Roger Moore Official Site

On Sunday, Oct 28, Sir Roger Moore and UNICEF held a press conference at the Hilton Hotel. He has been a UNICEF ambassador since 1991 and travels the world with his wife to raise awareness and money for the suffering children in the world that UNICEF has dedicated itself to help.

Specifically, Sir Roger gave the conference to help promote the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra's charity concerts to benefit UNICEF. The pair of concerts, on Oct 29 and 30 were conducted by the National Philharmonic's artistic director Zoltán Kocsis, they were scheduled to include the overture to Glinka's opera Ruslan and Ludmilla, Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals, in which Sir Roger was the narrator.

This is the third occasion on which the National Philharmonic Orchestra has given concerts to benefit UNICEF.

The other speakers at the press conference were Dr András Blahó, Hungary's UNICEF representative, and Géza Kovács, the National Philharmonic's General Director.
Blahó spoke about UNICEF's mission as the world's largest organization to help children, its programs to vaccinate children against deadly diseases, and the importance of the charity concerts as they provide aid for poor, needy children. Kovács said that the National Philharmonic was proud to be able to support UNICEF with its fund-raising concerts, and said that the concerts would not only be broadcast on Hungarian television in December, but that a DVD of it would also be released.

British actor Sir Roger Moore, the star of the TV series The Saint and of seven James Bond films, spoke of why he became a UNICEF ambassador, and what the organization does. He joined the struggle because he wanted to see the faces and help real children behind the grim statistics of poverty, illness and hardships that children suffer around the globe.

He said that the experience has been both rewarding and sometimes disturbing.
He has seen many AIDS victims. UNICEF works to develop and spread education to combat ignorance about disease.

For example, in some places people believe that, if an AIDS-infected man sleeps with a virgin, his body will be healed. So education and awareness is one cure to this ignorance.

When asked in an interview with Népszabadság how Sir Roger Moore managed to persuade the Hungarian state to allocate three times more subsidies than last year to the Hungarian UNICEF chapter, he told the daily that he always talks to politicians' wives.

Sir Roger Moore and his wife Kristina Tholstrup hand over gifts to small children during their visit to the Real Pearl day nursery in Budapest, Hungary, Monday Oct. 29, 2007. (AP Photo / MTI, Attila Kovacs)

One of the saddest things he and his wife had seen is the children dying of AIDS in hospices. Holding in his arms an eight-year-old child, who had the underdeveloped body of a three-year-old, and feeling through its little ribs intense coughing which he described as "a rumble from Hell," made Sir Roger even more resolved to help children.

UNICEF considers education one of its primary targets to combat ignorance, so it concentrates on getting children into school, which means providing the schools with infrastructure, and getting qualified teachers, as well as providing at least one meal a day.

He said that poverty leads to disease through lack of hygiene, so UNICEF works to provide communities with clean water, fighting malaria by providing children with mosquito nets, etc.

And lest anyone think that contributions to UNICEF may be a waste, he said that UNICEF spends only 9% of the contributions on administration and 91% to work for the children, a claim that no other world charitable organization for children can make.
Sir Roger said he has been encouraged by developments he has seen over the years, and mentioned that Hungary has raised over a million dollars for UNICEF.
Also, through his "begging," the Hungarian government has tripled its contribution in the last year.

Responding to a question from The Budapest Sun about his role as narrator in The Carnival of the Animals, he said that he himself did not write the narrations, but rather that Frances Button was the author.

He finds the whole production quite a lot of fun, and said that his personal favorites in Saint-Saens' Carnival are The Pianist, the Cuckoo, the Elephant, and the grand finale, in which all the animals join in.

As it was his 80th birthday, the jokingly self-described "geriatric actor" was presented with a birthday cake at the end of the conference.

Visit: UNICEF Hungary

Text : The Budapest Sun, Hungary Around The Clock and Marie-France Vienne (Sir Roger Moore's Official Website)