Yet when I commended his humanitarian effort she's self-depricating. "It's certainly better than poncing around playing movie stars! I'm doing something useful. Saying that sounds pompous, rather arrogant, but it is something for me that is worthwhile."
Acting is still a part of his life, but is not what drives him. He has been starring in The Dream Team, a Charlie's Angels-type TV series, which he says is "a dream job" because he only has to work a few days in a row throughout the season. He plays the boss of three secret agents who double as models. He films his scenes without leaving Monaco. "They come and even put a teleprompter up so I don't have to learn the lines." What problems? "I've never had to say more than 'My name is Bond, James Bond'. That was about the longest speech I ever had."
He has never taken himself too seriously but despite the send-up, there is a sardonic note to his words. Does he regret that his full body of talent has not been tapped? He replies with a joke: "I don't know about my full body of talents. Maybe you mean my fallen body?" But then a wistful note creeps into his voice. "I suppose I would have loved to have been a classical actor. I had the chance. I was offered my MGM contract the same week I was offered Stratford. But I might still have been at Stratford carrying a spear today. I might not have been any good. Whereas I got away with it in Movies."
So the confidence - once so lacking that he manufactured for himself 'the Roger Moore persona' to cover up - still has a few holes? "I think about it, yeah, but purely as it passes in the night, when the nightmare come up." Nightmare? "Yes. I have this recurrent nightmare that I'm in a show and haven't had a rehearsal and nobody will show me the script and the curtain is going up. It's terrible. Terrifying."
Then the self-deprecation takes over again and he roars with laughter at the memory of recent clips used in a BBC documentary about him, on which I worked. One early 1954 clip in particular has him doubled up - a scene with Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson from his first film The Last Time I Saw Paris "Oh my God! What a twit I was. If you've ever seen yourself on the screen you have to have a sense of humour."
He is amused by some "fairly non-PC remarks" he made in the programme ("They wont show it in America, will they?" he asks). These revolve around his early theatrical days in London, when the West End was controlled by Blinky Beaumont and H. M. Tennant. One tale is intended as a joke, but is tinged with bitter humour. Moore had been understudying David Tomlinson in The Little Hut and when he came offstage one night, Blinky was waiting in the wings. "Hr told me 'you were very good tonight dear' and I said 'well, thank you, Mr Beaumont, don't you think I should have a raise?' I was getting £15 a week. He looked at me, then said 'you're married aren't you?' 'Yes' I replied. He said 'You're very lucky to be working, dear boy'."
Moore handed in his notice after that. "It was very difficult for me. Because I was pretty. I had a lot of problems."
He landed a contract with MGM, went to America, then found himself back in Britain a few years later. He tried to buy the TV rights to The Saint but Leslie Charteris would not sell until ten years later, when Lew Grade acquired the rights and cast Moore in the role. Even Moore's physical appearance fitted the role; the debonair, lazy smile with its "unconquerable devilishness" and the quizzical eyebrows capable of rising to defiantly mocking heights. And so Roger Moore became The Saint incarnate. But in that portrayal came an image that would dog him forever: that of the suave, debonair, nonchalant Englishman.
Yet until then the policeman's son from South London lacked the confidence even to enter a restaurant alone. His answer was to invent another Roger Moore, one modelled on the outer characteristics of Simon Templar. As the two merged, so Moore adopted "the Act" that would mask his uncertainty and carry him through life, OO7 and beyond, with that carefree, sophisticated demeanour.
For millions around the world, Moore is still an icon. No matter that he hasn't made a big film in years, there are more websites dedicated to him than Kevin Costner. Even a clipping of his hair is being advertised for sale as an historical item that will increase in value. He laughs.
"Don't you ever take any of it seriously?" I ask. "Of course not, how can you?" His friend Gregory Peck ascribes this to "Roger's trademark insouciance". Yet Peck agrees, along with Caine, Bricuse and Pam, that Moore's career and what he has achieved mean a great deal to him.
Life has a strange habit of turning in circles. Moore may be cast in one now. His eight year marriage to the singer Dorothy Squires broke up when he fell in love with the Italian actress Luisa Mattioli. For seven years, though Roger and Luisa lived together and had two children (Geoffrey and Deborah), Squires refused to give Moore a divorce, intent on ensuring that the woman who had taken away her husband would never become his wife. In 1968 she finally relented and Moore married Luisa.
"I behaved badly," Moore has said. "I'm not particularly proud of that episode in my life. I shall pay for it one day. Why should she have gone out of her way to make things easy for me?" Yet when Squires died in April 1998, it was he who quietly paid her costly hospital bills.
But it seems he is indeed paying for it now. At the end of 1993, soon after his successful operation for prostate cancer, he took a lone holiday in his Swiss home and found himself spending time with Kristina Tholstrup, a widowed family friend and neighbour. Their friendship flourished into love and, after 33 years together, he left Luisa, 66. Now she has steadfastly refused to give Roger a divorce.
Kristina lacks the volatility of his Italian wife. For years their squabbles (usually begun in English and ending in Luisa's more demonstrative tongue) were common knowledge among their friends. Today, with Kristina by his side, the fights have been replaced with hand-holding under the table ("and on top of the table," he informs me cheekily) and tender gazes. Leslie Bricuse says "their devotion lights up a room". So Moore is a true romantic? "Yes," he smiles reluctantly, then bursts into song "Love's just around the corner!"
He is in fine physical shape and exercises regularly. Though careful about what he eats, he still heeds Noel Coward's early advice to him: "Eat what you like until you are 5lb over weight, then lose 10lb. When you've done that, dear boy, start eating again."
His son Christian is lurking in the outer office, waiting to drive his dad to a doctor's appointment and then to look at a new house ("It's for Christian") before returning to pack for a flight to London to attend the opening of his elder son Geoffrey's restaurant.
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Roger
and his Co-Stars from 'The Dream Team'