Actor oozed gravitas as vampire, villain
The thing about Christopher Lee being dead is that it doesn’t immediately strike you as much of a career setback.
For as long as he was an actor, his characters have often exuded not immortality, exactly, but a kind of ennobled deathlessness. You always sensed they’d been around for longer than was perhaps entirely natural.
Lee, who died on June 8 at age 93, appeared in more than 250 movies, including memorable roles as the wicked wizard Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the evil Count Dooku in two of the George Lucas Star Wars prequels.
But for many he will forever be known as the vampire Count Dracula in a slew of Hammer Horror movies — the gory, gothic thrillers the British studio churned out in the 1950s and 1960s that became hugely popular.
Part of his imposing appeal was his sharply hewn face and towering six-footfive frame. And part of it was the wood-fire crackle of that bass-baritone voice. He also imbued every character with a cold and granite grandeur, as if each one were a monument that would withstand whatever time and weather could throw at him.
Whether he was stalking across Scottish clifftops in The Wicker Man, or swishing, leering and hissing his way through any number of the Dracula pictures he made for Hammer Film Productions, Lee imbued each role with the depth of feeling you expect actors of his reputation and calibre to save for their big Shakespearean comeback at Stratford.
But at 92, there was his Saruman, in Peter Jackson’s final Hobbit film, fighting off the forces of the Nazgul with impressive kung fu.
Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born in London on May 27, 1922. He served as an intelligence officer during the Second World War, and afterward pursued an acting career.
In 1958 he was cast as the Count in Terence Fisher’s Dracula, and the future of his career snapped into place.