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Obituary: Luisa Mattioli, Italian actress who was Roger Moore’s wife during his James Bond years

Roger Moore and Luisa Mattioli Expand

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Roger Moore and Luisa Mattioli

Roger Moore and Luisa Mattioli

Roger Moore and Luisa Mattioli

Luisa Mattioli, who has died aged 85, acted in films in her native Italy in the 1950s and 1960s before becoming the third wife of Roger Moore, the screen personification of James Bond in the 1970s and 1980s.

After 30 years together, he abruptly left the marriage and took up with a family friend, prompting his wife in fury to alter the title of her putative memoir from Living With a Saint to Nothing Lasts Forever.

The two met in Rome in 1961. Moore, then 34 and the elder of the pair by a decade, had begun to make his name on TV as Ivanhoe. But eager for work he had accepted the lead in an Italian-made sword-and-sandals film, Romulus and the Sabines, in fact to be shot in Yugoslavia.

Luisa Mattioli, who had a smaller role as Silvia, interviewed Moore for TV before production began. Neither spoke the other’s language, but according to Moore’s autobiography, My Word is My Bond (2008), this did not hamper proceedings, nor their rapidly growing appreciation of each other.

So smitten was Moore he agreed to stay on in Rome and feature in a partisan drama, Un Branco di Vigliacchi (1962), in which Luisa Mattioli had been cast. Shadows, however, soon loomed over their gnocchi.

Moore, who had first been wed to the ice skater Doorn Van Steyn, was at the time the husband of eight years of the popular Welsh singer, Dorothy Squires. The Shirley Bassey of her day, she and Moore, her junior by a dozen years, had a tempestuous relationship.

Although because of her devout Roman Catholic upbringing Luisa Mattioli had at first agonised over living with the married Moore, she patiently bore the tribulations that followed.

The last of her score or so of screen appearances came in Bikini Pericolosi (“Dangerous Bikinis”) in 1963, the year that she gave birth to the couple’s first child, Deborah. She would become an actress herself.

Their first son, Geoffrey, later an actor and restaurateur, was born in 1966, and the family settled at Denham, south-east England. Cilla Black lived next door and John Mills was also a neighbour. Moore found fame on the small screen as professional smoothie The Saint, and after eight years Squires agreed to a divorce.

With Kenneth More as best man, Moore and Luisa Mattioli were then married in April 1969 at Caxton Hall, Westminster; a largely female crowd of 600 onlookers wished the couple well.

Luisa Mattioli was born on March 23, 1936, in San Stino di Livenza, near Venice. Her childhood was dominated by the war years. After finishing her education, she studied at Rome’s film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, making her screen debut at 20 in Napoli sole mio!. She also worked as a television presenter.

In 1973, the year that their second son, Christian, a producer, was born, Moore made his debut as James Bond in Live and Let Die. Global fame brought new problems – she once said that she ensured she had the aisle seat on flights “so Roger was always protected”.

In 1978, primarily for tax reasons, the family settled in Gstaad, Switzerland. They travelled frequently, however, and Luisa Mattioli became a familiar face from appearances at film premieres and the like.

Moore’s final eyebrow-raising turn as Bond came in 1985, by when he was nearing 60. Eight years later, a bout with prostate cancer that he described as “emasculating” prompted him to take stock of his life. He left Mattioli.

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Her real ire, however, was reserved for Kristina “Kiki” Tholstrup, with whom Moore set up home in Monaco. A Swedish-born Danish socialite,she had known Moore and his wife for many years.

They wed nine years later after Moore and Mattioli divorced.

He was said to have re-established friendly relations with Mattioli before his death in 2017. Their children survive her.

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