The Last Hours of...Roger Moore

Sir Roger Moore died of liver cancer in 2017 at the age of 89. The famously modest and unassuming British actor had been many people’s favourite James Bond. Where Sean Connery had played 007 straight, Roger had played him for laughs. He’d identified the joke at the heart of the role – James Bond, the secret agent so familiar that everybody knows his favourite drink. For Roger Moore, Bond was a parody or he was nothing. But Roger’s swashbuckling, devil-may-care Bond had belied a life of serious health problems. He was not as robust as the movie image of indestructibility suggested. Roger’s life story read like a medical textbook with major ailments at every turn. It had started with near terminal double-pneumonia at the age of five – the doctor had told his father he’d be back in the morning with a death certificate. The son of a south London policeman, Roger had been forced to reinvent himself at RADA - the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art – after being told that his cockney accent wouldn’t do. This, coupled with his father’s advice to remember that success might be short lived fostered in him a sense of life’s precariousness. His international standard hypochondria and almost pathological self-deprecation were the consequence. His critics described his acting as wooden and shallow and deep down, he probably agreed with them. But as his friend, Sir Michael Caine says, making it look easy is the hardest thing. Sir Roger had made friends wherever he had gone, and long before the end of his life had been elevated to the status of National Treasure without ever quite understanding how. World-renowned forensic pathologist Dr Michael Hunter analyses the details of this fascinating case to unearth the truth behind Sir Roger Moore’s death. He had suffered years of ill health and fought three different types of cancer but had somehow made it to the age of 89. Maybe there had been more 007 in Sir Roger Moore than he had let on.