Christopher Lee

• 1. Introduction

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  Sir Christopher Lee was 91 years and 6 months old when his single "Jingle Hell" entered the Billboard Hot Singles Sales chart at number 22. Press attention then pushed it up to number 18, which made him the oldest person to have a top 20 hit. The man behind that heavy metal Christmas song was an actor whose career ran for more than 60 years. He was a classically trained singer with a deep, commanding voice, and he played villains in horror and franchise films so often that audiences came to expect them. Where does a voice like that come from? What was he doing before cameras ever found him? And why did an actor so often cast as the monster spend decades trying to be taken for something else?

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• 2. Noble Blood, Strict Schools

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  Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born on the 27th of May 1922 in Belgravia, London. His father, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Trollope Lee of the 60th King's Royal Rifle Corps, had fought in the Boer War and the First World War. His mother, Countess Estelle Marie, was born Carandini di Sarzano. She was an Edwardian beauty who sat for the painters Sir John Lavery, Oswald Birley and Olive Snell, and for the sculptor Clare Sheridan.

  Music and exile ran through the maternal line. Lee's great-grandfather Jerome Carandini, the Marquis of Sarzano, was an Italian political refugee. His great-grandmother Marie Carandini, born Burgess, was an English-born opera singer. Lee had an elder sister, Xandra, and a younger brother, Nicholas.

  Lee was four when his parents separated, and they divorced two years later. His mother took the children to Wengen in Switzerland. At Miss Fisher's Academy in Territet, Lee played his first role, Rumpelstiltskin. Back in London, his mother married the banker Harcourt George St-Croix Rose, an uncle of Ian Fleming. That made the author of the James Bond novels Lee's step-cousin.

  In Fulham, the family lived next door to the actor Eric Maturin. One night, Lee was introduced to Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the men who had assassinated Grigori Rasputin. Many years later, Lee would play Rasputin himself.

  At nine, Lee was sent to Summer Fields School in Oxford. He kept acting in school plays, though, as he put it, "the laurels deservedly went to Patrick Macnee." He then sat his interview for an Eton scholarship in front of the ghost story author M. R. James. Weak maths placed him eleventh, one place short of becoming a King's Scholar. His step-father refused to pay the higher fees of an Oppidan Scholar, so Lee went to Wellington College on classics scholarships, studying Ancient Greek and Latin.

  Wellington gave him almost no stage time beyond a "tiny part" in one school play. He was a "passable" racquets player and fencer and a competent cricketer, but he struggled at hockey, football, rugby and boxing. He disliked parades and weapons training, and in mock battles he would "play dead" as soon as he could. Beatings were frequent. Lee accepted them as "logical and therefore acceptable" punishments for knowingly breaking the rules.

  The summer term of 1939 was his last, with a year of school still to run. His step-father had run up gambling debts of £25,000, and Lee's mother separated from him. With money short, Lee needed work. On his way to the French Riviera, where his sister was on holiday, he stopped in Paris and watched the guillotine execution of Eugen Weidmann, the last public execution carried out in France. After a stay in Menton among exiled princely families, he returned to London and took a job at United States Lines, handling the mail and running errands in a Europe on the brink of war.

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• 3. The Intelligence Officer

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  Lee's first war service lasted two weeks, in Finland. After the Second World War began, he enrolled in a military academy and volunteered for the Finnish Army against the Soviet Union in the Winter War. British volunteers like him were kept away from the fighting, issued winter gear and posted on guard duty a safe distance from the border. Lee later said he knew how to shoot but not how to ski, and that he would probably be dead if he had been allowed near the front line.

  In early 1940, Lee joined Beecham's, first as an office clerk and then as a switchboard operator. When the firm moved out of London, he joined the Home Guard. His father fell ill with bilateral pneumonia and died on the 12th of March 1941. Lee had no wish to follow him into the Army, so he volunteered for the Royal Air Force while he still had a choice of service.

  Training led from RAF Uxbridge to the Initial Training Wing at Paignton. Then, under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, he sailed on the Reina del Pacifico to South Africa. His posting was at Hillside, near Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia. Flying de Havilland Tiger Moths, Lee reached his penultimate session before a first solo flight when headaches and blurred vision began. The medical officer hesitantly diagnosed a failure of the optic nerve. Lee was told he would never fly again.

  Lee was devastated, and the death of a fellow trainee from Summer Fields left him more despondent. His appeals were fruitless. Wanting to "do something constructive for my keep," he applied to join RAF Intelligence. His superiors praised the initiative, and he was seconded to the British South Africa Police and posted as a warder at Salisbury Prison.

  After the Sicilian campaign, Lee caught malaria for the sixth time in under a year and was flown to a hospital in Carthage. When he returned, the squadron was restless. There was no news of the Eastern Front, no mail from home and no alcohol, and the unrest threatened to become mutiny. Lee, by then an expert on Russia, talked the men back to their duties. His commanding officer was much impressed.

  During most of the Battle of Monte Cassino, Lee was attached to the Gurkhas of the 8th Indian Infantry Division. On leave in Naples, he climbed Mount Vesuvius, which erupted three days later. During the final assault, a plane crashed on takeoff and Lee tripped over one of its live bombs, nearly dying. In Rome afterwards, he met his mother's cousin Nicolò Carandini, who had fought in the Italian resistance.

  In November 1944, Lee was promoted to flight lieutenant and moved to Air Force HQ, where he helped plan for a possible assault on the rumoured German Alpine Fortress. In the last months of his service, he was seconded to the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. He spoke fluent French, Italian and German, among other languages. Of that work he said: "We were given dossiers of what they'd done and told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could and hand them over to the appropriate authority."

  Lee finished his RAF service in 1946. He said he had been attached to special forces but declined to give details, so nearly everything known about his service rests on the chronology in his own autobiography.

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• 4. Too Tall for Film

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  Back in London in 1946, Lee turned down a significant raise to return to Beecham's, because "I couldn't think myself back into the office frame of mind." The armed forces were offering veterans with a classics education teaching posts at universities. Lee felt his Latin was too rusty, and he disliked the strict curfews.

  Over lunch with Nicolò Carandini, by then the Italian Ambassador to Britain, Lee was listing his war wounds when his cousin asked, "Why don't you become an actor, Christopher?" Lee liked the idea. To calm his mother's protests, he pointed to the successful Carandini performers in Australia, among them his great-grandmother Marie. Nicolò then introduced him to his friend Filippo Del Giudice, a lawyer turned film producer who headed Two Cities Films, part of the Rank Organisation. Lee recalled that Del Giudice "looked me up and down" and decided he was just what the industry needed.

  Josef Somlo, who was to arrange the contract, first told Lee he was too tall to be an actor. Lee called this "a quite fatuous remark," like saying you are too short to play the piano. His summary of the next ten years was brief: "I watched, I listened and I learned."

  Somlo sent Lee to Rank's David Henley and Olive Dodds, who signed him to a seven-year contract. Like other students at Rank's "Charm School," he struggled to find work. His film debut came in 1948, in Terence Young's Gothic romance Corridor of Mirrors. To get around Lee's height, the director seated him at a nightclub table beside Lois Maxwell, Mavis Villiers, Hugh Latimer and John Penrose. He had a single line.

  Also in 1948, Lee carried a spear, uncredited, in Laurence Olivier's film of Hamlet. Peter Cushing, his later co-star and close friend, played Osric. In 1951, Lee played a Spanish captain in Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N., cast after the director asked whether he could speak Spanish and fence. That year he was also an uncredited chariot driver in Quo Vadis, shot in Rome, and he was injured when thrown from the chariot.

  Lee dated his breakthrough to 1952, when Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. began making films at the British National Studios. He said in 2006 that he was cast in various roles in 16 of them and even appeared with Buster Keaton. The same year, he was in John Huston's Oscar-nominated Moulin Rouge. Over the next decade, he made nearly 30 films, including The Cockleshell Heroes, mostly as stock action characters. Lee found it odd that the role which finally rewarded all that patience required him to say nothing at all.

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• 5. Hammer's Count

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  The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 was Lee's first film for Hammer Film Productions, and he played Frankenstein's monster opposite Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein. At the casting session, "they asked me if I wanted the part, I said yes and that was that." The film began a partnership of more than 20 films, and the two men became close friends. Boris Karloff joined Lee for Corridors of Blood in 1958. The two had met in 1955 on an episode of the television series Colonel March of Scotland Yard, and they were London neighbours for a time in the mid-1960s.

  Dracula followed in 1958, released as Horror of Dracula in the US. The writer Kevin Jackson judged Lee's debut triumphant and said it fixed the image of the fanged vampire in popular culture. Lee brought a dark, brooding sexuality to the Count, which Tim Stanley called subversive because it hinted that women might quite like the attention. Empire magazine ranked the portrayal the 7th Greatest Horror Movie Character of All Time. CNN placed it third among British villains, noting his "chilling, sonorous tone." In 1959, Lee also played Kharis in Hammer's The Mummy and took a similar role in an Italian-French picture, Uncle Was a Vampire.

  In Dracula: Prince of Darkness in 1965, the Count has no lines and merely hisses his way through the film. Lee says he refused to speak the poor dialogue he was given. The screenwriter Jimmy Sangster says the script held no lines for the character. The film set a pattern for the sequels, with half the running time spent on Dracula's resurrection and only brief appearances by the Count.

  Lee said Hammer all but blackmailed him into the later films. Unable or unwilling to pay his usual rate, the studio reminded him how many people he would put out of work by refusing. He recalled Hammer's president, Jimmy Carreras, ringing in a state of hysteria to say the film was already sold to the American distributor with Lee in the part. His verdict: "Emotional blackmail. That's the only reason I did them."

  Dracula Has Risen from the Grave in 1968, Taste the Blood of Dracula in 1969 and Scars of Dracula in 1970 gave the Count very little to do. In a 2005 interview, Lee said he pleaded with Hammer to let him use lines Bram Stoker had written, adding, "Occasionally, I sneaked one in."

  Two more Hammer films in the early 1970s tried to bring the Count into the modern day. Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1973 were not commercially successful. The latter was tentatively titled Dracula Is Dead... and Well and Living in London, a parody of a musical revue, and Lee was not amused. At a press conference in 1973 he said, "I'm doing it under protest. I think it is fatuous." He felt he had played the part too many times and that the films had deteriorated, so this was his last Hammer Dracula.

  Counting every appearance, Lee played Dracula 10 times. Seven were for Hammer, one was Jesús Franco's Count Dracula in 1970, and he appeared uncredited in Jerry Lewis's One More Time and in Édouard Molinaro's Dracula and Son. He also played an unnamed, Dracula-like vampire in The Magic Christian in 1969. Fifty years after the original film, in 2008, the Royal Mail issued a commemorative stamp showing Lee as the Count.

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• 6. Breaking Free

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  Billy Wilder's British-made The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, released in 1970, cast Lee as Mycroft, Sherlock's smarter brother. Lee credited the role with ending his typecasting: "I've never been typecast since. Sure, I've played plenty of heavies, but as Anthony Hopkins says, 'I don't play villains, I play people.'" He had already played Sir Henry Baskerville to Cushing's Holmes in 1959, and he played Holmes himself in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace in 1962.

  In 1962, Lee took a leading role in the German film The Puzzle of the Red Orchid, speaking the German he had learned during his education in Switzerland. That year he auditioned for The Longest Day but was turned down because he did not "look like a military man." Some film books wrongly credit him with a part in it, and he had to correct them for the rest of his life.

  The author Dennis Wheatley, a friend, introduced Lee to the occult, and Hammer made two films from Wheatley's novels with Lee starring. The New York Times described his performance in the first, The Devil Rides Out in 1967, as "suave dignity." The second, To the Devil a Daughter in 1976, was troubled in production and disowned by its author. It made money, but it was Hammer's last horror film. Between 1965 and 1969, Lee also played the villain of the Dr. Fu Manchu series, beginning with The Face of Fu Manchu, in yellowface make-up.

  The Wicker Man in 1973 was Lee's personal favourite, the film he considered his best. He wanted to leave the Dracula image behind, so he met the screenwriter Anthony Shaffer. Shaffer and the director Robin Hardy thought it would be fun to make a horror film about "old religion," the opposite of Hammer's popular films. Peter Snell, head of British Lion, joined them. Shaffer chose David Pinner's novel Ritual, in which a devout Christian policeman investigates what looks like the ritual murder of a young girl in a rural village. He and Lee paid Pinner £15,000 for the rights, and Shaffer then built a new story from only the novel's basic outline. The budget was so small, and Lee so keen, that he played Lord Summerisle for free.

  One job went badly wrong. In 1970, Lee appeared as the on-screen narrator of Eugenie, directed by Jess Franco, as a favour to the producer Harry Alan Towers. He thought the film was about the Marquis de Sade and flew to Spain for a single day's work in a crimson dinner jacket. Later a friend asked whether he knew he was in a film on Old Compton Street. Lee crept to the cinema in dark glasses and a scarf and found his name on the front. He had not known the film was softcore pornography, because the sex scenes were shot separately. "I was furious!" he recalled. In 1972, he also produced Nothing But the Night, in which he starred. It was the first and last film he produced, because he did not enjoy the process.

  Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, had offered Lee the title villain of Dr. No in 1962. Lee accepted enthusiastically, but by the time Fleming told the producers, they had already chosen Joseph Wiseman. Lee finally played a Bond villain in 1974, as the assassin Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. The novel's Scaramanga is a West Indian thug, but Lee made the film version charming, elegant, amusing and lethal. "I played him like the dark side of Bond," he said.

  Some parts got away. Filming in Bangkok kept Lee from playing the Specialist in Ken Russell's Tommy in 1975, and the role went to Jack Nicholson. John Carpenter has said he offered Samuel Loomis in Halloween to Cushing and Lee before Donald Pleasence took it. Lee later told Carpenter that turning it down was the biggest regret of his career. He also turned down Dr. Barry Rumack in Airplane! in 1980, a part that went to Leslie Nielsen, and later called that "a big mistake."

  In 1977, Lee left the UK for the US, worried about the typecasting that had trapped his close friends Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. His first American appearance was in the disaster film Airport '77. In 1978, he surprised many people by going along with the joke as guest host of NBC's Saturday Night Live. Steven Spielberg was in the audience and cast him in 1941 in 1979. Lee also co-starred with Bette Davis in Disney's Return from Witch Mountain. Of Hollywood he said, "I was no longer a horror star. I was an actor." In Gremlins 2: The New Batch in 1990, he played the mad scientist Dr. Catheter. When the Bat Gremlin transforms, Catheter feels deja-vu, and the audience hears Dracula music.

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• 7. Franchise Revival

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  For decades, Lee said in the commentary for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, he had dreamed of playing Gandalf. He conceded that he was too old and too limited physically. Ian McKellen, then in his early 60s, took Gandalf, while Lee, in his mid-70s, became Saruman. Saruman needs no horse-riding and far less fighting. Lee had met J. R. R. Tolkien once, which made him the only person involved in Jackson's films to have done so. He reread the novels at least once a year. His scene in The Return of the King was cut from the theatrical release and restored in the extended edition.

  The Lord of the Rings began a major career revival. Next came Count Dooku in George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones in 2002 and Episode III - Revenge of the Sith in 2005, opposite Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman. Lee did most of the swordplay himself, with a stunt double only for long shots with more vigorous footwork. Anthony Daniels called him "a real bastion of cinema history" in his memoirs.

  Star Wars also linked Lee to his oldest film friend. Cushing had played Grand Moff Tarkin in the original film, decades before Lee joined the series. The last project that united the two men in person was the documentary Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror in 1994, which they narrated together two months before Cushing's death.

  Tim Burton cast Lee in five films late in his career. The first was Sleepy Hollow in 1999. In 2005, Lee voiced Pastor Galswells in Corpse Bride and played Dr. Wilbur Wonka, father of Willy Wonka, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For Sweeney Todd in 2007, he and Anthony Head recorded "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" as the Gentleman Ghost, but Burton judged the songs too theatrical, and Lee's appearance was cut completely. In 2010, Lee voiced the Jabberwock in Alice in Wonderland, alongside Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway. He respected Depp as "a fellow survivor." Dark Shadows in 2012 was his fifth and final Burton film, in the small role of a New England fishing captain.

  For The Hobbit, Lee wanted to show Saruman's corruption by Sauron, but he was too old to travel to New Zealand. The production adjusted so that he could take part from London.

  Lee spoke fluent English, Italian, French, Spanish and German, and was moderately proficient in Swedish, Russian and Greek. He was the original voice of Thor in the German dubs of the Danish animated film Valhalla in 1986, and of King Haggard in the English and German dubs of The Last Unicorn in 1982. He supplied every voice in the English dub of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. He voiced Death in animated versions of Terry Pratchett's Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters, and Ansem the Wise in Kingdom Hearts II. In 2007, he voiced Tolkien's The Children of Húrin for the audiobook.

  In April 2014, the Lego The Hobbit video game was released with special dialogue recorded by Lee as narrator. At 91 years and 316 days old, he appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest video game narrator.

  In 2004, Lee had lamented that Hollywood scripts were mainly spin-offs and that he was mostly offered spin-offs of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. In an interview in August 2013, he said he had no intention of retiring: "Making films has never just been a job to me, it's my life." He was realistic about the work available at his age, but he took what he could, even voice-overs and narration.

  A month before he died, Lee signed to star in the Danish film The 11th. One of his final performances was in Michael Pakleppa's fantasy Angels in Notting Hill, where he played The Boss / Mr. President. It premiered at the Regent Street Cinema in London on the 29th of October 2016, more than a year after his death.

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• 8. Metal, Family, Legacy

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  Lee's operatic bass voice was on record long before heavy metal. He sang Paul Giovanni's "The Tinker of Rye" on The Wicker Man soundtrack and the closing credits song of the 1994 horror film Funny Man. In 1977, he appeared on Peter Knight and Bob Johnson's concept album The King of Elfland's Daughter.

  His first contact with metal came in 2004, in a duet with Fabio Lione, lead vocalist of the Italian symphonic power metal band Rhapsody of Fire. The single was "The Magic of the Wizard's Dream," though Lee sang only backing vocals on the album version. He went on to narrate four of the band's albums and an EP, as the Wizard King. He also recorded narration for Manowar's new version of their first album, Battle Hymns, replacing the original voiceover by Orson Welles, who died in 1985.

  Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross in 2010 and Charlemagne: The Omens of Death in 2013 were symphonic metal concept albums in which Lee played the title character. They mixed his spoken word, singing and dramatic narration. The second was released on his 91st birthday. In May 2014, he released the EP Metal Knight to celebrate his 92nd birthday. It included "My Way," "The Toreador March" and two songs from the musical Man of La Mancha. He explained the choice: "as far as I am concerned, Don Quixote is the most metal fictional character that I know."

  At the 2010 Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards, Tony Iommi presented Lee with the Spirit of Hammer award. Lee jokingly apologized to Saxon for his song "Massacre of the Saxons" and thanked the audience for listening to "a young man right at the beginning of his career." Of his December 2014 Christmas release, "Darkest Carols, Faithful Sing," he said, "every day is a celebration, and I want to share it with my fans." His narration of "The Last Vampire" on the debut album by Hollywood Vampires, the supergroup of Johnny Depp, Alice Cooper and Joe Perry, was recorded shortly before his death.

  In the late 1950s, Lee was engaged to Countess Henriette Ewa Agnes von Rosen, whom he had met at a nightclub in Stockholm. Her father, Count Fritz von Rosen, made the wedding wait a year, had Lee interviewed by friends in London and hired private detectives to investigate him. Lee also needed the permission of King Gustaf VI of Sweden, whom he had met while filming Tales of Hans Anderson, and he received his blessing. Shortly before the wedding, Lee ended the engagement. He felt that, with an actor's financial insecurity, von Rosen "deserved better." She understood, and they called it off.

  Lee was introduced to the Danish painter and former model Birgit "Gitte" Krøncke by a Danish friend in 1960. They married on the 17th of March 1961, and their daughter, Christina Erika Carandini Lee, was born in 1963. Lee and his daughter provided spoken vocals on Rhapsody of Fire's album Triumph or Agony in 2006. He lived with his family in Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge until his death.

  Lee died of heart failure at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on the 7th of June 2015, aged 93. His wife delayed the public announcement until the 11th of June so that she could tell the family first. Then-Prime Minister David Cameron praised Lee as a "titan of the golden age of cinema." The academy honoured him in its In Memoriam section at the 88th Academy Awards on the 28th of February 2016. His widow, Gitte, died on the 20th of June 2024, aged 89.

  The honours had come steadily. Lee received the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1994 and became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire on the 16th of June 2001. He was made a Knight Bachelor for services to drama and to charity on the 13th of June 2009. A BAFTA Fellowship followed in February 2011 and a BFI Fellowship in 2013. In 2005, a USA Today poll named him the most marketable star in the world, after three of his films grossed US$640 million. In 2010, he was identified as the IMDb member with the greatest closeness centrality, which implied he was the best-connected person in the business.

  In 2019, four years after his death, Rhapsody of Fire released The Eighth Mountain, with a posthumous narration by Lee that carries the concept story of the band's Nephilim Empire Saga.

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