Roger Moore rarely looked shaken or stirred across seven high-octane movies as the suave superspy.
Today marks the sad anniversary of the actor’s death in 2016 but he will always be remembered for his fantastically unruffled performance as Her Majesty’s secret agent, the occasional elegantly raised eyebrow aside.
Although he played one of the greatest action film heroes in cinema history, Moore wasn’t perhaps a classic action film star.
He famously joked: “I did some of the stunts like jumping off a cliff with a parachute but I always had a double for the kissing scenes.”
In fact, one terrifying scene left him desperately seeking comfort in a stiff drink between takes.
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Moore hilariously said: “I’m doubled in love scenes. I’m not good after the third take,” while insisting stunts were another matter: “I do all of them actually… I do all my own lying.”
But, famously, he struggled terribly with one iconic moment in For Your Eyes Only.
The actor was known for his patience and professionalism – and humour – on set. In the previous Moonraker, he had calmly reshot the scene with a malfunctioning gondola turning into a hovercraft – even though each time it dumped him into a Venetian canal and he had to be dried, redressed and restyled only for it to happen again and again.
He also carried on shooting the scene where 007 gets trapped in a spinning zero-gravity simulator – even though the process kept bruising his face.
For Your Eyes Only co-star Jack Klaff, who played villain Apostis, said: “Roger was very unassuming, but he knew his place, he knew that he was the star.
“When we were on Corfu, he would arrive each morning in his own boat with a cigar and always say, ‘Never fear, The Saint is here.’ Roger told an awful lot of really, really filthy jokes. His twinkle was Olympic class.”
Bond girl Lynn-Holly Johnson paid tribute to his: “marvellously protective warmth…the utmost charismatic, hysterically sagacious fellow, and yet always a large kind-hearted gent.”
Yet, one particular sequence in the movie distressed Moore so much, he needed drink and drugs to get through it. Scroll down to watch it in full.
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Incredibly, it wasn’t the moment he was lashed to a sled speeding down a cliff edge with co-star John Wyman who said:”You feared for your life. You might think this was the end of it… we could have both gone off the cliff had the guy (directing the sled turned the wrong way.”
Instead, it was the scene set against a clifftop monastery in Greece.
Moore might have always looked like he was never shaken or stirred but he had one terrible fear his whole life – and this scene was his worst nightmare.
Even the stuntman Rick Sylvester said: “From where we were, you could see the local cemetery; and the box [to stop my fall] looked like a casket. You didn’t need to be an English major to connect the dots.”
Bond dangles from a thin rope calmly using his bootlaces to help him climb up, while a villain rappels down to kick out his support before 007 takes him out with thrown knife.
In fact, these scenes filmed around the vertiginous cliffs were a horror for Moore who suffered from vertigo. Even though he was only dangled above a four-foot drop (compared to twenty for Sylvester), it was enough to terrify the star, combined with shots running around the mountain-top monastery.
Apparently, the actor would down a calming cocktail of valium and alcohol throughout the filming of cleverly shot angles showing close-ups of him hanging suspended off a sheer rock face while the stunt crew did the long shots.
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