The film actor Christopher Lee, who has died aged 93, lent his impressive height, distinguished good looks, Shakespearean voice and aristocratic presence to the portrayal of a gallery of villains, from a seductive Count Dracula to a dreaded wizard in The Lord of the Rings.
Lee was 35 when his breakthrough film, Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), was released. But it was a year later, when he played the title role in Fisher's Dracula, that his cinematic identity became forever associated with Bram Stoker's noble, ravenous vampire, who in Lee's characterisation exuded a certain lascivious sex appeal.
Even in his 70s and 80s, Lee's countenance could strike fear in the hearts of moviegoers. He played the treacherous light-sabre-wielding villain Count Dooku in the Star Wars instalments Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) and Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith (2005). And he was the dangerously charismatic wizard Saruman, set on destroying "the world of men", in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies.
Lee was sometimes – but not always – philosophical about having been typecast. Of his roughly 250 movie and television roles, only 15 or so, he contended, had been in horror films. And that included at least 10 outings as Dracula, plus one as Frankenstein’s monster and one as the Mummy.
Swashbuckling
Many of his other characters were terrifying men. He was the swashbuckling assassin Rochefort in
The Three Musketeers
(1974); the eerily manipulative title character in
Rasputin: The Mad Monk
(1966); the Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga in
The Man With the Golden Gun
(1974); a German officer in Steven Spielberg’s
1941
(1979); and a mad scientist in
Gremlins II
(1990). During the 1960s, he played the title role of the Chinese criminal mastermind in five Fu Manchu movies.
But Lee also played men of quieter power. He was the dying founder of Pakistan in Jinnah (1998) and Sherlock Holmes's brother in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970). He even made a western, Hannie Caulder (1971), playing a peaceful family man.
One of his favorite roles was that of the hedonistic pagan leader who advocated free love, public nudity and human sacrifice in The Wicker Man (1973).
Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born in London in 1922, the son of Lt Col Geoffrey Trollope Lee and Contessa Estelle Marie Carandini. His parents divorced when he was six, and his mother married Harcourt George St-Croix Rose, a banker who, until his finances collapsed in 1939, easily maintained their privileged existence.
Lee recalled that lifestyle in his 2003 memoir Lord of Misrule: "It was true that we'd once failed to travel first class on the Blue Train," he wrote, "but that must have been a booking error."
Lee attended Eton and Wellington College, then joined the Royal Air Force, serving in intelligence and special forces during the second World War. He had reached his full height, 6 feet 5 inches, as a boy. “I went through my school days in a constant state of embarrassment,” he recalled.
Lee lived in Switzerland and in California for many years but eventually returned to his native England. He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2001, knighted by Prince Charles in 2009 and made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2011.
Muscial career
In the 1990s, he embarked on a low-key singing career, with concerts and recordings, including arias, show tunes and, in 2010, what he characterised as “symphonic metal” (with the album
Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross
). He had hoped to study at the Royal College of Music but was rejected, in his 30s, as too old.
He continued acting into his 90s. In 2012 he appeared in Tim Burton's Dark Shadows and the first of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings prequels, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, reprising his role as Saruman. He played Saruman again in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third movie in the trilogy.
In 1961, Lee married Birgit Kroencke, a model who was born in Copenhagen and later acted under the name Gitte Lee. They had a daughter, Christina.
Lee often said that he identified with Count Dracula, because they were both embarrassments to an aristocratic family. In Lord of Misrule, he expressed sympathy for his famous horror characters. "In my mind Dracula, the Mummy and Frankenstein's monster are driven figures, unable to help themselves, eventually out of control like a runaway train," he wrote, "and consequently very much alone."