It’s a pretty impressive accomplishment for any actor to be working well into his 90s. Sir Christopher Lee, who died earlier this week at the age of 93, was not only still working, but still in demand.
Lee, who was knighted in 2009, had a remarkable life even before he became a movie star. He was an intelligence officer in the Second World War, and hunted down Nazi war criminals after Germany fell he knew J.R.R. Tolkien and was related to marriage by Ian Fleming. (Seriously, Lee’s Wikipedia page – much of it taken from his own autobiography, Tall, Dark And Gruesome – reads like a movie pitch.)
It’s the film work that people know best, of course. Lee was beloved by horror fans for his work in nearly two dozen Hammer pictures, where he reinvented legendary screen monsters opposite Peter Cushing his animalistic, predatory Dracula is arguably the definitive screen incarnation of Bram Stoker’s vampire, and he didn’t do too badly as the Mummy or Frankenstein’s creature either.
Fans of Roger Moore-era Bond fans will bring up Lee’s star turn as the merciless assassin Scaramanga in 1975’s The Man With The Golden Gun. (Moore and Lee had known each other since the 50s, and clearly enjoyed the chance to square off in a giant action movie.)
And then there’s Lord Summerisle, the imperious, mysterious cult leader at the heart of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man – which, four decades later, remains one of the strangest movies ever produced in Britain. It was a favourite of Lee’s, and the actor was essential to the film’s preservation and restoration over the years.
But basically, Lee did everything. He played Sherlock Holmes in Hammer director Terence Fisher’s Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace eight years later, he played the character’s brother Mycroft in Billy Wilder’s 1970 curio The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes. (He’d return to the role of Sherlock for two TV-movies in the 90s, paired with Patrick Macnee as Watson. The actors seemed to be having fun, at least.)
As often happens with cult actors, Lee’s star was reinvigorated when a generation of filmmakers who’d grown up watching him had the chance to cast him in their own projects. Steven Spielberg was probably the first to do it, casting Lee as a Nazi sub commander in his 1979 WWII comedy 1941 it’s not a great part, mostly requiring him to stand next to Toshiro Mifune and scowl menacingly at Slim Pickens, but Lee gives every line his full attention.
Joe Dante tapped Lee to play a geneticist in Gremlins 2: The New Batch in 1990, and Lee is having a grand old time shouting the usual mad-scientist lines while surrounded by rampaging puppets. In 1999, Tim Burton cast him as a village elder in Sleepy Hollow, starting a working relationship that would last for more than a decade.
One year later, Peter Jackson brought Lee to New Zealand to play the traitorous wizard Saruman in his Lord Of The Rings trilogy. (Fun fact: Tolkien had wanted Lee to play Gandalf when the books were being considered for a screen adaptation in the late 50s.) If anyone was worried about Lee’s heartiness, his appearance in Jackson’s trilogy was a pretty good indication that he was up for more work.
George Lucas cast him as the evil Count Dooku in the second Star Wars prequel, Attack Of The Clones – where, at the ripe old age of 80, the actor fought Yoda to a standstill. Dooku would return in the last of the prequels, Revenge Of The Sith, and Lee didn’t seem to have lost a step.
Maybe it was the metal that kept him young. In his later years, Lee recorded a series of heavy-metal albums, lending his sonorous voice to all manner of dark music (and an especially delightful Christmas record).
Most likely, though, he just enjoyed working. He loved making movies, and moviemakers loved him right back. I’d be willing to bet that Peter Jackson included all those Elf Council sequences in the Hobbit trilogy just to have Lee back on set, telling stories between takes. You just know he had some good ones.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
