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Sir Roger Moore has died after a brief battle with cancer. He was 89.
Roger Moore’s acting career stretched for more than 70 years, and it included a long and acclaimed tenure as the star of the long-running spy thriller The Saint. But like every actor to take on the role to date, Moore’s defining role would always be James Bond. Over 12 years, Moore played Bond seven times, including 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me—still, a full 40 years later, one of the high watermarks of the franchise.
The next 007's first mission will be undoing the damage of SPECTRE.
Moore’s Bond never stopped being a hit with audiences. 1985’s A View to a Kill—Moore’s final outing as 007—was one of the bigger hits of his extended tenure, though Moore himself was 57 at the time. ("I was only about 400 years too old for the part," he later laughed.)
The self-deprecating quip was typical of Moore, a characteristically good-natured actor who never took himself even a little seriously. On and off the screen, Moore’s defining trait was always his sense of humor. If Connery’s rough-and-tumble Bond was prone to the occasional deadpan joke, Moore’s posh 007 was practically a clown—sometimes literally.
The 007 franchise endures, in part, because producers have been savvy enough to remake the character in the mold of the actor who plays him, and this wry, unshakeable wit was clearly cribbed from Moore himself, who improvised jokes on-set that made it into the final cuts of his movies. Some critics attacked Moore’s frothier take on 007, but no one said anything as harsh as Moore’s self-deprecating take on his own career: "My acting range has always been something between the two extremes of ‘raises left eyebrow’ and ‘raises right eyebrow.’"
Moore’s innate breeziness meant that none of the barbs lobbed at him ever seemed to land with any impact—but in his winking appraisal of himself, Moore also did his actual talents a disservice. It’s not easy to take over a role like James Bond and make it your own, as Moore undeniably did. And it’s not easy to hold a scene together on the sheer force of your own charm. Just watch, say, this clip of Roger Moore singing opposite Miss Piggy, and you’ll see how coolly and effortlessly he commands the screen:
After he retired from the role of 007, Roger Moore spent decades raising millions of dollars for impoverished children as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. He also continued acting. For better or worse, an actor who plays James Bond will never shake the association with the character, and Moore seemed perfectly content to carry the 007 mantle for the rest of his career. Later appearances in TV shows like Alias and movies like Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore explicitly traded on the inherent cachet of having Roger "James Bond" Moore in the cast.
And in some alternate universe, he might actually have donned a tuxedo and downed a martini one last time. In 2015, Moore revealed that he had been approached about an Expendables-esque movie that would unite every actor who has played James Bond on the big screen. Sean Connery shot the idea down, but Moore said he was up for it. "I’d need about 10 stunt doubles!" he joked.
In 2009, Roger Moore wrote a tremendously entertaining memoir called My Word Is My Bond, chronicling the years he spent traveling around the world to play 007. The book was successful enough that that Moore followed it up with a second book titled One Lucky Bastard. The title was classic Moore—a man who was always quick to attribute his success to something other than his own talents. If he were around to read the outpouring of heartfelt tributes today, he would undoubtedly wave them away with a self-deprecating joke—but I hope he’d still recognize he deserves all of them.
