INTERVIEW: Donald Clarke meets the man - and the character - called Roger Moore, in his guise as UNICEF goodwill ambassador.
There is a generation of really famous people who were born just too late to fight in the war and just too early to properly join in the shabby decadence of the 1960s. At the height of their renown, round about the mid-1970s, they wore blazers, fine polo-necks and slip-ons with buckles. They smoked slim panatelas, drank Campari and spent the winter eating fondue at ski lodges. This generation's avatar is the great Sir Roger Moore.
Born in 1927, the star of The Saint and seven Bond films still looks pretty nimble, particularly when you consider he has recently been fitted with a pacemaker. His cautiously oiled hair is arranged carefully for maximum coverage and his leathery cheeks are slightly sunken, but you wouldn't say he looks like an old man.
Sinking into one the Berkeley Court's capacious armchairs, he begins tutting and sighing. "I was just walking through the foyer and everyone has papers or laptops or mobile phones. Does nobody have an office in Dublin? They are on the point of allowing mobile phones on aeroplanes apparently." We will never be allowed to stop working.
"Whatever about that, the wife will always know where you are," he cackles, gesturing towards Lady Kristina Moore, who, exquisitely primped and lacquered, has perched herself on a chair nearby.
The her-indoors language is, of course, very much in keeping with the blazer generation's attitude to sexual politics. Nonetheless, I am a little surprised that Moore seems quite so willing to hint, even so obliquely, about the high-jinx he gets up to when his fourth wife is not around. After all, he has a spot of previous here. He left the first Mrs Moore for the singer Dorothy Squires, then abandoned her for the glamorous Italian Luisa Mattioli, who was, in due course, exchanged for Kristina.
"Well, it's not quite like taking them into Exchange and Mart," he says slightly crossly. "The first one was just a problem with geography. The second one was, well, geography again. The flesh is weak. But that was a long time ago and now I have my darling here." He stretches across an adjacent stool and pats the arm of her chair. "Geography never separates us. In fact, this is the furthest we have been apart in years. Separated by a bloody stool."
Did Kristina not have any concerns about getting hitched to somebody who seems to have such great difficulty staying married? "Oh no," she says in her clean European tones. "I think the more a man has married, the more he knows about us - women that is."
Moore is in town for a UNICEF corporate lunch promoting that organisation's commendable efforts in supporting children orphaned by AIDS in Africa. Since he was appointed a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in 1991, he has devoted an extraordinary amount of his time to the cause. He could easily have sat back and remained a figurehead, but appears genuinely committed to using his celebrity responsibly.
"Audrey Hepburn got me into it rather insidiously," he laughs. "She called and asked if I would co-host the Danny Kaye children's awards in Amsterdam. And I said, 'When?' and she said 'this Saturday'." He goes on to explain how shocked he was by the awful statistics concerning child mortality in the Third World that he then came across when researching the organisation.
"The only way I could learn more was to sign on the line and become a special representative," he says. "They sent me to Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador. And I knew I was hooked. I think all of us in the business - singers, actors, whatever - should have a conscience and do something about it. I understand that there are people who don't have time to do it, which is why it is so hard to get young people in the business involved." He pauses and looks wistful for a moment.
"I mean, when I was poncing around as Bond, I would do 4,000 interviews on one film. They clocked-up 190 journalists on one set while we were filming and 188 wanted to do an in-depth interview. I didn't have time to breathe - not that it took very long to say, 'My name is Bond'. So I ended up lying in the interviews. You just get bored."
Really? What did he lie about? "Oh, you know, my background and so forth." Despite his lounge-lizard suavity, he actually comes from reasonably humble stock. Born and raised in Stockwell, south London, Roger Moore was the only child of a policeman. "No, no. I was actually very well-to-do. Ha ha! No I'm lying again. Yes, my father was a policeman at the old Bow Street station."
The young Moore had ambitions to be an artist. After obtaining a certificate from the Royal Society of Arts, he got a job working on animated cartoons, but was sacked after ruining one too many strips of valuable celluloid. One day at the swimming pool, a friend suggested that he might want to investigate working as a movie extra. After carrying spears on a 1945 production of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, he was taken under the wing of the flamboyant Irish director Brian Desmond Hurst and edged towards RADA.
In the past, he has admitted that he often views the laid-back, tuxedoed charmer named Roger Moore as an invention. I would guess that it was during his RADA years that the south London lad began to be taken over by the classless stranger with tight vowels. "I don't know whether I had an accent," he says. "Because my mother was very particular about the way I spoke. I remember getting a clip round the ear for saying 'ain't'. The character I invented called Roger Moore was just this guy who can walk into a restaurant, sit down and talk to people and not hide in a corner. Fortunately, I was 6ft 1in, blue eyed and a bit pretty - until age marched all over my face. So they would never let me wear disguises. I had to invent another Roger Moore who looked exactly like me."
In 1953 Moore went to America and developed a decent career playing minor bounders and callow romantics. But it wasn't until 1962 that he found real fame. In that year, he was simultaneously offered a season with the RSC at Stratford and a chance to play Leslie Charteris's proto-Bond The Saint on TV.
"That is the fork in the road that I came to," he says. "Years later I was working with Noël Coward and he said, 'You must take every job you are offered, because when you are not working you are not an actor. And, when you are offered two jobs, take the one that offers the most money.' "
After The Saint he starred opposite Tony Curtis in 24 episodes of the wonderfully vulgar TV series The Persuaders and then, in 1973, took on the part of Bond in Live and Let Die. To be honest, all three characters are just variations on the theme of "Roger Moore". So, for good or ill, Coward's advice landed the actor with a role - he drinks champagne, he beds the ladies, he raises an eyebrow - that lasted nearly a quarter of a century.
Does he ever resent the fact that questions about Bond follow him round, even now? "Oh God no. I would be ridiculously ungrateful not to acknowledge the fact that, as a result of Bond, I don't have to run around looking for work." But he must acknowledge that, whatever the rewards, he did do at least one Bond flick too many. When he made A View to a Kill in 1985 he was 57: not a bad age for a Prime Minister, but a little over-the-hill for a superspy.
"Well, yes. I could still jump around, but they were going to start running out of villains who looked like they could be knocked down by me. And leading ladies were becoming young enough to be my grandchildren. That all became a bit disgusting - a bit Lolita."
During the Bond years he gradually honed his talent for the wearing of blazers and the swirling of snifters. He bought homes in France and Switzerland, and it was while swanning about on the piste, a decade or so ago, that he bumped into Kristina. It is reported that Luisa, his then wife, did not take the break-up well. She was quoted in the Daily Mail describing her husband's new partner as "old meat: a hanger-on who has had two husbands and three facelifts" and it is said that their children were equally aggrieved.
"Oh, I don't want to talk about all that, beyond saying it's a load of crap," he says, waving a hand dismissively. "We did not have a falling out."
Knighted for his UNICEF work last year, Moore gives every impression of being happy with his lot. But he has had his difficulties recently. A month before he got the call from the Queen, he collapsed on stage during a New York performance of Hamish McColl's and Sean Foley's Morecambe and Wise pastiche, The Play What I Wrote. "Poor Kristina was sitting in the front row and she thought it was a new part of the play. I suddenly heard Hamish's voice and thought: what is he doing in my bedroom?" After being fitted with a pacemaker, he was told to slow down, but seems to have paid little attention. He continues to put in the hours for UNICEF and insists he is still open to calls from producers.
He said earlier that he felt his whole career was based on fooling people. At 78, after nearly 60 years in the business, does he still feel that is what he is doing? "Well, I suppose I must be. Because this guy Roger Moore is still following me round."