A Vampire, Dark Wizard, and Jedi Knight Has Died
June 11, 2015
Beloved and iconic film star Sir Christopher Lee died this week at the age of 93. Over his 70-year career as an actor, Lee played a large number of roles, but he is closely associated with the role of the vampire Count Dracula in horror films. Hammer Pictures, a British film company, produced a famous series of horror movies from the 1950′s through the 1970′s. It was Hammer that gave Christopher Lee his real start, some 10 years into his acting career.
Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born in London in 1922, to a British Army officer and an Italian Countess. After taking a degree in classics, Lee saw distinguished service during World War II (1939-1945). He worked in intelligence for the Royal Air Force and served for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a top-secret British organization that fought behind enemy lines.
After World War II, Lee went into acting and spent the next decade being cast in very minor parts in film. His breakout came in a role in which he did not speak, as the Frankenstein monster in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). In 1958, he played another screen monster, Dracula, in Hammer’s Horror of Dracula. Lee would play the role of Count Dracula another half-dozen times for Hammer Pictures. He also played in other films of theirs through the 1970′s.
Lee could have been in danger of being typecast in villain roles. He played a villain in the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun (1974). (Lee and Bond author Ian Fleming were cousins and actually fought together for SOE during World War II.) Lee’s ability to speak multiple languages and his fencing expertise meant that he was cast in a variety of roles. He fenced in a number of Three Musketeers films.
Younger filmgoers may be more familiar with Lee’s later roles: the dark wizard Saruman in the trilogy The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, and 2003) and the trilogy The Hobbit (2012, 2013, and 2014), both based on the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien; and the fallen Jedi knight Count Dooku in two Star Wars films in 2003 and 2004.