James Bond Star Sir Roger Moore’s Belgravia Apartment Is Up For Sale

From a £45m mansion which once housed Bond film producer Harry Saltzman and starred as M’s office in Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, to Ian Fleming’s offices turned James Bond inspired home, it seems there’s no shortage of Bond-themed properties on the market. The latest offering for James Bond fans? The longest running 007 star Sir Roger Moore’s Belgravia apartment has hit the market. 

22 Eaton Square: Roger Moore’s Former Apartment

Last year, the news broke that Roger Moore’s former Holland Park apartment was available to rent – for a cool £5,600 a month – and now his Belgravia digs have followed. Though a prime London postcode, this Belgravia flat very much belonged to the early days of Moore’s career. Living there in the late 1960s, the actor had yet to make his debut in his first Bond film (Live and Let Die, 1973) and his career was only just entering its prime. Less booked and busy than he would later become, Moore was left with plenty of time to stir, or rather shake, the pot of his relationships.

Roger Moore’s Relationships

Much like the womanising spy he would later play, Moore’s romantic track record wasn’t the smoothest. He first married in 1946, aged just 18, to a woman six years his senior named Doorn van Steyn. A fellow RADA student, Moore moved in with her and her family, only for their relationship to quickly sour. Money tensions and Van Steyn’s lack of confidence as an actor took their toll and the marriage collapsed. Later, Moore would accuse her of domestic abuse, claiming that she scratched and punched him, and even threw a teapot at him. 

Continuing his preference for older women, in 1952 Moore met the Welsh singer Dorothy Squires who was 12 years his senior. Divorcing Van Steyn the following year, Moore and Squires got married and moved to the US. But new difficulties quickly arose. Alongside tensions caused by their age difference, Squires was none too happy about Moore’s new-found infatuation with starlet Dorothy Provine. In a bid to save their marriage, the pair packed their bags back to Blighty but it seemed the new address would do little to help. While Squires suffered a series of miscarriages (with Moore later suggesting things might have been different if they’d been able to have children), Moore entertained himself with an affair with Italian actress Luisa Mattioli whom he had met on a film set years earlier.

In the late 1960s the pair would sneak off to this very same Belgravia flat at 22 Eaton Square for their romantic rendezvous. When Squires discovered the couple living together she threw a brick through the windows of the flat’s living room and smashed a guitar over Moore’s head. Moore promptly left Squires for Mattioli, got married and had kids – before leaving her in 1993 for Swedish-born Danish socialite, Kristina ‘Kiki’ Tholstrup, whom he later married. 

Despite the tempestuous times had there, it seems that Moore wasn’t the only Bond attracted to Eaton Square. Before he bought up his French Riviera home, Sir Sean Connery lived in a first-floor flat just down the road at No 6, which he sold in 2005 for £1.25m with only 26 years left on the lease. 

The History Of 22 Eaton Square

Before its windows were smashed through with a brick, the glass at 22 Eaton Square had been completely blown out in the Blitz. Even earlier, in the 1930s, before the Belgravia property’s conversion into apartments, the stucco-fronted house served as the childhood home of Lord Lucan. A British peer and avid gambler, Lucan was renowned for his expensive tastes. When his marriage collapsed in 1972 he was forced out his then-home, from which he pursued a vicious custody battle against his wife – a battle he eventually lost. Obsessed with regaining control of his children, he began to spy on his wife and record their telephone conversations.

His madness came to a head on 7 November 1974 when the children’s nanny Sandra Rivett was declared dead, having been murdered in the Lucan family home. His wounded ex-wife then burst into the nearby Plumbers Arms, claiming she’d been attacked by her husband and that he had admitted to killing the nanny. That evening Lucan called his mother, visited a friend and penned a letter protesting his innocence. Early next morning, he had disappeared. His car was found abandoned in Newhaven but Lucan himself was never found. 

Step Inside

Today, this Belgravia home holds little trace of its once famous resident, nor its swinging sixties heyday. 

With the current owners having owned the property since 2007, the three-bedroom apartment is now being sold with a 115-year lease. Stretching over the third and fourth floors, the property boasts a large entrance hall with a sweeping staircase and spacious reception room, plus a balcony with views over the communal gardens.

On the market for £5.75m. Find out more at content.knightfrank.com