Nipped over to see my ma this morning and after a rather hair raising drive along the A12 and a run in with an extremely rude lorry driver, came home feeling I needed a sit down. I had been given the above book to read by a friend of mine who loves reading 'celeb' autobiographies. I usually avoid them like the plague but the last two she has given me have been great reads. One was the Michael Parkinson book which I read with huge enjoyment as sitting down on a Saturday to watch 'Parky' on TV in the 1970s was what one did then and I have seen him interview the most amazing people, including Fred Astaire and James Stewart. Enjoyed reading this very much and, by all accounts, this was actually written by Mike P himself and handed in ahead of schedule, causing his publisher to suffer a heart attack...
So then I was given this one and, with a title like that, this has to be Roger Moore's autobiography. I simply adore RM, always have done. I fell in love with him years ago, back in 1961, when he starred as The Saint and became a huge heart throb. I would never miss an episode, filmed in black and white to start with, and the halo appearing above his head as Roger would look up and raise that quizzical eyebrow. So dashing and so incredibly handsome.
He seems to have had the most incredibly lucky acting life more or less falling into it by accident and though he spent time touring and in rep, he seems to have graduated to the big time pretty easily, probably helped by being married to Dorothy Squires, a huge star of the 50s who whisked him off to Hollywood where he soon found himself rubbing shoulders with the likes of Cary Grant, James Stewart and all the big names.
Won't give a blow by blow account as each chapter is witty and amusing full of very very funny anecdotes and stories about filming James Bond which made me roll about laughing. Obviously written from his point of view, he skates over his marriages and the furore when he left his wife of 35 years to be with his current, and by the sound of the way he talks of her, very lovingly, his last. He admits he was a coward and probably not a very nice person in the way he treated two of his four wives, but it is glossed over. This is defo not a warts and all telling, how could it be when he is doing it himself? (well, with the help of a ghost writer anyway...).
I thoroughly enjoyed it and while I now look at some of his Bonds and wince, at the time they were huge fun and greatly admired. Roger himself says he knows that critics think he played it too much for laughs, but as he points out you have to laugh at the idea of a spy, yes a spy, walking into any bar in the world, the barman saying Ah Good Evening Mr Bond and serving him the perfect martini shaken not stirred, it is a prepostrous one and you cannot take it seriously. He has a point.
He is now a very respected ambassador for UNICEF and does a huge amount of work for them, while keeping his hand in at voice overs, ads etc. He says that being a 'name' and keeping his profile high means he can raise a lot of money for this charity and says that wherever he goes in the world, there is somebody who is still watching the reruns of The Saint or the Persuaders or is watching his James Bond movies on DVD.
Filled with lots of super photos of him as The Saint, Bond, Ivanhoe, Maverick and I had forgotten how gorgeous he was in a simply dire film, the Miracle, picture reminded me, this book is great fun and a very pleasant way of wiling away an hour or two. What I love about Roger is that he is self-deprecating and really knows, deep down, that he is not a very good actor, but he says if people are happy to pay him for not acting very well, who is he to argue?
Who indeed?
And a PS - his parents retired to Frinton and Roger used to visit them often and came down by train to Colchester where one day I nearly had a seizure when catching a train to London, spotted James Bond himself sitting on Platform 3 at Colchester station. Everyone knew who he was, but nobody bothered him as they knew he was a regular and came down to see his mum when she was ill. Sometimes the British public are rather sweet....
