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Sir Christopher Lee
CBE CStJ
Lee at the Berlin International Film Festival, February 2013
Born
Christopher Frank Carandini Lee

(1922-05-27) 27 May 1922 (age 102)
Belgravia, London, England, United Kingdom
Alma materWellington College
Occupation(s)Actor, singer, author
Years active1946–present
SpouseBirgit Krøncke (1961–present)
Children1
Military career
Allegiance Finland
 United Kingdom
Service / branchFinnish Army (December 1939)
British Home Guard (1940)
 Royal Air Force (1941–1946)
Years of service1939–1946
RankFlight Lieutenant
Battles / warsWinter War
World War II (North African Campaign, Allied invasion of Italy, Battle of Monte Cassino)
Websitechristopherleeweb.com

Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ, (born 27 May 1922) is an English actor, singer and author. Lee initially portrayed villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a string of popular Hammer Horror films. His other notable 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).

He was knighted for services to drama and charity in 2009, received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2011 and received the BFI Fellowship in 2013.[1][2][3] Lee considers his best performance to be that of Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the biopic Jinnah (1998), and his best film to be the British horror film The Wicker Man (1973).[4]

Always noted as an actor for his deep, strong voice, he has, more recently, also been known for using his singing ability, recording various opera and musical pieces between 1986 and 1998 and the symphonic metal album Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross in 2010 after having worked with several metal bands since 2005. The heavy metal follow-up titled Charlemagne: The Omens of Death was released on 27 May 2013.[5][6] He was honoured with the "Spirit of Metal" award in the 2010 Metal Hammer Golden God awards ceremony.

Christopher Lee is one of the highest grossing actors of all time, having grossed $8,321,486,066 worldwide.

1950s

[edit]

His final theatrical performance was in the West End, as the lead character in an Under 30 Group production of The Flat Next Door at the Whitehall Theatre. He was simultaneously filming Fergus McDonell's 1950 drama Prelude to Fame and, despite having a very small role, he was required to be on set for almost the entire film. The film won in the "tug-of-war" and rehearsals for the play had to go on without him. On the opening night he was so nervous he suffered a "dry" after five minutes and had another eight or nine before the end, in a performance he called "an utter disaster".[7]

Lee's first foray into television was on the live light entertainment programme Kaleidoscope, where his performance as the Commissaire de police was overshadowed by co-star Richard Molinas' uncontrollable flatulence.[8] He didn't do live television again until 1978, when he hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live. He did, however, do much live radio, which was less fraught, but still had its peculiar moments due to "sudden urges of naturalism", such as the time he and Roger Delgado acted out an actual duel in the studio with real foils.[9]

He reunited with Terence Young in Germany for the war film They Were Not Divided, which included a large number of soldiers playing parts. Lee felt uneasy at returning to Germany so soon after the war and the shoot was made more difficult by the presence of live mines and the proximity of former S.S. "stud farms".[10] On his return to London, Rank told him again that casting him was difficult because he was "too tall, too foreign-looking, and hadn't made a name." This time, the message was italicised and they declined to renew his contract.[11]

Left to fend for himself as an independent, Luck was on Lee's side. He ran into the American director Raoul Walsh in a corridor, who asked him if he could speak Spanish and fence, which he could. He was thus cast in Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N., as a Spanish Captain. [12][13] Lee and the film's star, Gregory Peck, both had their first on-screen duel, against each other. Lee enjoyed the experience, noting that the difference between British and American films was that the Americans gave the supporting characters their "moment", whereas in British films they were "set dressings, [given] not so much direction, as indirections, to interpret as best we might."[14] After filming was completed, opportunities dried up for Lee and he had to take a job as a floor-walker in Simpsons of Piccadilly to pay the rent.[15] Also in 1951, he appeared uncredited in the American epic Quo Vadis. He played a chariot driver and was injured when he was thrown from it at one point during filming.[4]

When his next film arrived, it was his fourth collaboration with Terrence Young, in the thriller Valley of Eagles, playing the sidekick of Jack Warner's detective character. It was partly filmed in Sweden, which began Lee's "love affair" with the country.[16] A chance meeting with the tenor Jussi Björling while singing in a bar led to him inviting Lee to sing for Joel Berglund, the Intendant of the Royal Swedish Opera. He did so and they were impressed enough to offer to enrol him, if he would stay in Stockholm. He couldn't, and had to turn them down.[17] Still determined to return to Sweden, he was promised work as an English radio announcer and several parts in the series of television films called Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales. He returned to Sweden the following summer to make them, five in all, over two seasons, playing a variety of roles. During the filming of one, an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Nightingale, Lee played the Emperor of China and met King Gustaf VI Adolf, who visited the set and joked, "interesting matter of protocol - who should bow first, the Emperor of China or the King of Sweden?"[18]

On his return to London, Lee continued to struggle. Rank was in decline and there were fewer and fewer roles. Lee thus resolved to make the most of his language skills and try to turn himself into an "international figure".[19] He took whatever he could get, playing the villainous Sir Felix Raybourne in the crime thriller Paul Temple Returns, a slave dealer in Babes in Bagdad and as an aide-de-camp in The Crimson Pirate. He enjoyed the Spain-based shoot immensely and took fighting tips from Burt Lancaster, but felt that the script, which was re-written by director Robert Siodmak after the producers feared original writer Waldo Salt's so-called "Communist ties", turned the film from a serious effort into something approaching a farce.[20] After that he went to Paris to film John Huston's Oscar-nominated Moulin Rouge, where he appeared uncredited as the painter Georges Seurat.[21] To save money, the production company, Romulus Films, kept him on in Paris to play another uncredited role, Lieutenant Whitlock, in Innocents in Paris.[20]

After that, Lee's career stalled. With no roles coming his way, he and his mother went on holiday to Spain to see his sister, where he met and befriended the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty.[22] In his time off, he returned to Sweden, also visiting Norway and Finland, where he would do small jobs, occasionally joining one of the small operatic societies as a guest singer[23] Returning to London, he auditioned for a role in Diamond Lil opposite Mae West, but lost out to Bruno Barnabe.[24] With film roles still not materialising, he returned to television, for the TV film The Mirror and Markheim and the sitcom The Adventures of Aggie. He also did a play-within-a-play for Orson Welles, based on Moby-Dick. Called Moby Dick—Rehearsed, only 75 minutes of footage was shot before Welles stopped production and the footage is now lost.[25]

He recalls that his breakthrough came in 1952 when Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. began making half-hour films at the British National Studios for the anthology series Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Presents.[26] He played various roles in between 13 and 20 of the episodes,[a] gradually moving from supporting to lead roles, even appearing alongside Buster Keaton. In an interview in 2006, he called the work "an excellent training ground."[13] His work for Fairbanks, Jr. led to his appearing in a Fairbanks Productions film in 1955, Police Dog, as a dog handler frightened of dogs.[28] Also in 1955, Lee appeared in the film Crossroads, though he was reported to Equity and sent home in the middle of the shoot, for having laughed at a joke told by Ferdy Mayne. Lee speculated that he could have been punished by being cut from the final film but didn't know, rarely watching any of his films when they were released.[29]

During this time, Lee was frequently used as a dubber, on one occasion even dubbing a woman. His most notable dubbing work in the early 1950s was for Jacques Tati's French comedy Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.[30] He worked on numerous films in a variety of accents, including Malay pidgin, Japanese English, Soho Italian and Detroit Swedish.[30]

Making an episode of Colonel March of Scotland Yard, Lee met and befriended Boris Karloff.[31] Further television roles followed, including an episode of O.S.S., an episode of the Rhodes Reason series White Hunter, an episode of The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel and an episode of The Adventures of William Tell.[32] During the latter, for the first time in his career, Lee refused to read a line. Feeling that the rote mid-Atlantic phrase "Tell, this time I'll get you for sure" was inappropriate, he declined to deliver it, much to the amazement of his co-star Scott Finch, who was unaware that actors could do such a thing.[33] Lee felt that the producers "got their own back" however, when as his character was dragged through a brush and hedge by a pack of dogs, he cut and bruised himself.[34] Other injuries he sustained in the early part of his career included almost drowning when he fell into the river Guadalquivir during the filming of Terrence Young's That Lady,[35] almost having the little finger of his right hand severed by an inebriated Errol Flynn during a swordfight in The Dark Avenger.[36] Lee played numerous roles in four episodes of The Errol Flynn Theatre and the two had a rematch in the episode Fortunes of War. Lee accidentally took Flynn's wig off with his rapier and had to convince Flynn that he hadn't done it on purpose.[37] Two of Lee's four episodes are missing, including the one where he duels Flynn.

Lee reckoned that by this point he had more fencing experience than his father had had, and some stories were rewritten specifically so that he could take part in a swordfight in them. In the 1958 TV series Ivanhoe, he and Roger Moore had to duel for hours on end, leaving them both exhausted.[38] Other television roles included two episodes of Assignment Foreign Legion, first as a homicidal French gardener and then as an officer of the French Foreign Legion; and in two episodes of Sailor of Fortune, for which he received positive reviews from W. Stanley Moss.[39]

Having done a steady stream of television with almost no film work, Lee received a "sudden inundation" of offers.[29] He worked in Portugal for José Ferrer on his war film The Cockleshell Heroes, in Spanish Morocco for Rudolph Maté's drama Port Afrique and returned to England for the Boulting brothers' Private's Progress.[40] He also did a large amount of work for the Danziger brothers, usually directed by David MacDonald or Ernest Morris, including three episodes of The Vise and the film Alias John Preston, which gave him what was his first lead role.[41]

At dinner with his sister's friend and her husband, Lee met the film producer Alexander Korda shortly before he died, and was directed by his brother Zoltan Korda and Terrence Young in the film Storm Over the Nile, which was a remake of Korda's earlier film The Four Feathers.[42] Lee began to "make a shop window of my foreignness, height and cold expression." He played a Uruguayan bar owner in The Battle of the River Plate, a German officer in Ill Met by Moonlight (though his only scene was edited out of the American release), a Welsh opera singer in Fortune Is a Woman (where he mimed to a record for the singing scenes, which rather hurt him), as a French cuckold in The Truth About Women and as a German-Jewish doctor in The Traitor.[43] He also returned to Libya for the first time since the war to make Bitter Victory. After a "lottery" for parts, Lee played an English Sergeant, but was perplexed by being told "not to being all this British Army nonsense" into the role.c He travelled to Kenya for Beyond Mombasa, which was directed by George Marshall, who had met Lee after wandering onto the set of Port Afrique. Lee played a white hunter and hoped the film would be his breakthrough. However, it was not a financial success. Lee, who had injured himself sliding down a mine shaft, suffered with Malaria, almost drowned in a river, and had to wrestle with a mechanical crocodile in the MGM studios, was immensely disappointed.[44]

As Lee turned thirty-five in 1957, the age by which most of the men in his family had assumed prestigious positions of power and authority, he reflected on his career so far. He was still tall, foreign and mostly unknown but felt he could claim to have "learned by doing" and had "scorned nothing as beneath me". He had died "countless times" on-screen and hoped that perhaps he might build up a reputation, "in the same way as a coral formation, which is made up of a deposit of tiny corpses".[45] Shortly thereafter, his agent told him that Hammer were looking to remake Frankenstein in colour and he had been suggested to play The Creature. He attended a casting session with Anthony Hinds and Terence Fisher, where: "they asked me if I wanted the part, I said yes and that was that."[13] Peter Cushing played Baron Victor Frankenstein and the two quickly became close friends.[21][4] They met when Lee burst into his dressing room and complained, "I haven't got any lines!" Cushing replied, "You're lucky. I've read the script."[46] Lee enjoyed the shoot tremendously and the resulting film, The Curse of Frankenstein, was a huge success. To "offset" the horror film, Lee appeared in A Tale of Two Cities as the villainous Marquis St. Evrémonde, alongside his elderly cousin Nicholas Hannen.[47]

His next role was his most famous, and in another remake, this time of Dracula. Lee, having impressed in The Curse of Frankenstein, was given the role of Count Dracula. He chose not to watch Bela Lugosi's version beforehand, so as not to be influenced by it. Instead, he pored over Bram Stoker's original novel and found that he identified with a few aspects of the character.[48] As with his first Hammer film, Lee enjoyed making the film, titled simply Dracula (but known as Horror of Dracula in the United States).[49] He interrupted the filming of Corridors of Blood alongside his friend Boris Karloff to attend the American première of Dracula, where he signed his first autograph. The film went on to become one of the most successful British films ever made.[50] Also that year, he played an SS officer in the war film Battle of the V-1, based on the novel They Saved London by Bernard Newman.[51]

Acutely aware of the typecasting that had plagued Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, Lee was determined not to have the same thing happen to him. So he chose as his next two roles, Kharis the Mummy in Hammer's The Mummy, a remake of the film of the same name; and as the upstanding Sir Henry Baskerville in The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Hammer adaptation of the novel of the same name by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the first such adaptation to be filmed in colour. Both were directed by Terence Fisher and both co-starred Peter Cushing. They were both also great successes, both critically and commercially.[52] During his engagement to Henriette von Rosen (see Personal life section), Lee appeared as a "raft of sleazy characters" in The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Hot Money Girl and Beat Girl and played a Satanist monk in the Lovecraftian horror film The City of the Dead.[53]

In the wake of his success as Count Dracula, Lee received a "flurry of vampire offers". He agreed to appear in the Italian horror comedy Tempi duri per i Vampiri (also known as Uncle was a Vampire and Dracula Is My Uncle). Though Lee's character was a baron vampire, he was not Dracula. It was filmed in Castello Orsini-Odescalchi on the shores of Lake Bracciano and was received very well in Italy.[54] With many of the films he was making being based in mainland Europe, Lee was offered a role in an episode of Tales of the Vikings, a TV series spinoff from the Kirk Douglas film The Vikings. Lee played a Norman tyrant alongside Wilfrid Lawson as a Saxon chief, whom Lee regarded as the greatest actor in the world.[55]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "Hammer Horror star Lee knighted". BBC. Retrieved 7 May 2012
  2. ^ "Christopher Lee to receive Bafta Fellowship". BBC. Retrieved 7 May 2012
  3. ^ "Depp surprises Sir Christopher Lee with film award". BBC. Retrieved 14 December 2013
  4. ^ a b c "The Total Film Interview – Christopher Lee". Total Film. 1 May 2005. Archived from the original on 12 June 2007. Retrieved 25 August 2013.
  5. ^ Sir Christopher Lee releases second heavy metal album
  6. ^ Farrell, John (28 May 2012). "Christopher Lee Celebrates 90th Birthday By Recording Heavy Metal". Forbes. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
  7. ^ Lee 2003, p. 131-132.
  8. ^ Lee 2003, p. 132-133.
  9. ^ Lee 2003, p. 133.
  10. ^ Lee 2003, p. 133-134.
  11. ^ Lee 2003, p. 134.
  12. ^ Lee 2003, p. 135.
  13. ^ a b c d "A prolific star of the Elstree screen". Boreham Wood & Elstree Times. 16 February 2006. Retrieved 20 December 2012.
  14. ^ Lee 2003, p. 135-136.
  15. ^ Lee 2003, p. 136.
  16. ^ Lee 2003, p. 142.
  17. ^ Lee 2003, p. 142-143.
  18. ^ Lee 2003, p. 143-144.
  19. ^ Lee 2003, p. 145.
  20. ^ a b Lee 2003, p. 146.
  21. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Yahoo was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  22. ^ Lee 2003, p. 147.
  23. ^ Lee 2003, p. 147-148.
  24. ^ Lee 2003, p. 148.
  25. ^ Lee 2003, p. 149.
  26. ^ Lee 2003, p. 149-150.
  27. ^ Lee 2003, p. 150.
  28. ^ Lee 2003, p. 152.
  29. ^ a b Lee 2003, p. 164.
  30. ^ a b Lee 2003, p. 151.
  31. ^ Lee 2003, p. 156.
  32. ^ Lee 2003, p. 156-157.
  33. ^ Lee 2003, p. 157-158.
  34. ^ Lee 2003, p. 158.
  35. ^ Lee 2003, p. 159.
  36. ^ Lee 2003, p. 160.
  37. ^ Lee 2003, p. 160-161.
  38. ^ Lee 2003, p. 161.
  39. ^ Lee 2003, p. 162.
  40. ^ Lee 2003, p. 164-165.
  41. ^ Lee 2003, p. 165-166.
  42. ^ Lee 2003, p. 166-167.
  43. ^ Lee 2003, p. 169.
  44. ^ Lee 2003, p. 170-172.
  45. ^ Lee 2003, p. 173.
  46. ^ Lee 2003, p. 174.
  47. ^ Lee 2003, p. 175-176.
  48. ^ Lee 2003, p. 176.
  49. ^ Lee 2003, p. 176-177.
  50. ^ Lee 2003, p. 178.
  51. ^ Lee 2003, p. 201.
  52. ^ Lee 2003, p. 180-181.
  53. ^ Lee 2003, p. 183-184.
  54. ^ Lee 2003, p. 188.
  55. ^ Lee 2003, p. 192-195.

Bibliography

[edit]
  • Christopher Lee's Treasury of Terror, edited by Russ Jones, illustrated by Mort Drucker & others, Pyramid Books, 1966
  • Christopher Lee's New Chamber of Horrors, Souvenir Press, 1974
  • Christopher Lee's Archives of Terror, Warner Books, Volume I, 1975; Volume 2, 1976
  • Tall, Dark and Gruesome (autobiography), W.H. Allen, 1977 and 1999
  • The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films, by Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, Titan Books, 1997 and 2007 – Foreword by Christopher Lee
  • Christopher Lee: The Authorised Screen History by Jonathan Rigby, Reynolds & Hearn, 2001 and 2003
  • The Lord of the Rings: Weapons and Warfare by Chris Smith, HarperCollins, 2003 – Foreword by Christopher Lee
  • Lee, Christopher (2003) [1977]. Lord of Misrule: The Autobiography of Christopher Lee. London: Orion Publishing Group. ISBN 0-75285-770-3.
  • Dans les griffes de la Hammer by Nicolas Stanzick, Le Bord de l'eau Editions, Paris, 2010.
  • Sir Christopher Lee by Laurent Aknin, Nouveau Monde Éditions, Paris, 2011.
  • Monsters in the Movies: 100 Years of Cinematic Nightmares, by John Landis, DK Publishing, 2011 – Interview with Christopher Lee
  • Le Seigneur du désordre (autobiography, a French version of Lord of Misrule), Christopher Lee, Camion Blanc (Coll. "Camion Noir"), 2013.
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