Actor, singer, soldier, spy?
Playing Dracula loomed large over his life and work, but a new film delves beneath the cape and fangs to reveal the real Christopher Lee
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- Amy Raphael
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From the outside, Christopher Lee had it all. He was a particularly tall, charismatic actor with the kind of booming voice that could stop you in your tracks. He also had an astonishing 250 film and TV roles to his name by the time he died in 2015, aged 93.
His breakthrough film was the 1957 British horror movie The Curse of Frankenstein, in which he played the creature; a year later, he took on the titular role in Dracula, and it became his cinematic albatross. Despite later roles as a pagan leader in cult film The Wicker Man, as Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, as Saruman in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films and, quite unbelievably now, as a Chinese criminal in five Fu Manchu movies, Lee was unfairly categorised as a horror actor, forever defined by his role as the blood-lusting count with fangs.
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Plenty has been written about Lee, not least by the actor himself, who penned several books and autobiographies, but the Sky Arts documentary The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee takes a novel approach to his life, using previously unseen archive material and a puppet, voiced by Peter Serafinowicz, to bring the actor back to life in a startlingly effective manner.
There is an almost overwhelming amount of material to cover, but director Jon Spira wasn’t remotely fazed by the project. He admits that he wasn’t particularly a fan of Lee’s work and didn’t like the myriad Hammer films in which he starred; in fact, his interest in Lee’s story was almost accidental.
Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957. Shutterstock
“I came across Christopher Lee’s episode of This Is Your Life from 1974 on YouTube,” Spira recalls, “and he looks like he’s having the worst time imaginable. I watched it again and it became clear that he was trying to protect his own narrative. The world saw him as strong, erudite, educated, athletic, handsome and debonair, but the truth is that he was as messed up as the rest of us. I wanted to tell the story of his insecurities.”
Spira, who used to work for the British Film Institute, had access to all Lee’s interviews in the BFI library alongside his personal scrapbooks. “They start early in his career and go up to the 70s. If he was on TV, he’d take a photo of himself because there was no other way of recording it. There are photos of projects that didn’t come to light, of Orson Welles’s unfinished Moby Dick film… it’s quite extraordinary.”
As well as dipping into his oeuvre, The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee explores the idiosyncratic actor’s life, from his upbringing with a military father and aristocratic Italian mother to his military career, his value as a polyglot to the secret service and his tracking down of Nazi war criminals. It also attempts to discover if Lee’s cousin Ian Fleming really did base James Bond on him – a nice idea even if it’s not quite true.
I wanted to tell the stories of his insecurities
Jon Spira, Director
The old footage assembled by Spira is fascinating, but the talking heads provide an extra dimension. Actress Harriet Walter, Lee’s niece, says her uncle was “as soft as putty” but could “never leave Dracula behind”. She adds that “he had a lot of rejection which people didn’t know about”.
Director Peter Jackson, who grew up a Lee fan, says that the late star – “tall, elegant, slightly pompous” – grumbled when he asked him to a sign a Dracula poster, clearly wanted to be recognised as a versatile actor and was, to everyone’s surprise, consumed by “a surprising insecurity” on The Fellowship of the Ring. Jackson recalls how Lee was doing a scene with Ian McKellen as Gandalf and “Ian came up to me and said, ‘You might have to have a word with Christopher. He’s convinced he’s going to get fired at the end of the day. He’s convinced he’s doing a terrible job, and you don’t like him.’ Which was a terrible thing to hear! I started to really reassure him that he was doing great.”
Christopher Lee in Dracula: Horror of Dracula, 1958. HAMMER FILM
There are also, inevitably, gaps in Lee’s story that will likely remain unfilled for ever, namely his apparent involvement with the secret service during the war. “Realising I was never going to have access to his war records was so annoying,” says Spira. “Officials said: ‘There’s nothing to see’ on repeat. If his cover had been blown, the secret service or MI5 would have disavowed all knowledge of him anyway.” John Landis, who directed Lee in The Stupids, says that he always wanted to hear about Lee’s war. Lee always replied, “John, I can’t!”
Nonetheless, the documentary is fascinating, covering Lee’s singing career (encompassing everything from show tunes and arias to heavy metal, despite him being rejected from the Royal College of Music in his 30s, apparently due to his age) and the wonderful fact that he was 90 when he appeared in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows.
While researching the documentary, Spira watched over 150 of Lee’s films and is honest about the lack of quality control. “Some of them were bad. A mess. All over the place. On occasion I had to pay £200 to get a bootleg from Japan and when it arrived it was unwatchable. Having said that, the joy was never knowing what you were going to get. Lee was always capable of surprising you.”
Christopher Lee in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001. NEW LINE CINEMA
The denouement of The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee comes when Lee does a TV interview in 2009, moments after being knighted. The young presenter refers to the 92-year-old as “the king of horror” and Lee is clearly upset that his life’s work has, in his eyes, been diminished. He objects; she becomes increasingly flustered. “It’s heartbreaking,” says Spira. “On the one hand, he should have got over it by that point in his life – did it really matter that he was reduced to being Dracula in a news item on the TV?
“At the same time, he had this incredible career, making films all over Europe because he could speak so many languages, doing some really good work later in life. I just hope that people will watch this documentary and then go and watch some of his better films, like the female-centric western Hannie Caulder with Raquel Welch. He took every performance he ever did seriously, and now he deserves to be taken seriously.”
From Hammer to Hebrides: Five of the best Lee films to stream now
The Curse of Frankenstein – Amazon Prime
Hammer studios hit horror paydirt with this eerie spin on the gothic tale of a mad scientist playing God. Lee earns his breakthrough as “The Creature”.
Dracula – Amazon Prime
Reuniting with his Curse co-star Peter Cushing and director Terence Fisher, Lee assumes the role that would follow him to his own grave — and beyond.
The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit – Now/Amazon Prime
Lee was a lifelong fan of JRR Tolkien’s work, so jumped at the chance to work on Peter Jackson’s trilogies, in which he played Saruman.
The Man With the Golden Gun – Amazon Prime
…and the third nipple. Lee portrays expert assassin Francisco Scaramanga, who meets his match in James Bond (Roger Moore).
The Wicker Man – iPlayer
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Lee considered this unsettling folk horror his greatest work. He brings mystery and menace to Lord Summerisle, whose remote Hebridean island community doesn’t take too kindly to strangers.
Authors
Amy Raphael
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