Sir Roger Moore on the interview circuit in Australia

As suave and charming in real life as he was in his heyday on screen, Roger Moore rattles off the anecdotes for Michael Dwyer of The Age.

WHEN James Bond's car pulls away from the casino, black pursuit vehicles inevitably appear in the rear-view mirror. Our hero smirks cruelly as the dashboard morphs into a flashing armoury of dials and buttons …

"Is there a hook back here?" Roger Moore asks in mild exasperation from the back seat of the car. He fumbles around the window frame, smart navy blazer hanging from a crooked finger.

"Of course, Sir Roger." The driver locates a concealed switch and, click, out pops the necessary accoutrement, like a welcome-to-Melbourne surprise from Q Branch. The former 007 flicks a famous eyebrow with a "whatever next" chuckle.

The world is greatly changed since Moore sheathed his Walther PPK for the last time. Today it's Daniel Craig who's licensed to kill at the cinema. His bitter, haunted, humourless Bond is the antithesis of the light-hearted escapologist Moore portrayed in seven films between 1973 and 1985.

"My Bond was a lover and a giggler," he writes unapologetically in his autobiography, My Word is My Bond. Like the character he portrayed as 007 — and as Simon Templar, aka The Saint, and opposite Tony Curtis in The Persuaders — the book is charming and breezy, propelled from one glamorous scene to the next with a hint of amusement at each outrageously fortunate turn.

"Well, I was running out of years, wasn't I?" he says of the book's canny timing, as it glides into shops on yet another world wave of Bondmania. "If I'd waited any longer it would have been a posthumous book."

So far, the 81-year-old has been precluded from seeing the 22nd Bond film, Quantum of Solace, by his promotional duties as an author, which yesterday brought him to Melbourne for an Age Dymocks literary lunch at Crown.

"I am curious," he says. "I shall see a DVD just before Christmas. I thought Casino Royale was terrific. I like Daniel Craig. Damn good actor."

As he is perfectly well aware, the same has rarely been said of Roger Moore.

His "tiny talent" is a running gag through his book, the irony being a staggering resume rooted in the demanding repertory theatre of pre-war London. He caught the end of the old Hollywood studio system, then did 15 solid years of television before his Bond broke box-office records in the '70s.

"You'll never be an actor," the famous wartime theatre critic James Agate had told him while still at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the 1940s. "I'll tell you why: because the gallery will love you and you'll never bother to learn to act."

In retrospect, Moore tends to agree. "The problem was that looking like a hero, looking like a leading man, they're the parts you got, and there's not much acting to be done in those parts. You get to say, 'My name's Bond, James Bond' — but that's all you get." His throaty chuckle acknowledges that few lines in showbiz have ever offered quite as much consolation.

Moore's relentlessly name-dropping memoir describes a life no less enviable than his remuneration. Whether driving Noel Coward's new Thunderbird from Los Angeles to London (via the Queen Mary), swapping fart jokes with Cary Grant, or spending regular Thanksgivings with Frank Sinatra, the self-portrait that emerges is of an exceedingly well-connected man of the world.

Married four times, Moore comes across as a bon vivant who never succumbed to the on-set drinking that he describes in too many of his co-stars. Well, hardly ever. "Only once," he confides with another flick of the eyebrow. "Because of a long, long luncheon that I couldn't leave. Royalty."

It was an especially dear friend, Audrey Hepburn, who drew him into his present role as goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, for which he was knighted in 2003. Although still open to movie offers, this has now eclipsed many of Sir Roger's most satisfying and prominent screen roles.

"As an actor, you're poncing around the world, in the best hotels, the best seats everywhere, everybody worried about whether your shirt's clean," he says. "You're so busy making a film you don't have time to worry about what's going on over there, the abject poverty on the other side.

"On the humanitarian side of things you see the world very differently. I'm very grateful that Audrey Hepburn introduced me to that world, to open my eyes."

Compared to the giggling and gaudy '70s, the whole world sees itself differently in 2008, if the dark and desperate new James Bond is any indication.

The producers "have to go with whatever they feel is going to be the current vogue. But you know," he says, as the car pulls up at his next swashbuckling assignment, "I don't think it has very much to do with real life".

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