SCREEN legend Sir Roger Moore has been remembered as a “charming” and “modest” young man by a former Bournemouth mayor who gave him tips on improving his acting.

The James Bond and Saint star died this week at his home in Switzerland at the age of 89.

Pamela Harris, who was a stage and film actress, knew him in the late 1950s, when stardom still lay ahead.

The two shared an agent when Pamela was appearing in repertory theatre and Sir Roger was back from early experience in American films.

“He came back from Hollywood. I had been in London doing bits in films and I’d been in Worthing at the Connaught Theatre,” she remembered.

“He said, ‘I’ve only ever done film. I don’t know anything about acting’.

“I said ‘Go and learn’ and he went down to Worthing.

“He was charming – I liked him very much.”

Pamela, whose surname was Thomas, was among the original cast of the ground-breaking play Look Back in Anger. She had small parts in films, including Reach for the Sky and the Goons’ short The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn, but turned down a contract with 20th Century-Fox.

She said of Sir Roger: “He had been in America doing films and everybody thought he was wonderful.

“He had this wonderful tan, which we’d never seen in England. He was a beautiful colour, having just come back. He was a terribly handsome man and we were all lily-white.

“He was very modest. He wasn’t a bit big-headed. Some of them, it goes to their heads, but he wasn’t a bit like that. He was charming.”

Sir Roger played James Bond seven times, from Live and Let Die in 1973 to A View to a Kill in 1985. He joked: “When I was doing The Saint on television I had two expressions; as Bond I’ve managed to work up to four.”

In recent years, he was known as an ambassador for the United Nations children’s fund Unicef.

He brought his one-man show An Evening With Roger Moore to Bournemouth’s Pavilion in 2013, telling the audience that he had preferred Sean Connery’s Bond until he saw Skyfall the previous weekend.

“Daniel Craig is sensational. No one will remember any other Bond film after this. He does more stunts in two minutes than I did in seven movies,” he said.