Book review: My Word is My Bond: The Autobiography

Review by BRIAN PENDREIGH

ROGER MOORE MAKES IT CLEAR AT the outset that he does not intend his autobiography to be a volume of tittle-tattle and dirt-dishing. "When I have nothing nice to say about a person, I'd rather not say anything at all," he writes in the foreword. The comment is characteristic of a man who is, one senses, a naturally likeable character, as well as being part of a generation for whom good manners and discretion are vitally important.

Although Moore succeeded Sean Connery as James Bond, he is three years older. He was born within a decade of the First World War and is old enough to have worked in the Hollywood studio system, briefly under contract to MGM during the 1950s.

That was before James Bond, The Saint and even Ivanhoe, the television series that catapulted him to stardom at the end of the decade. Moore seemed especially well suited to an adventure series set in a vanished age of chivalry.

A policeman's son, he came from neither an aristocratic background nor the sort of impoverished environment that Connery managed to bring to vivid life in his recent quasi-autobiography-cum-cultural-musings. Despite three marriages that ended in divorce, there is never any hint of a dark side or the complexities of so many other actors, including Connery.

A sunny disposition illuminates just about every page – which makes those rare occasions when Moore does say something negative about someone all the more delicious. He clearly loathed David Niven's wife Hjordis, for her treatment of his old friend rather than the way she behaved towards Moore himself.

And he did not get on with his female co-stars on A View to a Kill, his seventh and last Bond movie, at the age of 57. His recollections of working with Grace Jones are particularly amusing. Given Moore's vintage and values, it did not take a genius to forecast he would not get on with the moody rock diva.

"I'm afraid my diplomatic charm was stretched to the limit," he confesses. "Every day in her dressing room – which was adjacent to mine – she played very loud music. I was not a fan of heavy metal … One day I snapped. I marched into her room, pulled the plug and then went back to my room, picked up a chair and flung it at the wall."

Moore drifted into acting as an extra in 1945's Caesar and Cleopatra, with Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh. An assistant director took him under his wing and steered him towards RADA, where he was a contemporary of Lois Maxwell, later Miss Moneypenny to his Bond.

He supplemented his income as an actor by modelling jumpers for knitting patterns, not the sort of detail that would add much street cred to an aspiring young actor's resum these days. Michael Caine nicknamed him "The Big Knit".

Moore married singer Dorothy Squires in 1953, when she was a major international star and he was merely an aspiring actor. It was one of the reasons he went to the US so early in his career. The marriage possibly helped open doors, though it would hardly have secured work – he had the talent, looks and charm to back up those initial contacts.

He made his Hollywood debut in 1954 in The Last Time I Saw Paris, and shared "a sort of semi-love scene" with Elizabeth Taylor, whose breasts he describes variously as "hills of ripe young motherhood" and "mountains of desire". He also notes, however, that Taylor did not bother to turn up when the time came to shoot his close-ups. (Perhaps she thought her chest was putting him off.)

MGM terminated the contract after just two years. But then came Ivanhoe, after which Moore returned to the US, signed with Warner Brothers, starred in the series The Alaskans and succeeded James Garner in the western series Maverick, as the cousin of the original title character, newly arrived from England.

The Saint provided him with steady, well-paying work throughout the 1960s, while James Bond subsequently guaranteed a permanent place in cinema history. Connery's James Bond was cold and violent and classless, in tune with his times; Moore's was 007 Lite and a throwback to an earlier, more chivalrous age.

Moore was not a great actor and he makes no claims to be. But his Bond films remain enjoyable in their own right. And the charm and unsophisticated humour he brought to the role are apparent throughout his warm-hearted recollections of a long and distinguished career, in film and television, in the US and UK.