His one regret? He never starred in a Carry On film
THE last time I saw Sir Christopher Lee, he was folding himself with some difficulty into a seat on a flight from Berlin to London, after the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. The difficulty was l ess a consequence of his great age than his great height — 6ft 5in, even with a stoop.
We had met before, but I didn’t disturb him. The large-brimmed hat he wore seemed like a statement that he didn’t really want to be recognised, which was, of course, too much to ask — but which of us would want to provoke the ire of Count Dracula, Lord Saruman, Rasputin, Fu Manchu, Count Dooku and Scaramanga, all rolled into one?
Lee was a colossus not only physically but also artistically.
He wasn’t just the so-called king of the franchises, the only link between the Hammer Horrors, the Bond movies, the Star Wars series and the Lord Of The Rings trilogy (what a shame, he once ventured, that he’d never been asked to do a Carry On), but also, it is said, perhaps the most prolific film actor there has ever been.
When I interviewed him in 2009, he reckoned he had more than 350 big-screen credits to his name. And he did a fair few more after that.
For me, his most memorable performance was in the enduringly creepy 1973 film The Wicker Man. Lee played Lord Summerisle, the charismatic but sinister laird of a Hebridean island, and when he was on screen it was simply impossible to look anywhere else.
He had a commanding, magnetic presence, intensified by a voice that could be seductively velvety one minute and terrifyingly thunderous the next. It was easy to see why the pagan islanders were so in his thrall, and how effortlessly he could incite them to sacrifice Edward Woodward’s hapless police sergeant.
Lee never tired of playing villains, which was just as well because casting directors never tired of asking him.
His handsome but faintly saturnine looks lent themselves perfectly to Dracula, but all those Hammer Horrors tended to cloak the fact that, like his great friend Peter Cushing, he was a very good actor and far from one-dimensional.
He was not the most obvious person to play the title role in the 1998 film Jinnah, about the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah; in fact, he might have been one of the least obvious.
But he pulled it off, giving a performance of such charm and sincerity that even those Pakistanis who had expressed indignation at a western actor playing their great national hero were reasonably mollified.
Lee made rather a habit of being the best thing in a mediocre film, which Jinnah was.
ANOTHER good example is The Man With The Golden Gun. Released in 1974, it was a long way from being one of the best Bond films, but in Lee’s Scaramanga, the film had one of the best Bond baddies.
I always rather liked Roger Moore as 007, but even he would admit that, while he might have outsmarted Scaramanga, he couldn’t possibly out-act him.
‘Six bullets to your one,’ smirked Bond. ‘I only need one,’ Scaramanga replied. It was the best put-down in the film, from its most elegant performer.
Lee was a one-off, in so many ways, and his passing truly represents t he end of a cinematic era.