1:16PM, Oct 23, 2008
He may not have been to everyone's taste...Roger Moore brought a light, comic touch to the debonair superspy.
Yet, for better or worse, Moore's eyebrow-raising characteristics have been ones that every Bond after him has tried to shake off.
Still he managed seven movies...and Alan Partridge loves him
It was all change for the Bond franchise when former Saint Roger Moore stepped into Sean Connery's shoes for his first mission as 007. He's sent to the Caribbean via New York and Louisiana on the trail of drugs kingpin Mr Big (Yaphet Kotto). Departing from the earlier themes of global megalomania, it jokily drew on the blaxploitation movies of the time.
Roger Moore’s second Bond movie sees 007 targeted by Christopher Lee’s ruthless assassin, the wonderfully named Francisco Scaramanga. Originally intended as the sixth Bond movie and to be shot in Cambodia, the Vietnam war got in the way and so the film had to wait until after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Live and Let Die.
Roger Moore’s third 007 outing saw his Bond's formula nailed and the film remade in the next four outings. Author Ian Fleming requested that only the source novel’s title be used, and legal wrangling meant original SPECTRE based scripts had to be ditched in favour of a wholly original story – the first time in a Bond film.
"James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only", claimed the end credits of The Spy Who Loved Me, but when Stars Wars went supernova at the box office a space themed 007 movie was commissioned and became Bond’s then biggest box office outing. A non-stop out-of-control barrage of sound and fury.
After the hi-tech tomfoolery of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, Bond reclaimed his licence to kill with this action thriller considered by Sir Roger to be his best 007 effort. Forgoing supervillains and world domination, this has Bond in a race with a KGB lackey for a computer located on a sunken MI6 spy ship.
Due to Sean Connery’s unofficial Bond Never Say Never Again being released the same year, the 55 year old Roger Moore was lured back to play the spy once again for a tale of nuclear disarmament, disgruntled war-mongering Soviet generals, smuggled Faberge eggs, and Maud Adams in her second Bond.
At 57, Roger Moore made his final appearance as the world’s most famous superspy (what an oxymoron) in this reworking of Goldfinger. Paris and San Francisco are the cities on Bond’s radar as he hunts supervillain Christopher Walken, at that point the only Oscar winner to appear in a 007 picture, whose plan to destroy Silicon Valley is reminiscent of 1978’s Superman.
