Playing villains, he made a giant of himself
The Wire
June 15, 2015
When the first installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy was released in 2001, it introduced a whole new generation to the ageless charms of Christopher Lee. Far removed from the often campy Dracula that an earlier set of filmgoers loved him for, he played the ‘white wizard’ Saruman with an electrifying dignity, brushing the character with a majestic flavour of evil. It’s hard to imagine many other actors being able to do that without outright vilification.
Sir Christopher Lee passed away on June 7 in a hospital in London due to respiratory problems and heart failure. He is survived by his wife Birgit Krøncke and their daughter, Christina. He was 93 - fully 69 of which he had spent as an actor, starting with small roles in action films to finally playing the bloodsucking Count in the cultic Hammer Horror films, Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, memorably, Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, Count Dooku in Star Wars Episode II and III, and, of course, Saruman in the movies based on JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth epic.
Lee was also a popular fixture in horror films in the 1950s to the 1970s, often appearing as characters whose places in the literary canon were as revolutionary beings, great influencers of the zeitgeist. In fact, the list all of his roles will be powered with what appear to be minor ones - in keeping with how Hollywood for long treated science-fiction and fantasy films - with a few major forays here and there that received mainstream acclaim.
From 1950 to 1977, Lee appeared in a host of monster films, playing Dracula eight times for Hammer (1958-1973) and in the regrettable Fu Manchu productions. Although all of the Hammer films fared well commercially, Lee went on record to state that he was emotionally blackmailed into starring in them - principally because the producers ran out of money and would ask Lee to think of all the people he’d put out of work if he backed out.
His Dracula was smooth – in one film, he only hissed – but he had come to hate the lack of challenge. In this time it was as if the pithy roles Lee was being offered insulated him from the acclaim he was starting to receive from the rest of the world. In fact, a film he did in 1970 - The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes - pushed him to refuse being typecast in the future as an ‘evil heavy’, as Christopher “The Count” Lee, and eventually to leave England altogether for America in 1977.
Thus it was only in the 1970s and the 1980s that he started playing characters that would define his legacy the way he wanted. In 1973, Lee starred as the defiant Lord Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s cult classic The Wicker Man, playing a deranged nobleman who has convinced those on his estate of Summerisle that a willing human needs to be sacrificed for every season the local harvest fails. In 1974, he got to play the memorable villain Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, where he very nearly stole the show from Roger Moore’s James Bond.
