Ex-007 Roger Moore 'beaten up by first two wives'

Former James Bond actor Roger Moore has claimed he was a victim of domestic violence during his first two marriages, it emerged on Wednesday.

The 84-year-old British star, who first played agent 007 in 1973's "Live and Let Die", said his former wives Doorn Van Steyn and Dorothy Squires subjected him to a string of attacks in both of their doomed marriages.

Van Steyn, an ice skater who married Moore when he was 19, once threw a teapot at him, he told television presenter Piers Morgan in an interview due to be broadcast on Friday.

"She would scratch me," the longest-running Bond told Morgan's "Life Stories" chat show. "My mother was always petrified when I went home to see that I had more scars."

Moore, who is on his fourth marriage, said that on one occasion Van Steyn had even attacked a doctor who was treating a cut on his hand.

"She said to him, 'Aren't you going to do anything?' and punched him," he recalled. "Which made a change, because normally she punched me."

Moore divorced Van Steyn in 1953 and soon after married Welsh singer Dorothy Squires, whom he described as having "a great temper."

But this marriage was also stormy, and she once hit him over the head with a guitar, he claimed.

The actor went on to divorce Squires in 1968 and married Italian actress Luisa Mattioli the next year. The couple had three children but ended their marriage in 1996.

Moore has been married to Christina Tholstrup, a 71-year-old Scandinavian socialite, since 2002.

Squires died in 1998 and Van Steyn in 2010.

AFP