Christopher Lee

Christopher Lee: The Man Who Refused to Play Villains

He was a descendant of an Italian marquis, a scholar of Greek and Latin, fluent in French, Italian and German, an intelligence officer who was seconded to the Special Operations Executive and afterwards helped track Nazi war criminals, and a step-cousin of Ian Fleming. He then spent sixty years being cast as monsters. "I don't play villains," he said. "I play people." The distinction mattered to him more than almost anything else in his professional life.

Carandini

Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born on 27 May 1922 in Belgravia, London. His father, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Trollope Lee, served with the King's Royal Rifle Corps; his mother, Countess Estelle Marie Carandini di Sarzano, was the daughter of an Italian nobleman, and her grandmother had been the opera singer Marie Carandini. When his mother remarried, her new husband — the banker Harcourt Rose — turned out to be Ian Fleming's uncle.

He went to Wellington College in Berkshire on classics scholarships, studying ancient Greek and Latin. He grew to six foot five. He was an Anglo-Catholic who served at the altar of St Stephen's, South Kensington, in the years when T.S. Eliot worshipped there.

The War

In 1939 he volunteered for the Finnish Army during the Winter War. From 1941 to 1946 he served in the RAF, working as an intelligence officer with No. 260 Squadron through the North African campaign, the Mediterranean and Monte Cassino, and rising to flight lieutenant. He was seconded to the Special Operations Executive, and after the war worked on the hunt for Nazi war criminals. He never said very much about any of it.

Charm School

The producer Filippo Del Giudice suggested he try acting. He signed a seven-year contract with Rank in 1946 and got nowhere: the studio's "Charm School" had no idea what to do with a man of his height and profile.

The breakthrough came in 1957, when Hammer cast him as the creature in *The Curse of Frankenstein* opposite Peter Cushing. The two men became friends and made more than twenty films together. The following year came *Dracula*, and with it the trap. Lee played Count Dracula ten times — seven for Hammer, three elsewhere — through *Dracula: Prince of Darkness* (1965), *Dracula Has Risen from the Grave* (1968), *Taste the Blood of Dracula* (1969), *Scars of Dracula* (1970), *Dracula A.D. 1972* and *The Satanic Rites of Dracula* (1973).

He hated most of them. He said Hammer's executives "emotionally blackmailed" him into returning by reminding him how many crew jobs depended on it. Of the last, he was blunt: "I'm doing it under protest. I think it is fatuous. I can think of twenty adjectives — fatuous, pointless, absurd."

Summerisle and Scaramanga

In 1973 he made *The Wicker Man*, playing the courteous, pagan Lord Summerisle. He worked for nothing to get it made, and for the rest of his life called it his finest film. It is the clearest evidence for his own claim about villains: Summerisle is not a monster but a reasonable, cultivated man whose reasoning happens to end in a burning effigy.

The following year he played Francisco Scaramanga in *The Man with the Golden Gun*. There was a family footnote to it — Fleming had wanted him for Dr No a decade earlier, but the producers had already cast Joseph Wiseman. He also played the Comte de Rochefort in *The Three Musketeers* (1973), injuring his knee doing it.

The Third Act

Most actors' careers taper in their seventies. Lee's expanded. He had met J.R.R. Tolkien and reread *The Lord of the Rings* every year of his adult life; Peter Jackson cast him as Saruman across the trilogy (2001–2003) and again in *The Hobbit* films (2012–2014). George Lucas cast him as Count Dooku in *Attack of the Clones* (2002) and *Revenge of the Sith* (2005), and he did most of his own swordplay in his eighties. He made five films with Tim Burton between 1999 and 2012, from *Sleepy Hollow* to *Dark Shadows*, playing Willy Wonka's father along the way. By the end his credits ran past two hundred.

Then there was the music. A classically trained bass, he recorded symphonic metal concept albums — *Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross* (2010) and *Charlemagne: The Omens of Death* (2013) — sang across four Rhapsody of Fire records as the Wizard King, and replaced Orson Welles as narrator for Manowar. In 2013, with a track called "Jingle Hell," he became at ninety-one the second-oldest living performer ever to enter a Billboard singles chart. "I do not know how long I am going to be around," he said, "so every day is a celebration."

Why Christopher Is Called a Genius

The claim is unusual because it does not rest on any single performance. Lee's gift was a rare alloy: genuine erudition — classics, six languages, a trained operatic bass — deployed in service of material that mostly did not deserve it. What he brought to Hammer's cheap sets was seriousness. His Dracula is frightening because Lee plays him as an aristocrat with a coherent inner logic rather than as a ghoul, and his Summerisle is disturbing for the same reason. That is an intellectual choice about character, sustained across decades of scripts he privately despised.

The second claim is stamina of a kind that shades into something stranger. More than two hundred credits; a career that got better after seventy; a man who in his ninth decade was still doing his own swordfights and cutting metal albums. "Making films has never just been a job to me," he said, "it's my life."

The honest counter-case is substantial. The overwhelming bulk of his filmography is bad. He took work indiscriminately, by his own account partly out of obligation and partly because he could not stop, and the result is a body of work in which the great performances — Summerisle, Scaramanga, Saruman — sit inside a vast quantity of dross. He wrote nothing and directed nothing. He never won an acting award of consequence, and his honours were for a career rather than for a role. His was the intelligence of a supremely cultivated professional, not of an artist who made something new.

Legacy

He was appointed CBE in 2001, knighted by Prince Charles in June 2009 for services to drama and charity, made a BAFTA Fellow in 2011, a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres the same year, and a BFI Fellow in 2013. He took the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1994, appeared on a British commemorative stamp as Dracula in 2008, and holds the Guinness record for the oldest video-game narrator, set at ninety-one. He married the Danish painter Birgit Krøncke in 1961 and stayed married to her for fifty-four years; their daughter Christina was born in 1963. He died of heart failure at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on 7 June 2015, aged ninety-three. Johnny Depp's summary was as good as any: "Christopher is truly a force to be reckoned with."

Achievements

• Commander of the Order of the British Empire — 2001
• Knight Bachelor — 2009
• BAFTA Fellowship — 2011
• Commander of the Order of Saint John — 1997
• Worked as actor, television actor and film actor