Christopher Lee – actor

Christopher Frank Carandini Lee (27 May 1922 – 7 June 2015) was an English actor, singer, and author. With a career spanning nearly seventy years, Lee initially portrayed villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a sequence of Hammer Horror films. His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Saruman in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and The Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014), and Count Dooku in the final two films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005).

Obituary:

We knew it was coming – the man was 93, after all – but you could easily believe that if anyone was going to live forever, it would be Christopher Lee. His death on Sunday, announced today, shows that even he was mortal.

But what a life. It’s fair to say that whoever you are and however long you live, you will never be as utterly cool as Christopher Lee. This is a man who was a wartime spy, had a film career than lasted almost seventy years – working with everyone from Jess Franco to George Lucas – and in his Nineties recorded a bunch of heavy metal albums, picking up a Metal Hammer award to go alongside his knighthood, BAFTA  Fellowship and other gongs.

Lee made so many films that even listing the highlights will turn into a gargantuan list. He rose to fame working for Hammer – in The Curse of Frankenstein, he was simply the monster – sorry, ‘creature’ – but then got to prove his acting chops with Dracula the next year, in the process becoming the iconic version of the character in a variable series of films. Lee would be a Hammer regular in the late 1950s and continued to work with them, often co-starring with Peter Cushing, throughout the 1960s and 70s, on films as varied as She, Taste of Fear, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Pirates of Blood River,The Devil Rides Out, Terror of the Tongs and the final horror film of Hammer’s first incarnation, To the Devil a Daughter. In 2011, he returned to the revived company to appear in The Resident.

Lee also worked frequently for Hammer’s rivals Amicus – he starred in their first horror film The City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel) and would be one of their go-to stars for films like Dr.Terror’s House of Horrors, The Skull, The House That Dripped Blood, Scream and Scream Again and I, Monster. But Hammer and Amicus were just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Lee’s horror work in the 1960s, as he travelled across Europe to star in a huge number of films. He worked with Mario Bava on The Whip and the Body and Hercules in the Haunted World, spoofed his Dracula role in Uncle Was A Vampire (he would do likewise in 1976 in Dracula and Son) and also appeared in The Virgin of Nuremberg, Terror in the Crypt aka Crypt of Horror, Castle of the Living Dead, Night of the Big Heat, Circus of Fear, The Blood Demon and The Oblong Box amongst others. He played Sir Henry Baskerville in Hammer’s Hound of the Baskervilles and then graduated to playing Sherlock Holmes.

Also in the 1960s, he developed another recurring role, playing arch villain Fu Manchu in five films. The last two of these were directed by Jess Franco, who Lee would go on to make several films with – from the ambitious but ultimately misguided Count Dracula (an attempt to stick to Stoker’s novel) to The Bloody Judge and Eugenie: The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, though Lee maintained that he was unaware of the sort of film he was making in that instance!

In the early 1970s, Lee continued to make international horror films, including The Creeping Flesh, Horror Express, Dark Places, Nothing But the Night (for his own Charlemagne company) but increasingly found himself able to move beyond the genre. While still a horror movie, The Wicker Man was a cut above the usual in terms of respectability, while other films like The Three Musketeers, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, western Hannie Caulder and Julius Caesar allowed him to move away from the genre to a degree.

A move to the USA and an iconic role in James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun cemented a move to the mainstream, and in the latter half of the decade and early 1980s, he had major roles in the likes of Airport ’77, Return from Witch Mountain, 1941, Bear Island, Goliath Awaits and a surprising number of martial arts action films: An Eye for an Eye, Jaguar Lives and Circle of Iron. Not that he abandoned low budget genre films – he was essentially tricked into hosting The Hollywood Meatcleaver Massacre, but also appeared in The Keeper, Starship Invasions, End of the World, Arabian Adventure, House of the Long Shadows and, most bizarrely, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf and the appalling Funny Man.

In the 1990s, he worked with Alejandro Jodorowsky on The Rainbow Thief, appeared in Police Academy: Mission to Moscow and turned up in Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch. This latter appearance was a precursor to his 2000’s career revival when he was often hired by directors who grew up watching him. So he worked with Tim Burton on Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Alice in Wonderland, Sleepy Hollow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and appeared in both the decade’s biggest franchises, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. And he just kept working – between 2010 and 2013, he made twelve films!

And it was more than just films and TV. Lee lent his voice to numerous audiobooks and latterly provided voices for video games – he also appeared in CD ROM project Ghosts in the mid 1990s. He fronted collections of horror stories, and wrote his autobiography, and made numerous records – in the 1970s, he narrated Hammer’s Dracula LP and made an opera single, in the early 2000s sang a handful of shockingly bad pop songs and then became a heavy metal star, first working with symphonic metal band Rhapsody and then releasing his won albums. He seemed to genuinely love this new and unexpected career twist, presumably no longer giving a damn what anyone thought of him.

They say that you shouldn’t meet your heroes, and they are often right. But I met Lee twice – once while working on a The Wicker Man featurette with David Gregory, and once when hanging around with the boys as they filmed Lee and Jess Franco for The Bloody Judge extras. Lee was exactly what you wanted him to be – dignified, serious, gentlemanly and charming. In short, he seemed a thoroughly decent chap. When he called me up after The Wicker Man shoot to get a number for one of the crew, my inner ten year-old exploded with excitement: Dracula on the phone!

Lee might not have been entirely comfortable with his ‘horror star’ reputation, but I think he eventually came to realise how much his work meant to so many people – including those now employing him. And regardless of what he thought of the films he’d made, he was a genuine connoisseur of the gothic and the nightmarish in literature. He never seemed ashamed of his past.

The death of Christopher Lee is the end of an era. I doubt any living actor will clock up the sheer number of credits that he has, or leave the same sort of cultural imprint. I’ll miss never seeing another Lee Christmas message. And I’ll miss his reassuring presence – he was an integral part of my life since I was a small child and the world feels that little bit emptier now.

David Flint, Strange Things Are Happening

Filmography