. “When you’re developing a character, you’re very much behind the whole concept: the details, what would he drive, what he would wear, the clothing, the tailoring,” he explains. “He had some input, that’s for sure.”

Moore’s clothes throughout his career never looked anything less than immaculate, thanks to three trusty tailors: Cyril Castle, the Savile Row genius whom he kept with him throughout both those TV shows and on into his first two films as Bond, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974); Angelo Vitucci, who stepped into the breach for The Spy Who Loved Me, arguably the best of Moore’s Bond outings; and then Douglas Hayward, who would dress Moore not only for his four remaining instalments as Bond, but right up until Hayward’s own death in 2008.

Geoffrey remembers going along with his father to fittings. “It was on Mount Street in Mayfair, opposite Scott’s [seafood restaurant],” he recalls. “You’d sit in there and the number of people who’d walk in over the course of an afternoon to see Dougie was incredible: Ralph Lauren even came in to pick up a suit one time.”

As a boy, however, Geoffrey was loath to have anyone know that he had a famous father. “He rarely picked me up from school, because he was always at the studio. Then one time he did, and his car was surrounded by my schoolmates. That’s when I realised: ‘Ah…’. I just wanted to keep it all low-key, hush-hush.” His father had the same attitude. “He was the most self-deprecating guy you could meet. The bigger the talent, the smaller the limo, that sort of thing. He always said, ‘You’d better be nice to people on the way up because you’re going to meet them on the way down.’”

Which is very sound advice. Except that for Sir Roger Moore, there was no decline: if anything, his stature only increased as audiences came to feel nostalgic for the wit and levity he brought to the Bond films, and for the panache and generosity with which he wore his fame. When he died in 2017, aged 89, there was an outpouring of love and admiration. “At ten, I used to try to dress like Simon Templar,” admitted Russell Crowe. Pierce Brosnan, who took over as Bond in 1995 with GoldenEye, said that Moore “embraced the role with an easy charm and grace that let us all in on the game.” It was characteristic of Moore that he rated himself only the fourth best actor to have played the part, choosing to anoint Daniel Craig instead as “the Bond.” Craig, however, spoke for millions of fans when he posted a picture of himself with Moore, accompanied by the caption: “Nobody did it better.”

Ryan Gilbey is the film critic for the New Statesman.