Hey, guys. Quint here. It's difficult to know where to begin talking about the awesomeness of Christopher Lee's career. Do you start at the beginning with his journeyman character actor work or his cult star-making time at Hammer or his later in life resurgence as the best personification of gray-haired supernatural evil? Or do you start with his real-life heroics? I mean, there's not many badass evil wizards that can say they survived Nazi bombings while in service of the crown.
The fact that it's difficult to approach this man's legendary career only underlines just how special he was.
Lee had a hell of a career playing heavy and intimidating characters, from Dracula to Bond to Tolkien to Star Wars. It's quite the contrast to his real life persona. Lee's sharp intelligence can be gleaned from all his villain performances (and is what likely makes them so damn affecting), but in real life he was much closer to the heroes he fought in these films.
This man actually fought the Axis powers during WW2. He started out as an RAF pilot, but was grounded by an eye issue and instead moved into the Intelligence field and helped stop the Axis' advance in North Africa. He also was in the Italy invasion force, but his wartime heroics weren't the end of it. He also served on the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, which meant he spent the year after the end of WW2 hunting down Nazi war criminals, his interrogations aided greatly by his fluent German.
He was also part of the SAS, but wouldn't go into details in any interview.
If that's all Lee did with his life he'd have lived a more important, fulfilling life than 99% of the rest of us schlubs, but he also decided he was going make an everlasting stamp on cinema.
After the war, instead of feeling like the world at large owed him something for his service, he decided to become an actor and worked from the ground up. He spent 10 years in bit parts, studying the art of filmmaking and honing his craft.
In 1957 he played the monster in The Curse of Frankenstein and that was only the beginning of a long collaboration with Hammer Studios.
My personal introduction to Christopher Lee as a cinema presence was probably as the voice of King Haggard in The Last Unicorn, but before I educated myself on the wonders of Hammer Horror there was his mad scientist role in Gremlins 2.
Doctor Catheter is quite a silly roll in quite a silly movie, but it was the first time I put the legendary name “Christopher Lee” to his face. It wasn't long after that, I hit and passed puberty, that I began to round out my Lee knowledge.
My stepdad was way, way, way into Bond so of course I saw The Man With the Golden Gun around that time as well. I haven't revisited the Moore Bonds in a very long time, but I do still remember how cold Scaramanga was and feeling like no other Bond villain ever felt as threatening, other than perhaps Robert Shaw's Red Grant.
I love that Lee seemed to shape every generation of film to his talents. The '50s and '60s were rife with monster pictures, but he also did some great work in some of Hammer's not-so-famous other genre pictures, like the pulpy crime film Terror of the Tongs (which admittedly is a bit outdated with casting Lee as a Chinese criminal mastermind) or the scope technicolor swashbucklers The Pirates of Blood River and The Devil-Ship Pirates.
In many of his horror pictures Lee faced off against Peter Cushing. They weren't always enemies, though. In real life they were close friends and we get to see a little bit of that chemistry in a few films, including the really fun Horror Express and the surprisingly effective The Skull.
The Skull in particular is a great outing for Lee. Both he and Cushing are collectors of the macabre and there's one item, the Skull of the Marquis de Sade, that comes into and out of each man's life. It's a hell of a picture and criminally underseen.
Another crazy role of Lee's you have to catch if you haven't is that of his singing villain in superhero spoof The Return of Captain Invincible. Yes, I said singing villain. The movie's about a washed up superhero (Alan Arkin) who is a bit of a boozer. Lee's Mr. Midnight, knowing that alcohol is Captain Invincible's Kryptonite, tries to tempt him into drinking via song. No shit! See:
I want to go on and on about his work in films like the Three and Four Musketeers, Nothing But the Night, To the Devil A Daughter, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1941, The Devil Rides Out, Rasputin and so many others, but then this remembrance will become a novel.
Instead let's focus on a few key roles we haven't yet touched upon, starting with one of his favorites: Lord Summerisle from The Wicker Man.
There's so much gleeful joy in Summerisle's speeches, such a zest to every mannerism, that it's easily understandable whey Lee loved this performance so much. He's got the charisma of a cult leader and the assured grin of a madman while delivering his incredibly memorable dialogue.
Cinema has never been better than when Lee clicked with a character, be it a bloody-eyed vampire or a wizard fallen from grace.
This is where my brief interaction with the man comes to bear. At the ripe old age of 22 I found myself in New Zealand during the pick-up photography on Return of the King. It was an amazing time to be a LOTR geek visiting the set because they were picking up shots from all over the film, which meant all the characters were back. One day it'd be Aragorn receiving the reforged Narsil from Elrond, the next it'd be Theodin crushed beneath his horse and the next day would be Sam and Frodo fighting off Gollum on the side of Mount Doom.
I sold a good deal of my meager collectibles collection to be able to afford that trip, which had me in Wellington for about a month. On my second to last day in town I gave my thanks to Peter Jackson for allowing me to spend so much time watching history being made and his response was “What? You can't leave now! Christopher Lee is coming in next week!”
I didn't have much money, so I thought I flat out couldn't afford to change my flight, but thankfully I booked through a youth/student travel program that meant the change cost less than $70 and with the help of the very considerate owner of the house my friends and I were renting we found ourselves in the studio when Lee came in to film.
Most of my time spent on the set of Return of the King had me sitting quietly behind some monitors, but Peter either sensed my geekout or wanted to make the extra expense of staying in town double worth it because on the first day of Lee shooting he brought my friends and I over to Mr. Lee decked out in his Saruman beard, robes and fingernails to have a nerdy chat.
We mostly talked about The Wicker Man because he was in the process of trying to get a sequel off the ground and wanted to know if I had any suggestions on what studios/production companies might be interested. At the time Sean Astin was going to play the new lead and Lee was to come back as Lord Summerisle. My memory isn't as sharp as Mr. Lee's and most of that conversation is fuzzy, but I'll never forget how considerate and kind he was.
After the chat, I noticed my good friend and onset photographer Pierre Vinet (who sadly passed away a few years ago) waiting in the wings. Peter was smiling and said that it was time to get a photograph with Mr. Lee. He obliged and stood from his chair and even 80 something years old he towered over me (and I'm over 6 feet tall), which was made all the more surreal by the fact that it wasn't Christopher Lee standing over me, but Saruman himself.
Pierre lined up the shot and suddenly the light shifted. We all looked over and it was Andrew Lesnie moving a light so the picture would turn out better. He lit us to his liking and gave Pierre the thumbs up. I made a goofy face as Mr. Lee opened his arms in a Saruman-ish gesture and Pierre snapped the picture.
A couple days later I was sitting at the monitors and Jackson's assistant, Matthew Dravitzki, came up to me and handed me a large, rigid envelope. “With regards, from Christopher Lee” he said. I opened it and inside were three gorgeous photographs, each one signed and personalized by Lee to me and my friends.
There are only a few things that I will rescue if my house ever caught fire and that picture is one of them (my cat, computer and the amulet from The Monster Squad are the others in case you were interested).
My other great memory of Christopher Lee was him entering the studio, his wife on his arm, for his wrap party. During the pick-ups they pretty much had a big party every few days, celebrating the work of every actor who filmed their very last bits for the trilogy. This would entail the crew hanging out, drinking booze, sharing stories and honoring the epic journey they were all wrapping up.
At each of the wrap parties they would show a blooper reel specifically tailored to the person they were honoring, some of them down right filthy. Ian McKellen's had Gandalf kissing Shadowfax as the camera pulls back revealing that the horse had a massive floppy boner, for instance.
Lee's was pretty special, too. It had the now famous “I can't get up these goddamn steps smoothly” bit from him as he kept stepping on his robes. The blooper that sticks out in my mind, though, was from his original death scene, thrown from the top of his tower and impaled on a spike. The shot had him upside down on the spiked wheel, blood coming from his mouth and looking dead... until he calmly spoke.
”You know, thirty years ago I looked up from this position and saw Peter Cushing. Now I see Peter Jackson.” Then he gave a kind of shrug and went back to playing dead.
I know this is running long, but considering we've only really just scratched the surface of his immense body of work that should tell you a little something about how major of an impact this man had on cinema. It's not many who can make their mark significantly for two or three generations, but Lee did it.
It might be ridiculous to be sad at the passing of a man who did so much with his long life, but I gotta admit this one hurt. There is, was and never will be another of his like. The man was a true professional, a real-life badass and one of the most intelligent people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.
My thoughts will be with Mr. Lee's friends, family and fans.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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