On this day today in 2017, we sadly lost one of our most beloved actors. He may have had the golden looks of a matinée idol playing the love-and-leave-them James Bond, but Roger Moore was always an absolute gentleman, especially off-screen.
Numerous Bond Girls have paid fond and sometimes grateful tribute to how he looked after them while filming and behind the scenes.
A young Jane Seymour was making her big screen breakthrough as Solitaire, opposite the eyebrow-arching icon in 1973’s Live And Let Die. She recalled how he hilariously insisted they both eat stinky liver before love scenes, brought her a cuppa when she actually nodded off during a length shoot in bed, and made sure she was always safe in the evenings.
But even Moore struggled to keep his cool during the hardest saucy scene of his career in Moonraker. Scroll down to watch how it all looked on screen.
Moonraker was the most expensive James Bond film ever made at that point, its £30million budget was almost as much as the first eight films put together. The producers wanted to capitalise on the recent Star Wars phenomenon and rejigged their planned order of adaptations from Ian Fleming’s novels, moving up the space-race-based story.
This gave Moore an unprecedented challenge, dealing with scenes set in zero-gravity simulators and a malfunctioning gondola that turns into a hovercraft, and that’s before the climactic sex scene.
When Bond goes to investigate the estate of villain Drax, he gets trapped in a spinning zero-gravity simulator that henchman Chang tunes up to dangerous speeds. Moore’s face was bruised badly by the intense blasts of air used to replicate the effects of spinning.
This caused a headache for the make-up artists that was matched by the struggles of the wardrobe, hair and make-up teams when James Bond‘s tricked-out gondola failed to turn into a hovercraft on the first four attempts. Each time the actor was dumped into the Venetian canals, to the entertainment of watching tourists and the despair of the crew who had to dry Moore off and restyle and dress him over and over.
Moore, however, took it all in his stride and was highly regarded by the cast and crew for his professionalism, good humour and generosity of spirit.
Like every other Bond Girl of the Moore era, Lois Chiles – whose Moonraker character gloried in the outrageously naughty name Holly Goodhead – was full of praise for the British actor, on and off set and in and out of their bed scenes, including the traumatic final one.
Fondly known with tongue firmly in cheek as the “attempting re-entry” scene, it shows Bond and Goodhead caught in a zero-gravity naked clinch as their shuttle re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere.
Moore was 52 at the time. He might have been an old pro and the banter and smooth moves, but this scene would have tested any on-screen lothario. It looked fantastic on screen, of course, complete with the trademark quips but Moore later revealed that filming it was one of the hardest of his entire career: “I was hanging there, with all the blood rushing into my nose and eyes…”
Chiles, naturally, later described how easy he made it for everyone: “When I joined Moonraker, it was already Roger’s fourth Bond film but he never acted the star. He’d always include me in dinners and drinks with his family after filming.
“We filmed in glorious locations, in Paris, Venice and Rio de Janeiro, and most of my scenes were with Roger, including a couple of love scenes. Even in those, Roger would be joking to keep the mood light. It was never drudgery with Roger.”