Sir Christopher Lee loved to sing. I remember being at the BBC one afternoon in 1994 and hearing his voice booming majestically down the corridors of Broadcasting House – rich, mellifluous, commanding. As a longtime horror fan, I instinctively recognised that voice from the Hammer films that made Lee an international celebrity back in the 60s. But as well as being an iconic screen presence, he was an acclaimed vocalist whose powerful range could be employed from opera to heavy metal with breathtaking results. Alongside his many other accolades, Lee received a Spirit of Metal award in 2010 for his work on Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross, a “symphonic metal concept album”, which cemented his reputation as a genuinely unpredictable cultural polymath. “It’s fascinating,” he said at the time, “that people are starting to look upon me as ‘a metal singer’.” To my surprise and great pleasure, I suddenly find that there seems to be another string to my bow… ”
I first met Lee in 1991, when he provided the narration for a Channel 4 documentary I was working on entitled Fear in the Dark. The script (which I had “polished”) was somewhat perfunctory, but Lee made it sound... important, vibrant, engrossing. I remember sitting in the control booth with director Dominic Murphy listening to Lee breathe dramatic life into words that had seemed so sterile on the page. The timbre of his voice was astonishing – if he’d read the phone book out loud, it would have seemed deep and meaningful. I also remember his numerous notes – correcting small factual errors (he believed very strongly that the devil was in the detail), reconfiguring clumsily constructed sentences, challenging lazy generalisations. He also politely, but firmly, put me straight on the correct pronunciation of the word “piranha”, a word that has never sounded the same to me since.
For a certain generation of film-goers (those aged 50 and over), Lee’s name will always be associated with key roles in such Hammer classics as 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein, in which he played the creature, or 1958’s Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula), in which he played the Count. The latter of these would establish Lee as the screen’s most celebrated vampire, a label with which he became increasingly uncomfortable. Yet despite the fact that his biography was self-deprecatingly entitled Tall, Dark and Gruesome, Lee consistently rose above typecasting, reinventing himself time and again in a career of quite bewildering diversity.
Many younger viewers will think of Lee as Saruman from Peter Jackson’s blockbusting The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, or as Count Dooku from George Lucas’s Star Wars series – roles in his later life that introduced him to legions of new fans. For others, it is his portrayal of the evil fiend Fu Manchu, whom he played in a string of hit movies in the 60s, that will resonate most richly, or his mesmerising title role in Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966). In the 70s, he worked with Billy Wilder on The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, portrayed triple-nippled Bond baddie Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun, and played Rochefort in Richard Lester’s popular The Three Musketeers movies. He had a major role in HBO’s epic 1984 TV miniseries The Far Pavilions, and in 1990 he did sterling comic work as Dr Catheter in Joe Dante’s fantasy satire Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
In 2009, he was knighted for services to drama and charity, and received the Bafta fellowship (the organisation’s highest honour) in 2011. The award was presented by Tim Burton, who worked with Lee on films such as Sleepy Hollow (1999) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and who described him after his death last week as “the last of his kind – a true legend – who I’m fortunate to have called a friend”.
Following my first own starstruck encounter with Lee on Fear in the Dark, I crossed paths with him again in 1998 when I joined him on a BBC World Service programme in which he looked back at his extraordinary career, and talked enthusiastically about his two most recent projects; a recording he had made of Wand’rin’ Star in a baritone so rich it would have made Lee Marvin cry; and the film Jinnah, in which he played the founder of Pakistan – a role he was particularly proud of.
The Wicker Man. ‘I don’t think that anyone up to the time we showed it had ever seen a film quite like it,’ said Lee.
But it was while making a documentary about the cult British classic The Wicker Man that I saw Lee at his most passionate. “I don’t think that anyone up to the time we showed it had ever seen a film quite like it,” he told me in 2001 of the film he considered to be his finest work. Based on a script by Anthony Shaffer, The Wicker Man cast Lee as Lord Summerisle, the leader of a pagan island where ancient rituals are given horrifying new life. Although the film tapped into Lee’s horror status (“I was typecast in the sense that people said: ‘Oh he kills people, and he makes these frightening, dark, gruesome movies’”), The Wicker Man was something new, a film that replaced the gothic trappings of yore with a modern-day terror all of its own. Lee is astonishing in the movie, bringing gravitas, intrigue and a touch of black comedy to a role that could easily have descended into farce. The film’s fiery climax remains one of the most memorably chilling finales of modern cinema.
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The Wicker Man was a masterpiece but it struggled to find a home in the landscape of 70s cinema, with which it was bizarrely out of step. Unloved by its production company British Lion (“they told me they thought it was one of the 10 worst films they had ever seen,” said Lee), it was cut down and released as a B-picture on a double bill with Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Years later, thanks largely to Lee’s tireless flag-waving, the film was reassessed and partially restored, having been hailed by Cinefantastique as “the Citizen Kane of horror movies”. All of which gave Lee great cause for rejoicing – although he continued to believe that a superior, more complete cut of the film languished in a vault somewhere, awaiting rediscovery.
“We do all of us depend on the elements that have been there since the dawn of time, and without which we could not exist,” he told me while musing on the enduring power of The Wicker Man. “There’s a touch of paganism in us all…”
