Christopher Lee, who has died at the age of 93, brought dignity and gravitas to the most fantastical of roles. His talent will outlast us all, says Robbie Collin
The thing about Sir Christopher Lee being dead is that it doesn’t immediately strike you as being much of a career setback. For as long as he was an actor (which was a very long time indeed; his first film role was a one-line part in Terence Young’s baroquely strange romance Corridor of Mirrors, in 1948), his characters have often exuded – not immortality, exactly, but a kind of ennobled deathlessness. You always sensed they’d been around for longer than was perhaps entirely natural, and would more than likely outlast you.
Part of it was his face and imposing 6’5” frame, which had the sharply hewn angles of a medieval woodcut. And part of it was the wood-fire crackle of that bass-baritone voice, which made every script sound like illuminated manuscript. But there was also something less easily explicable at work; he imbued every character, however far-fetched, with a cold and granite grandeur, as if each one was a monument that would withstand whatever time and the weather could throw at him.
Whether he was stalking across windblown Scottish clifftops in The Wicker Man, his hair thick and wild as a tuffet of heather, or swishing, leering and hissing his way though any number of the Dracula pictures he made for Hammer Film Productions, Lee imbued each role with the depth of feeling you expect actors of his reputation and calibre to save for their big Shakespearean comeback at Stratford.
Christopher Lee in Hammer Horror's 1958 film Dracula (Photo: Everett Collection / Rex Feature)
But at the age of 92, there was his Saruman, in Peter Jackson’s final Hobbit film, fighting off the forces of the Nazgul with hitherto-unseen powers of kung fu. The scene was preposterous, but Lee didn’t just emerge from it with his dignity unbroken – his unbreakable dignity was the framework on which the entire sequence was built. He regularly brought more to a film than the film perhaps deserved from him, which is what separates a truly great actor from a talented one.
Lee was the son of a Lieutenant Colonel in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and a much-admired Italian contessa, which makes sense. After fighting in the Second World War (he was born on 27 May 1922, and was 17 years old when war broke out), he returned to England and pursued a career as an actor, and was given a seven-year contract with Rank.
After that, he scrabbled around for supporting work, his height a disadvantage until he was cast as the Creature in the 1957 Hammer production The Curse of Frankenstein (Peter Cushing played the Doctor). The character was mute: there was a wicked rumour Lee insisted on this after reading his proposed dialogue. But his performance was a masterwork of purely physical performance: stately, aching with pathos and, against all the odds, intensely moving.
Lee as Francisco Scaramanga in 1974's Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (Photo: Everett Collection/REX)
The following year he was cast as the Count in Terence Fisher’s Dracula, with Cushing as Van Helsing, and the future of his career snapped into place. His Dracula was netherworlds apart from Bela Lugosi’s more straightforwardly tragic portrayal of the character in Tod Browning’s 1931 film for Universal. This denizen of the dark was sensual, exotic and wolfish; red-blooded in his appetites in every sense.
He was also mostly silent: the character was almost entirely informed by Lee’s suavely elongated physicality, and speaks only 13 lines of dialogue throughout. “One of the most revolting pictures I have seen for years,” said the critic for the Daily Express. Audiences agreed, and flocked to see it.
Lee hit his sepulchral stride. Over the next decade, he played a Mummy, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, Dracula and other vampires, and assorted wicked earls and barons, all for Hammer. Then in 1968, in Terence Fisher’s The Devil Rides Out, he bucked the trend and played the hero: the dashing Duc de Richleau, a dapper initiate in the ways of the occult who disrupts the foul activities of a Satanic cult.
Lee as Saruman in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Photo: PIERRE VINET/NEW LINE)
The film was a commercial failure for Hammer, but one of their best films: Lee always regarded it as a personal favourite during his time with the studio, along with Taste of Fear, a truly unnerving Clouzot-ish psychological thriller, with Lee as an unctuous French doctor tending to a young woman who keeps spotting her father’s corpse around the house.
In the early 1970s, with Hammer’s powers fading, Lee’s graveyard shift came to a natural end, and he started branching out. He was deliciously precise as Mycroft Holmes, the great detective’s elder brother, in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), and unforgettable as Lord Summerisle, the gallant intercessor between man and nature in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973).
And as Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), he was Roger Moore’s equal and opposite in every respect. “Face it,” wrote the critic David Thompson, “he could just as easily have been Bond.” Well, yes, but perhaps not in the 1970s, as the series swung into its camp heyday. Lee brought a sculpted cruelty to his Bond film that recalled the Sean Connery films of ten years earlier. A Lee hero belonged to another era.
Lee in The Wicker Man, 1973 (Photo: Everett Collection / Rex Features)
His wickedness, however, was timeless, and could expand to fill almost any available space. As the white wizard Saruman, his presence hung over Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-3) like a volcanic pall. You sense George Lucas cast him as the fallen Jedi Master Count Dooku in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in the hope that he’d provide exactly the same instant gravitas, and Lee couldn’t help but graciously oblige.
Of all Lee’s performances, it’s his entrance in the first Lord of the Rings film that I just can’t shake. “Smoke rises from the mountain of Doom, the hour grows late…” he intones, gliding down Orthanc’s black staircase to receive the friend he’d already in his heart betrayed.
In The Two Towers, Tolkien devotes an entire paragraph to describing Saruman’s voice. It is “low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment…for those whom it conquered, the spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice, whispering and urging them.” That’s also unmistakably Lee’s voice, and Lee’s physicality, and Lee’s undying talent. He was the shadow at the top of the stairs, the smiling predator beckoning you in, the flash of silver in the dark.
Christopher Lee: a life in film
May 27, 1922
Christopher Frank Carandini Lee is born in Belgravia, Westminster, London
1941
After initially volunteering for the Finnish forces following the outbreak of the Second World War, Lee joins the RAF
1946
Lee returns from war... and decides to become an actor (Rex Features)
Returns to London after the war but cannot face returning to his old office job at Beechams, so he decides to become an actor
1947
Makes his film debut in Terence Young's Gothic romance Corridor of Mirrors
1957
Lee as Frankenstein's monster (Rex Features)
After an "apprenticeship" of ten years, mostly playing supporting and background characters, Lee appears in Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein alongside Peter Cushing. The pair will go on to become good friends and appear in more than 20 films together
1958
Lee's first appearance as a Transylvanian vampire in the 1958 film Dracula
1959
Lee in The Mummy (Rex Features)
He continues his working relationship with Hammer with the release of The Mummy
1966
Returns to the role of Dracula in Hammer's Dracula: Prince of Darkness. Lee's role is notable in that it features no lines - he hisses his way through the film
1968
Lee in arguably his most famous role (Rex Features)
Appears in Dracula Has Rissen from the Grave
1969
Taste the Blood of Dracula
1973
Lee later said The Wicker Man was his best film (Rex Features)
Stars in British horror film The Wicker Man
1974
With Roger Moore in The Man with the Golden Gun (Rex Features)
Appears as Francisco Scaramanga in James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun
1977
Lee moves to America, keen to branch out into other roles and concerned at being typecast in horror films. His first American film is the disaster movie Airport '77
1998
Stars in Jinnah as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of modern Pakistan. He later declares this role as his best performance
2001
Lee as Middle Earth wizard Saruman (Rex Features)
Plays the role of Saruman in the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring. Goes on to reprise the role in the second and third instalments in 2002 and 2003
2002
Lee makes his Star Wars debut
Appears in the second film in the Star Wars prequel trilogy as Count Dooku. He goes on to play the same character in the trilogy's final 2005 instalment
2009
Knighted for services to drama and charity
2010
Releases his first complete metal album, the critically-acclaimed Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross
2011
Receives the BAFTA Fellowship
2012
Lee in The Hobbit (Rex Features)
Reprises the role of Saruman to appear in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Goes on to appear in the second and third instalment of the trilogy
2013
Receives the BFI Fellowship
June 7, 2015
The veteran actor dies at 8.30am on Sunday, June 7, at London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
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