Sir Roger Moore is sharp as a pin. The 86-year-old seven-time Bond rattles out one-liners with the ease of man whose career depended on them.

Which movie of yours do you wish people would rediscover and why?

“Any of those I have a percentage of.”

What do all the Bond actors have in common?

“Bruises. Fan mail. Hate letters! I’m sure there must be a few around.”

But, speaking exclusively to The Guide, he admits with age he’s begun to feel lonely.

“It’s the fact that so many of my friends, as Tony Curtis used to say, ‘have gone to that great cutting room in the sky’ that I feel I am probably getting to the stage I am going to be the one who turns the lights off.”

Six months ago he was at Buckingham Palace to celebrate Richard Attenborough and fellow RADA graduates in the presence of the Queen. In August the British Oscar-winner and Brighton Rock star died.

And only yesterday, Richard Kiel, the 7ft 2in actor who played the steel-toothed villain Jaws opposite Sir Roger in Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me, died in California aged 74. “I am totally distraught to learn of my dear friend Richard Kiel's passing,” he told Press Association. “We were on a radio programme together just a week ago. Distraught. Can't take it in.”

The nearing door is the reason Sir Roger called his new autobiography, released earlier this week, Last Man Standing: Tales From Tinseltown.

“It’s rather frightening actually,” he confesses. “So many good friends left us before they were sixty that my ambition is not just to get a letter from the Queen on my hundredth birthday but to get one from the king on my 150th.”

Despite the hypochondria, he’s in good health: “I am able to totter on stage. I get carried off.” Though not long ago he thought he was dying after collapsing and being rushed to hospital - only for the doctors to diagnose him with diabetes.

He puts his health and life down to luck. He wanted to call the autobiography “one lucky b******d” but the publishers thought some booksellers wouldn’t put it on the shelves.

“I had so many brushes with health over the years but I’m not going to talk about my hypochondria because hypochondriacs are people who think they are sick. I invariably know I am. I don’t know more than doctors but I know more doctors than I’ve had delusions.”

Mind you, he adds, he’s got three holes in his backside where most people only have one. His rear caught fire when an explosion went off in the chair he was sitting in during the filming of The Spy Who Loved Me. Afterwards, he required daily Vaseline dressings, which was quite the job for the sister on duty.

“It was a stunt that was my fault. I shouldn’t have suggested that I sat in a chair instead of standing behind it. I didn’t get out of the chair in time when the explosion went off.”

The scene sees Stromberg, played by Curt Jurgens, threatening to shoot Bond under the table with a gun. Things went wrong when the special-effects man mistimed the explosion and Moore received burns to go with the bruises and bone replacements he’s picked up over the years.

“If you are doing action you’ve got to put up with a few bruises,” he says. “Just look at poor Harrison Ford, he’s been putting up with a broken ankle.”

Sir Roger says The Spy Who Loved Me, acting alongside Jurgens and being directed by Louis Gilbert, remains his favourite film.

“It was the first time we had ever seen Jaws on screen, and it was a good script with wonderful locations in Sardinia. We got to ride a wet bike for the first time when nobody had ever seen one. That was great fun.”

Unsurprisingly, things never got too difficult being Bond.

“The only challenge was getting out of bed – never learning lines. You never get to say more than my name is Bond.”

Yet the pressure must have been pretty hot when he replaced Sean Connery and made his debut in 1973 in Live And Let Die opposite Jane Seymour?

“I didn’t worry about doing it until the morning before we opened when I was going to London for a press conference and I thought ‘my God what if the press don’t like what do we do?’ “Then five minutes in it occurred to me it was like being wheeled into the delivery room if you are pregnant: the baby is going to come out one way or another and there is not much you can do about it.”

Everyone has a favourite Bond. Steve Coogan revealed his to be Sir Roger with his impressions in The Trip To Italy. Sir Roger says the two nearly worked together on Coogan’s faux chat show Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge.

“I am supposed to be a guest that is coming on and I keep calling from the airport and I’m on my way and I never get there.

“I didn’t know anything about this and I spoke to my father the day afterwards and he said, ‘that wasn’t very good, son’. I said, ‘what wasn’t good?’ “He took it quite seriously. My father believed it. Then I realised the funny side of it. I got a copy of it.”

Audrey Hepburn teased out Sir Roger’s serious side and inspired his charity work for UNICEF. He remembers the Breakfast At Tiffany’s star had “tremendous warmth and honesty and dedication, which is why she was such a good ambassador.”

But that star quality, I wonder, does such a thing really exist?

“Yes, and she had it. Something can happen with film which is quite extraordinary. The camera sees something the eye doesn’t see. That is star quality. What Gregory Peck and Kurt Douglas and Burt Lancaster and William Holden and the ladies like Audrey and Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn have in great abundance. “It’s something you don’t necessarily see in life and on the set unless the director has got a second vision. But you see it when you put that film up on screen.”

Sir Roger currently lives with his Swedish wife Kristina Tholstrup in Monaco. As a young man he lived for a short while in Hove. His then girlfriend had an apartment and they would whip off to the town for weekends. He was evacuated to Worthing at the beginning of the war and remembers later performing on Brighton Palace Pier in his touring days back in 1951 in a play called Miss Mabel and gracing the city in touring shows before the TV work took off.

“Between Brighton, Hove and Worthing I know that area of coast quite well. They were happy times – I was young and I didn’t mind pebbles on the beach.”

His big breaks before Bond came in 1962 series The Saint and 1971 series The Persuaders!

James Bond is now approaching film number 24. No other franchise films have such dependability. Sir Roger believes the spy reflects the actor playing the character rather than its era.

“I am very different to Sean and my attitude is I know I am going to win the fight, so I was a little devil may care about it; I enjoyed the humour of the character.

“Today it is keeping up with the times. There is more action, more CGI work in films, so Bond has had to go along with it. In between Bonds there are the imitators, the action movies, and sometimes there is action which makes you open your mouth. Bond does that today and I sit with my mouth open watching them.”

Duncan Hall looks back at the films which made Roger Moore such a great Bond

He’s played Simon Templar (aka The Saint) and millionaire playboy Lord Brett Sinclair in The Persuaders, but Sir Roger Moore will always be associated with one role – British secret agent 007 James Bond.
Duncan Hall profiles the seven movies which took Ian Fleming's super spy through the 1970s and into the 1980s.

Live And Let Die (1973)
FROM Paul McCartney and Wings's rock-reggae title track to the jungle locations it was clear from the outset that the safari-suited Roger Moore's take on Fleming's secret agent was going to be very different.
The film used spectacular stunts, blaxploitation influences and Moore's own natural comic persona to tell a rollicking story involving voodoo, Jane Seymour and loudmouth cop JW Pepper.
Outstanding moment: The speedboat chase in the Louisiana swamps.

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)
CHRISTOPHER Lee's titular assassin Scaramanga stole the show in Roger Moore's second outing as Bond.
The final of Fleming's Bond novels it is generally regarded as one of the writer's weakest - something the film did little to dispel. The rise of kung fu culture saw more than a few steals from Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon, although it is home to one of the most memorable car stunts in the series.
Outstanding moment: That car flip over the river with a vacationing JW Pepper.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
AFTER a long break in the series Moore returned with arguably his finest outing as the secret agent.
This time no expense was spared, with the production using the biggest set in the world, built specially at London's Pinewood Studios to represent the inside of a supertanker.
The tale of disappearing nuclear submarines was also the first appearance of one of the most memorable Bond villains, Richard Kiel's metal-toothed Jaws.
Outstanding moment: It doesn't get much better than the opening pre-credit scene on the slopes of Austria as memorably retold by Alan Partridge.


Moonraker (1979)
STAR Wars was breaking records at the box office, so perhaps it wasn't surprising Bond's producer's decided to move the action to outer space.
The last of Fleming's novels to be filmed the story was completely unrecognisable with only a few character names carried over. The production itself cost twice as much as The Spy Who Loved Me.
The results were not so impressive though, especially when the villainous Jaws suddenly got a girlfriend midway through the movie.
Outstanding moment: Jaws does battle with Bond and Dr Goodhead on a cable car high above Rio de Janeiro.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)
TAKING inspiration from two of Fleming's short stories, For Your Eyes Only is arguably one of the most under-rated of the series with its deliberate return to the grittier style of the earlier Bond movies.
When a spy boat co-ordinating the UK's fleet of Polaris submarines is sunk Bond has to prevent the Soviets from taking control of the UK's ballistic missiles. As the story twists and turns he is thrown together with the beautiful would-be assassin Melina Havelock who wants to kill the men who murdered her marine archaeologist parents.
Outstanding moment: Bond takes Havelock's Citroen 2CV down the slopes of Corfu to escape the scene of an assassination.

Octopussy (1983)
RELEASED the same year Sean Connery returned as 007 in the woeful rival production Never Say Never Again, Octopussy was another memorable outing for Moore's Bond.
The secret agent tries to chase down Steven Berkoff's mad Soviet general Orlov who is stealing jewellery and relics from the Russian government to fund his own expansion plans into Central Europe using a dirty bomb. Moore was reunited with The Man With The Golden Gun co-star Maud Adams as the titular jewel smuggler.
Outstanding moment: Bond's life-or-death struggle on a train with the twin knife-throwers who murdered his predecessor 009.

A View To A Kill (1985)
SADLY Moore's final outing as Bond was his least memorable, although Christopher Walken's chilling superhuman Max Zorin provided a great villain.
The set-pieces were looking tired, and a visibly aged Bond seemed a little creepy as he tempted Tanya Roberts and Grace Jones into bed.
Outstanding moment: The climactic battle on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.