Christopher Lee, 93, dies after half a century as the face of evil
Christopher Lee brought dramatic gravitas and aristocratic bearing to screen villains from Dracula to James Bond enemy Scaramanga.
Lee, who died in London of heart failure aged 93, appeared in more than 250 movies, including as the wicked wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the evil Count Dooku in two Star Wars prequels.
He never stopped working and only last year marked his 92nd birthday by releasing a heavy metal version of the Sinatra classic ‘My Way’.
But, for many, he will forever be known as the vampire Count Dracula in a slew of Hammer Horror movies — the gory, gothic thrillers churned out by the British studio in the 1950s and 1960s that became hugely popular.
He railed against typecasting, however, and ultimately the sheer number and range of his roles — from Sherlock Holmes to Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan — secured his legacy.
“I didn’t have dreams of being a romantic leading man,” Lee said in 2002. “But I dreamed of being a character actor, which I am.”
Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born in London on May 27, 1922. His father was a British army officer who served in the Boer War, and his mother was Contessa Estelle Marie Carandini di Sarzano, an Edwardian beauty of Italian descent. His parents separated when he was young, and his mother later remarried Harcourt Rose, the uncle of James Bond creator Ian Fleming.
He attended Wellington College, an elite boarding school, and joined the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Poor eyesight prevented him becoming a pilot, and he served as an intelligence officer in North Africa and Italy.
The 6ft 4in, sepulchral-looking Lee spent the decade after the was playing minor roles in a series of formulaic pictures, and appeared briefly in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948 — as did his future Hammer co-star, Peter Cushing.
He launched his horror career in 1957, starring as the monster in Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein. In 1958, Lee made his first appearance as the famous vampire in Dracula, opposite Cushing’s Van Helsing.
Film critic Matthew Sweet said Lee brought a sensuality to the role that chimed with the newly permissive times. While Bela Lugosi, the definitive 1930s Dracula, “postures and glides, Lee is rough and muscular”, Sweet wrote in 2007.
Lee went on to play the vampire in sequels including Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, Taste the Blood of Dracula, Scars of Dracula, and Dracula AD 1972 — an ill-advised attempt to update the series to 1970s London.
Starting in the 1970s, Lee tried to shake off the Hammer mantle. He played a Bond villain — Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun — and appeared in non-Hammer horror films. The most distinguished of these was 1973’s The Wicker Man, a cult classic in which Lee plays the lord of a Scottish pagan community disturbed by an inquisitive policeman.
Lee also lent his operatic bass voice to the film’s soundtrack and, in the last decade of his life recorded heavy metal albums that attracted a cult following and critical acclaim, including a ‘Spirit of Metal’ award from music magazine Metal Hammer for his 2010 album Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross.
Lee appeared in so many movies that he acknowledged he couldn’t remember them all. “And certainly some of them you want to forget,” he said in 2002.
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