Roger Moore was always the consummate gentleman – and it was not an act. Numerous friends and co-stars attested to his kindness and thoughtfulness. It was very out of character for the English actor to speak ill of anyone, but he shocked a live audience when he spilled the outrageous details about a fellow star.

His second outing as James Bond, The Man With the Golden Gun, is back on TV screens this weekend, and he revealed how one actor was constantly boasting about his staggering number of sexual conquests while they were making the 1974 film.

Moore said: “He was a very small man and he used to touch me and I used to say, ‘Don’t touch me. You are diseased'”

Roger Moore was speaking at London’s Southbank Centre in 2016 and was on his usual sparkling, witty form as he reminisced about his extraordinary life and career, including, of course, James Bond. He would pass away the following year on May 23.

The unfortunate actor he was referring to was Hervé Villechaize, who played Nick Nack, the sidekick to Christopher Lee’s Scaramanga. The diminutive actor was 3’11 tall, but Moore clarified: “I wasn’t being cruel about his size, it was just that he was a sex maniac. He had a lust for ladies, unnatural.”

Villechaize was a talented artist who had exhibited at the Museum of Paris at just 18, and an aspiring actor. He had been living in his car and working as a rat-catcher in Los Angeles before he landed the life-changing part, and Moore described how his sudden fortune went to his head.

As well conquests, Villechaize also boasted about sexual adventures with prostitutes – although some of them refused his advances and his money.

Moore said: “When we were in Hong Kong he would find girls in girly clubs and go with a flashlight, saying ‘You, you, not you.'”

In a staggering evocation of bygone days of promiscuity and sexism, Moore added that he asked Villechaize exactly how many women he had slept during the film shoot in the Far East: “He told me 35. I told him that did not count as he paid for them, but he said, ‘Sometimes when I pay they refuse.'”

Sadly, Villechaize did not enjoy a long and prosperous life full of anecdotes like Roger Moore.

After finding global fame in the James Bond franchise, he embraced a second round of success when he starred alongside Ricardo Montalban as Mr Roarke’s assistant, Tattoo, in the global smash-hit television series Fantasy Island from 1978.

Unfortunately, he was fired in 1984 after repeatedly clashing with the show’s producers over his pay demands and unwelcome propositioning of female cast members and crew.

Villechaize’s life came to a tragic end when he shot himself in the garden of his Hollywood home in 1993, aged 50. The actor had been supporting himself with sporadic guest appearances.

He left a suicide note which read: “I love everybody. Nobody is to blame for this.”