In later years (of which there were many), the inimitable Sir Christopher Lee, who has died at the age of 93, used to bristle at being identified with Count Dracula.
Indeed, appearing in a 2003 Channel 4 show celebrating the greatest horror films, he agreed to discuss Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man, but refused to say a word about Bram Stoker's creation. Show business is a strange affair. When the sad news was announced this morning, four days after his passing at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, at least one tabloid declared that "Lord of the Rings star dies". It's a good time to be an older British character actor.
Far from fading quietly into the darkness, Lee was more visible than ever in the current century. He appeared in the Star Wars prequels and The Lord of the Rings films. Tim Burton made great use of his gothic brows. In 2010 and 2013, he released a brace of heavy-metal albums concerning the story of Charlemagne. By golly, this was a life well lived.
The breadth of his achievements seems all the more remarkable when you realise that he was well into his 30s before becoming properly famous. Lee was born in Belgravia to a military family. His father, Lieut Col Geoffrey Trollope, fought in the Boer War and the first World War. His mother was a contessa of Italian descent.
When the second World War erupted, Lee made a quixotic attempt to serve with the Finns during the winter war, but ultimately ended up with the Royal Air Force in Italy and what was then Rhodesia. He ended the conflict as a flight lieutenant at Air Force HQ.
Success took a while
While Lee was kicking about London, an associate suggested he might have the looks and voice for a film star and he was pointed towards the Rank Organisation. Success took a while.
“I was around a long time – nearly 10 years,” he said. “Initially, I was told I was too tall to be an actor. That’s a quite fatuous remark to make. It’s like saying you’re too short to play the piano. I thought: ‘Right, I’ll show you.’ ”
Lee's breakthrough came when he played the monster in Hammer's effective The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). The British studio then set out to rework all the monsters that had delivered such success for Universal Studios two decades earlier. It was inevitable that they would tackle Dracula and – with his towering frame and severe temples – Lee proved ideal casting in the title role.
Directed by Terrence Fisher, Hammer's Dracula was a worldwide hit in 1958 and Lee was established. We think of him as being an urbane presence, but, looking back at the first Dracula film, one is struck by the animalistic nature of the performance. There is a little of Bela Lugosi's matinee seducer in the turn. But there is also an impressive amount of naked fury.
More gore
More sexually explicit and gorier than anything British cinema was then producing, the Hammer films became an industry within an industry. The partnership between Lee (cold, superior, towering) and Peter Cushing (slight, older, more wry) remains among the great double acts in cinema history. The two stayed great friends until Cushing's death in 1994.
Hammer may have been run by civilised men in a quiet part of suburban London, but the films were not regarded as properly "respectable" at the time and, though Lee worked furiously for the rest of his life, it took a long time to break out of the horror ghetto. He appeared in Italian shockers for the likes of Mario Bava and Antonio Margheriti. For Hammer, he also essayed Fu Manchu, The Mummy and Rasputin. His turn as Lord Summerisle in Hardy's folk horror The Wicker Man (1973) – for which he asked no fee – helped that project, despite early indifference, become one of the most celebrated British films of the decade.
There was no shame in any of this. Lee brought great intelligence to the cinema of the macabre. He played it straight, but with an ironic twinkle that acknowledged absurdities beneath. Nonetheless, it was unfortunate that relatively few big-name directors found work for him in other genres. He was a fine Scaramanga in the Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun. He rumbled subtly in Richard Lester's The Three Musketeer films. But he deserved more work in "prestige" pictures.
That changed as he moved into his 80s and 90s. Directors such as Martin Scorsese and Tim Burton, who remembered Lee from their youths, found inventive things to do with him in such films as Hugo and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His performance as Saruman, antagonistic complement to Gandalf, delivered mature energy to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings pictures.
"The thing I have always tried to do is surprise people, to present them with something they didn't expect," he said. "As an actor, I have always tried to be unconventional. Even Scaramanga in The Man With The Golden Gun could be charming."
He is survived by his wife, the former model Birgit “Gitte” Krøncke, whom he married in 1962, and by his daughter Christina Erika Carandini Lee. He is mourned by millions of movie fans who have felt close to him for many, many decades. He would surely forgive those who think first of Dracula when his name is mentioned.
