Suave, debonair Roger Moore and tough, plain-speaking Tony Curtis: they were partners briefly in one of the best British series, but since then their careers and their private lives have gone their own, very different, ways.

By Ken Roche

I was sitting halfway up a French mountain chatting to Tony Curtis. We'd been throwing stones at an old coke can, and I was delighted to be beating my boyhood hero with my superior accuracy. Farther up the mountain path, a score of yards away, Curtis' co-star Roger Moore was concentrating on being very macho in an all-action car chase scene for The Persuaders ! Remember that serie ? It's on again this Saturday.

We started talking about Moore. "Dat guy", said Curtis in his inimitable way, "is gonna to places".

And "dat" was the understatement of the year from one star assessing the potentialities of another. He was prophetic enough. Moore certainly has been places since that TV location in the first week's shooting of The Persuaders !.

Since then Moore has been to Bond and back - and looks very likely to be back yet again as the famed 007.

Of course, at the time of The Persuaders !, more than 10 years ago, Moore was already pretty well known. He had established himself as The Saint and in a stack of films. But he wasn't a superstar. "My acting ability", he once told me "could be assessed in a very few words. And I wouldn't like any of them to be used in a family magazine". But whatever it is that it takes to make a real star - and sometimes not even great actors have it - Roger Moore's got it. He didn't quite have it those 10 years or so ago. But he was on the edge of it, and Hollywood stalwart Tony Curtis could sense it.

So he, along with a lot of others - including Cubby Broccoli, the Bond producer - recognised that Moore had the makings of something rather special. And Moore went on to prove them all right.

Yet manu less shrewd assessors grimaced when Moore took over from Sean Connery as the new 007 in Live and Let Die. Some people in the film industry felt that Moore wouldn't have the same charisma as Connery. In fact, around the time this was about to happen, I was having lunch with Moore in Pinewood Studio's somptuous restaurant while he was doing studio work on The Persuaders ! Also there, at another table, were Sean Connery and Jill St John, themselves working on a Bond film. Moore, I knew - although he was keeping quiet about it at the time - was already involved in chats about his possible transition into Bond. Roguish as ever, he sent a note to Connery - and signed it 0031/2.

Live And Let Die opened in 1973 to glowing reviews, and became the biggest-ever moneyspinner in Britain up to then. It earned £2 million hereand grossed £14 around the world - which was seven times what it cost producers Broccoli and Harry Saltzman to make. In his first Bond film, Moore, the policeman's son from Stockwell, south London, who'd once been glad to pose for knitting pattern, made the giant leap from " light leading man" to international film star. He took all tongue-in-cheek, never losing his sense of humour or his ability to send himself up, never believing his own publicity. Which is maybe the secret of Roger Moore's amazing youth. He's a contemporary of various battered hell-raisers like Burton and O'Toole, who don't look exactly pristine these days, but he looks like a clean-living lad addicted to cold showers and jogging. he does, in fact, drink four pints of water every morning and a pint of cocoa at night.

But the women's magazines would have it that the immaculate Moore oweshis everlasting charisma to a happy marriage to his volatile Italian wife Luisa, who travels with him everywhere and shields him from the advances of his too-avid female fans. Well, shield is one word for it.

Rumours buzz round him as persistently as his admirers do: will he, won't he do another Bond has always been the most riveting. And Moore nearly always will. When Superman Christopher Reeve was tipped early this year to be Bond in Octopussy, the latest Bond saga, Moore simply grinned and said: "I can't see why I shoudn't carry on as 007. i'm rather hurt - nobody asked me to play Superman".

When word went around that Connery was going to make a comeback and play a baddy opposite Moore in a Bond film, Moore said that he felt there was no waythis would ever happen, but added with a smile that he wouldn't mind playing the villain as there wouldn't be so many lines to learn.

So now is he going to di his sixth Bond, Octopussy, with - for the first time - a gorgeous girl as the arch villain ? Unlike Rosa Klebb, the Soviet sweetie with stilettos in her toecaps in From Russia With Love, who was efficient but lacked allure, the new she-devil will be beautiful, intelligent and irresistible. And unlikea lot of the Bond girls, she'll have lines. Will Moore be able to resist her? Watch this space.

Meanwhile Moore, who looks in his mid-40s especially after that pint of cocoa - and is actually, unbelievably, well into his 50s - has bought the right to The Saint, the character that launched him into millions of sitting rooms from 1963 to 1968. He won'tn he says, be playing The Saint himself - there are limits to human credulity - but he'll obviously be a major influence in the casting. With a bit of luck we'll get a Saint as unpretentious as Roger Moore, who insists to all nd sundry that he's really a hopeless actor. Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn't. But he's a millionaire and - according to the polls - everyone's favourite film star.

"Dat guy" has gone places.

Why Curtis feels bitter

By Lesley Salisbury

It all started in 1949 when Bernie Schwartz changed his name to Tony Curtis and mde the film Criss Cross. Despite excellent films like Houdini (1954), Trapeze (1957) with Burt Lancaster, The Sweet Smell Of success (1958), The Defiant Ones (1959 with Sidney Poitier, Some Like It Hot (1960), the classic with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Munroe, and Spartacus (1961) Curtis always complains that Hollywood has never really treated him with respect.

He hoped for more character roles after his acclaimed performance in The Boston Strangler (1969) - he played the psychopathic killer - but such roles still elude him and he says bitterly that he hasn't been given the chance to prove himself. Curtis is now 57, the father of four daughters and two sons from three marriages. His most recent marriage, to model Leslie Allen, mother of his sons Nicholas and Benjamin, ended in divorce in 1981, with allegations from Leslie that she was afraid that Curtis would try to "molest, attack, strike or kill her". A sad end to a marriage that had lasted 12 years. In the past, Curtis has admitted spending 50,000 dollars on psychiatric help. He denies his ex-wife's allegations but admits that the divorce left him sad, lonely nd shaken. He tries to relieve his gloomy moods with partying - he is a regular on the Hollywood party circuit and is often seen at dusk-to-dawn parties at Hugh Heffner's Los Angeles Playboy mansion - and wih other women.

His name was linked in September 1980 with ex-Charlie's Angels Jaclyn Smith, who had just broken up with her husband Dennis Cole. Later, in May last year, he had a "whirlwind romantic fling" - as the American press described it - with Soraya Khashoggi, ex-wife of Arab billionaire Adnan Khashoggi.

Last year he was delighted when he was offered the lead in Neil simon's play I Ought To Be In Pictures when it openedin Los Angeles, and devastated when actor Ron Leibman replaced him for the show's New York run. Walter Matthau took the film role.

Curtis didn't hit the superstar bullseye in the same way as Roger Moore but is still a Hollywood "great". Now he has little need to work - he has made a fortune by investing his film earnings in real estate and he says there is plenty left over, "despite the alimony". He owns 250 acres of land in Los Angeles - he paid 750 dollars and acre for it 30 years ago and says it is now worth 25,000 dollars an acre. he has a house in Los Angeles and another on Cape Cod on the east coast of America.

Everywhere he travels, he takes a piece of paper with him that tells him how much he is worth. "I know exactly what I'm worth, wherever I am", he says. "I'm not going to go down the tubes broke".

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