Christopher Lee

In another age, Christopher Lee might seem as odd as actors in blackface - he is the end of the great movie tradition of sacred monsters.

David Thomson
The Guardian,
Friday 17 July 2009

I know he's 87, and possibly a little less than the 6ft 5in he once claimed, but when Her Majesty comes to knight Christopher Lee, I hope she'll keep a firm grip on the sword and make sure he's on his knees. Old habits die hard, and Sir Christopher might attempt a leap at her very throat. He is not to be treated lightly just because that raven black hair has turned to silver.

Of course, the first knight of horror (if I may be so bold) will have to see if his and the Queen's schedules can overlap. He has opened more veins and amazed eyes than she has named bridges and battleships. His record of work includes more than 250 jobs in film and television, dating from when he apparently carried a spear in Olivier's Hamlet (1948).

The same biographical sketch that lists the parts claims Lee was born in Belgravia. That sounds auspicious until you wonder - above stairs or below? Lee does have his credentials: Italianate-named forbears, the rumour of Wellington College, the Royal Air Force and then some rather hush-hush operations during the war. I'm sure it's all true (even if the detail is scarce), yet you can see the actor's face in the handsome young man, and acting is never too far from fraud, which in turn only makes me wonder if Lee might have thrown in a few more spivs, bounders and bogus colonels in his hallowed career as a magic man with strange powers. If there's one thing he has spared us, it's the possibility of humour. In turn, that provokes an intriguing question: did this veteran actor know that most of his great roles were enjoyable hokum, or did he take them in high earnest?

Although Lee was part of the J Arthur Rank charm school in the late 1940s, it has to be said that he did not really make it as a romantic lead. He was passed over in favour of people such as Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Richard Todd. But he did have a great scene - as a captured German soldier - in Michael Powell's Ill Met By Moonlight and that got him noticed. It was just a year later, 1957, that he played St Evremonde in A Tale of Two Cities, and then the Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein, in which his long-time chum, Peter Cushing, was cast as the Baron Frankenstein.

That was the start of what would become "Hammer Horror" (an operation that won the Queen's award for British Industry as well as critical praise for its introduction of colour, and thus blood, to the rather stale horror genre). In 1958, Lee was turned into a star by his very sexy and subtly ambiguous Dracula.

The die was cast. Lee and Cushing ran the horror show rather as Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi had done in the days of black and white. If the actor ever wearied of the cliches, it never showed. He played other roles - Sherlock Holmes, then Mycroft (for Billy Wilder). He played Bond villains when he might have been considered for the lead. He played Rochefort in Dick Lester's very pretty Musketeer pictures. He was exceptional as Rasputin: The Mad Monk in 1966 and, in 1998, as Mohammed Ali Jinnah (the leader of the young Pakistan). He did a lot of research for both and hardly seemed to realise that the first film cared so much less for authenticity than the second.

Just as sensible retirement might have been talked about, he found himself available for two lofty franchise projects: so he became Count Dooku in the last Star Wars pictures, and Saruman in the Lord of the Rings series. He opens this very week in The Heavy, and no one bothers to think that he might not be good value. All of which only leads on to the awkward question of where in our popular culture the monsters of myth (including the Creature, Fu Manchu and Dracula) meet those who are merely exotic or foreign - like Osama bin Laden, Mao Zedong or ... name your bogeyman. Truth to tell, in another age, a Christopher Lee might seem as odd as actors working in black face. But he is the end of the great movie tradition that began with Lon Chaney and our fascination with sacred monsters.