Christoper Lee – The actor laughing all the way to the bank | Latest Brexit news and top stories – The New European

PUBLISHED: 11:53 03 May 2020 | UPDATED: 12:19 03 May 2020

Tim Walker

Christopher Lee, portrait, backstage at the Golden Gods Awards at the O2 in London on June 15th 2014. (Photo by Mick Hutson/Redferns)

2014 Mick Hutson

TIM WALKER looks into the life and career of Christopher Lee, best known for his portrayal Dracula.

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There are certain parts and Dracula is one of them that require of the actor playing them some sense of being in on the joke with film-goers. Christopher Lee never saw anything funny about what was only ever a job to him. If anything horrified him, it was a giggling stranger coming up to his wife Gitte in the street and asking if she was the bride of Dracula.

He felt that insulted him every bit as much as her. I recall him telling me how hed reminded this funster that he hadnt played the Transylvanian blood-sucker in decades. An actor can move on and, of course, Lee did with parts in the James Bond, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings franchises but often the fans cant, not least because in his case the old Hammer horrors are still a regular staple of late night television.

Lees occasional co-stars Peter Cushing and Vincent Price took the ribbing in good part, but that wasnt for Lee. Maybe it was because theyd a come from a traditional stage background they had a more natural empathy with ordinary punters. Maybe, too, Lees wartime experiences attached to the SAS and SOE as an RAF liaison officer when hed often have to make decisions about whether people lived or died had also left their mark.

Within the acting profession, Lee was often seen as stand-offish and remote. The easy-going Roger Moore was intrigued by him when theyd appeared together in The Man With the Golden Gun. Although Moore liked him, he admitted he couldnt help but tease a man who was so deadly earnest. The crew on The Far Pavilions struggled not to guffaw when, in the middle of a scene, Rupert Everetts horse had attempted to mount Lees, and, in the ensuing melee, first the wig Lee was wearing for the part came off and then his own wig, which no one was supposed to know about.

During the making of The Three Musketeers, Lees co-star Oliver Reed had secretly spiked his orange juice with vodka. A few glasses had rendered Lee insensible. He told Reed the next day that what he had done was unprofessional and refused to talk to him for some time. My guess is Reed was just trying to get him to loosen up a bit, but, when I got to know Lee around the turn of the millennium, I soon worked out that was never going to happen.

It was probably Lees sense of utter conviction in his all-too-often preposterous films that had made him a hero of mine as I was growing up. After Id done an interview with him when hed joked I seemed to remember a lot more about his career than he did he was happy to meet for a series of lunches at Le Caprice and his club, Bucks. He was then in his eighties, but his work or, more to the point, his income stream mattered to him as much as ever.

Occasionally hed admit to disappointments if only hed got the part of the old butler in The Remains of the Day and he regretted turning down the role Leslie Nielsen ended up making his own in the Airplane films but, mostly, he had run his career with an almost infallible business acumen.

He could be almost chillingly detached about it, such as when his name began to appear before Cushings in the opening credits to their later films together. Lee said simply that hed asked his agent to fix it for him as he felt he had become the better-known star. He added that Cushings wife Helen had registered her displeasure, but his old friend never mentioned it.

In the 1970s, when Cushing loyally kept appearing in increasingly ropey films for Hammer, Lee saw there was no use staying in Britain, where the industry was starting to go into sharp decline, and decamped to Los Angeles. It turned out to be a typically canny move and a part in Airport 77 turned out to be the first in a remunerative series of blockbusters.

Lee eventually came back to Britain residing in some style near Sloane Square in London and a knighthood ensued. His fellow actors might not have been so sure he deserved it Dame Eileen Atkins felt such honours ought to be the preserve of theatre luminaries but Lee got to have the last laugh. He was still working when he died in 2015 at the age of 93 and had probably made more money than any actor of his generation. What no one could ever deny is that he was one of the great survivors.

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Christoper Lee - The actor laughing all the way to the bank | Latest Brexit news and top stories - The New European