Farewell to Christopher Lee, scariest superstar in the movies
Deadly missions against the Nazis. Witnessing the last death by guillotine. Extraordinary past that turned Christopher Lee into cinema’s seductive Prince of Darkness
FOR the late Sir Christopher Lee, horror was not just something he portrayed so memorably in the movies, it was something that he had repeatedly witnessed in real life. During the filming of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, the action called for the character of Saruman, the wizard famously played by Lee, to be stabbed in the back. The director, Peter Jackson, wanted Lee to scream out, but the legendary actor told him that when people are wounded in such a way, they are unable to scream. ‘Peter,’ said Lee, in his magnificently rich, authoritative voice. ‘Have you ever heard the sound a man makes when he’s stabbed in the back?’ Jackson admitted that he hadn’t. ‘Well, I have,’ Lee continued, ‘and I know what to do.’ The lungs are punctured, Lee explained, meaning that the victim cannot cry out and instead just emits a quiet groan.
With this gory revelation, Jackson and the crew went silent. They all knew that Lee had served in World War II, but here was a sign that he had witnessed true horror.
It was that sense of a dark, concealed past that helped to make Lee, who died on Sunday in a London hospital of heart failure, one of the finest and most distinctive actors of his generation. Although he will always be best remembered for his defining role as Dracula, Lee’s rich experiences of life before he became an actor equipped him to play a far broader range of genres than simply horror.
By his own reckoning, Lee starred in some 350 films, most of which were not in the horror genre. At times he would tire of being typecast, but l i ke all appreciative thespians, he remained grateful that the work never dried up, right until the end of his 93 years.
He had vowed to ‘die with his boots on’, and was about to start filming a movie with Uma Thurman.
‘I am never going to stop playing the villain,’ he once said. ‘I would be foolish to do so because the audiences apparently enjoy watching me, and who am I to say no?’
Unlike many actors, Lee showed no particular interest in the stage when he was young. Instead, his early life reads more like something out of Boy’s Own magazine than the typical Hollywood biography.
Born Christopher Frank Carandini Lee on 27 May 1922, his father, Geoffrey, was a Lieutenant Colonel in the 60th King’s Royal Rifle Corps and an extraordinary figure in his own right — decorated for gallantry in both the Boer War and World War I. At the Battle of the Somme, the French awarded Lee Senior the Croix du Guerre for commanding a battalion of Australian troops.
Bizarrely, he was also awarded the Order of the Nile from the Egyptians. ‘I never found out how,’ Lee said. ‘He said he got it for playing chess with King Fuad.’
Lee’s mother, Estelle Marie, a great beauty, was an Italian countess who could trace her lineage all the way back to Emperor Charlemagne. Throughout Lee’s childhood, his mother mixed with some exotic characters whom he would later encounter again, if i ndirectly, during his film career.
‘When I was a small boy, I was hauled out of bed by my mother in our home in Kensington, saying come downstairs and I’ll introduce you to two men who are here for dinner,’ Lee recalled in an interview.
‘She told me, “You probably won’t remember what they look like, but one day you’ll remember that you met them.” ’
Lee did indeed remember. The names of the Russian aristocrats were Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich — one of t he f ew members of the Romanov family to escape the Bolsheviks alive — and Prince Yusupov.
They are best known for their part in assassinating, in 1916, the Russian monk and mystic Rasputin — a role that Lee would later play on film.
After Lee’s parents divorced when he was six, Estelle went on to marry her second husband, a banker called Harcourt Rose, who was the uncle of Ian Fleming. Thus, Lee was now related by marriage to the man who would go on to create not only James Bond but also the Bond villain and would-be nemesis whom Lee would play with such aplomb — Scaramanga, otherwise known as The Man With The Golden Gun.
Lee took on his first theatrical role, in Rumpelstiltskin, as a little boy when his mother moved him and his sister Xandra to Switzerland after the divorce. When the family returned to London, Lee was dispatched in 1931 to Summer Fields prep school in Oxford.
There he befriended Patrick Macnee, who would later find fame in The Avengers. Although the two often acted together at school, there was no hint that Lee wanted to make a career out of performing.
Summer Fields is renowned as a ‘feeder’ for Eton, and Lee did in fact sit the scholarship and was interviewed by the school provost, Montague Rhodes James, whose Ghost Stories For Christmas Lee would read for a BBC production many decades later.
However, Lee narrowly missed out on a scholarship and it was decided to send him to Wellington in Berkshire instead, where he spent four happy years. He became a keen classicist and brilliant linguist: by adulthood, he had mastered French, Italian, Spanish and German and could reportedly ‘get along’ in Swedish, Greek and Russian.
However, Lee had to leave school a year early when his stepfather went bust, owing the equivalent in today’s money of some £1.3 million.
Lee’s premature departure from academic life gave hi m an opportunity instead to spread his wings. Unable to find employment in that fateful summer of 1939, he travelled to France, where he was to witness a scene straight out of a Hammer Horror movie.
On June 17, Lee learned that a murderer called Eugen Weidmann was to be publicly guillotined i n Versailles. Intrigued, he decided to attend what would be the l ast public execution in France. The footage of the gruesome event is viewable even on YouTube, and it is extraordinary to think that one of the members of the crowd is none other than the Master of Horror himself. It is tempting to suppose that at 6ft 5in, Lee must be easy to spot, but the film is too indistinct.
With conflict looming, the 17-yearold Lee returned to London, where he worked as a clerk. When war broke out, he wanted to do his bit. Too young to enlist in the British Armed Forces, Lee and a group of friends volunteered to fight in the Finnish campaign against the Soviets in the Winter War of 1939.
‘We had heard that there was a war going on in Finland against Soviets,’ Lee recalled. ‘We went there with a group of friends and said we wanted to help.
‘We could shoot pretty well but couldn’t ski. We were thanked for our help, and didn’t of course get anywhere close to the lines. But that was a good thing. Otherwise I wouldn’t probably be here!’
Lee’s moment to join up came in 1941, when he enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve.
There, he stood out from his somewhat roughneck fellow cadets. Not only did his height literally make him stand out, but he had also been to public school. ‘I couldn’t swear, although I was willing to learn,’ he said. ‘And I was opposed to drinking much because drink tended to make people drunk. These distinguishing features, as well as my accent, made the fellows look at me askance.’
Despite his keenness to qualify as a pilot, Lee was unable to complete the course as a troublesome optic nerve rendered him incapable of flying. It was a blow, but it instead gave him the opportunity to wage a rather more secret campaign.
Lee’s war years are somewhat shrouded in mystery. What we do know is that he served as an officer in the RAF’s Intelligence Branch in Africa, which involved selecting targets and planning missions. At one point, he was strafed by a German fighter and was wounded in the buttocks. However, it seems Lee may have got much closer to the action with his apparent involvement in secret units such as the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), which was the forerunner to the legendary SAS.
Frustratingly, Lee would forever remain tight-lipped about his time attached to these forces.
‘I’ve been entrusted with many secrets during World War II,’ he once said, ‘and if I spoke, people died. I was i n the i ntelligence service, special ops, and I’m not going to tell much more.
‘I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act, which binds me for life. And what I mean by this is that I’m able to keep a secret, and if I’m asked to say nothing, I say nothing. Never.’
When the war finished, Lee joined the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. This unit was tasked with tracking down some of the vilest criminals of the war, which effectively made Lee a Nazi hunter.
By his own account, he was to see many horrors as he tried to apprehend former SS men. ‘We saw these
‘I am never going to stop playing the villain’ ‘There was a war on in Finland — so I went along’ ‘I knew secrets — if I spoke, someone died’
concentration camps,’ he later recalled of places such as Dachau. ‘Some had been cleaned up. Some had not.’
After he was demobbed, Lee considered his options. With a fine voice, he nearly became an opera singer, and he even considered the Diplomatic Corps. However, the lure of the movies proved strong, and against his mother’s snobbish wishes, Lee j oined t he Rank Company of Youth in 1946.
A succession of bit parts followed. Casting directors found his height and menacing expression difficult to cast. His breakthrough came in 1957 when he played the monster opposite his friend Peter Cushing in Hammer’s The Curse Of Frankenstein.
But it would be the following year that Lee would really make his fanged mark in the role for which he would forever be associated: Dracula. Unlike the brooding Bela Lugosi, Lee played the Count with hauteur and charm, replete with a sense of inner sadness.
Finally, at the age of 36, Lee was a star. ‘It was the one that made the difference,’ Lee recalled. ‘It brought me a name, a fan club and a second-hand car, for all of which I was grateful.’
And just as Dracula can never escape the curse of the undead state, Lee found it hard to escape being typecast. He would reprise the role some ten times — but he would do it impeccably well.
Older audiences will also remember him fondly as well as the criminal mastermind, Fu Manchu. Today, younger cinema-goers are more likely to associate him with the character of Saruman in the Lord Of The Rings, and as Count Dooku in two Star Wars films.
Sadly, Christopher Lee was never to win an Oscar. Nevertheless, he was recognised by the British Government when he was knighted in 2009.
In his private life, Lee was most certainly not the villainous type he so often portrayed, although he did indeed have a fondness for the macabre and the occult, and boasted a library of 12,000 books on the topics.
In 1961, he married a Danish model, Birgit ‘Gitte’ Kroncke, and the couple had their only child, Christina, in 1963. When he was asked the secret of a long and happy marriage, Lee replied si mply: ‘Marry someone wonderful, as I did. And always have her come along on location.’
Despite all the dark horrors he had seen and played, there is no doubt that the death of Lee has ironically made the world a little less bright.