Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee CBE CStJ was born on the 27th of May 1922 in Belgravia, London. He was an English actor with a career which spanned over 60 years.
Lee was known for being tall (6ft 4inch) with a deep and commanding voice who often portrayed villains in Genre films.
Lee was the son of Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Trollope Lee of the 60th King's Royal Rifle Corps, and his wife, Countess Estelle Marie. Lee's father fought in the Boer War and First World War, and his mother was an Edwardian beauty who was painted by artists and sculpted by Clare Sheridan. Lee's maternal great-grandfather was Jerome Carandini the Marquis of Sarzano and Lee's great-grandmother, was English-born opera singer Marie Carandini.
Lee's parents separated and divorced when Christopher was six years old. Lee’s mother moved with Christopher and his sister Xandra to Wengen, Switzerland in 1926. Christopher Lee was enrolled in Miss Fisher's Academy in Territet where he played his first role, “Rumpelstiltskin” in a school play. (he was cast as a villain from day one)
The family returned to London, where Lee attended Wagner's private school in Queen's Gate, and his mother married Harcourt George St-Croix Rose, a banker and uncle of Ian Fleming (The author of the James Bond novels).
The family moved to Fulham where they lived next door to the renowned actor Eric Maturin.
One night, the young Lee was introduced to Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the assassins who killed Grigori Rasputin (Who Lee later played in the Hammer film “Rasputin The Mad Monk” (1966).
When Lee was nine he was sent to Summer Fields School, a prep school in Oxford, preparing him to attend Eton. He continued acting in school plays along with his schoolmate Patrick Macnee. Lee applied for a scholarship to Eton, where his interview was conducted in the presence of the legendary ghost story author M.R. James. His poor maths skills meant that he missed out on being a King's Scholar and his step-father was not prepared to pay the higher rate of fees. so instead of Eton he attended Wellington College, where he studied the classics, Ancient Greek and Latin. Aside from a "tiny part" in a school play, he did not act while at Wellington College but he was a "passable" fencer and a competent cricketer but did not do well at hockey, football, rugby and boxing.
He also disliked the parades and weapons training he said he would "play dead" as soon as possible during mock battles.
Lee was frequently beaten by schoolmasters while at school, including once at Wellington where he was savagely beaten for "being beaten too often,"
though he accepted them as "acceptable" punishments for knowingly breaking the rules.
At age 17, with only one year left at Wellington College, In the summer of 1939 Lee’s step-father went bankrupt, due to spiralling debts of £25,000 (equivalent to £1’340’000 in 2024)
His mother then left his stepfather and Lee had to get a job, his sister was already employed working as a secretary for the Church of England Pensions Board.
With most employers preparing to go on summer holidays, there were no immediate opportunities for Lee so he decided to pop to the French Riviera.
On his way there he stopped briefly in Paris, where he stayed with the journalist Webb Miller, a friend of his stepfather and witnessed Eugen Weidmann's execution by guillotine (the last public execution performed in France). When he arrived in Menton on the French Riviera he stayed with the Mazirov family, living among, exiled Russian Royals. When he returned to London he worked as an office clerk for an ocean liner company, taking care of the mail and running errands.
*War Career! If you don't care! scroll down.*
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Lee enrolled in a military academy and volunteered to fight for the Finnish Army against the Soviet Union during the Winter War.
British volunteers were kept away from the actual fighting, but they were issued with winter gear and were posted on guard duty a safe distance from the border.
In a later interview, Lee stated that he knew how to shoot but not how to ski and that he probably would not be alive if he had been allowed to go to the front line.
Lee then returned to work as an office clerk for an ocean liner/shipping company and he found this work more satisfying, feeling that he was actually contributing to the wider war effort. He joined the Home Guard in London In 1940.
In the winter of 1941, Christopher’s biological father fell ill with bilateral pneumonia and passed away. Realising he had no desire to follow his father into a career in the Army, Lee decided to join up while he still had some kind of choice of which service and volunteered for the Royal Air Force.
Lee was trained at RAF Uxbridge, After he had passed his exams he was shipped off to Southern Rhodesia. While training with de Havilland Tiger Moth aeroplanes, Lee began to suffer from headaches and blurred vision. The medical officer diagnosed him with a faulty optic nerve, and he was told he would never be allowed to fly again. Lee was devastated, Christopher Lee had a very eventful rest of the war. I will attempt to condense it down,
The RAF moved him around but ended up sending him to the Southern Rhodesia capital, Salisbury, in December 1941. Thinking he should "do something constructive", he joined RAF Intelligence.
His superiors then seconded him into the British South Africa Police and he became a prison warder, He was then promoted to leading aircraftman and was moved to RAF Kasfareet near the Suez Canal Zone and resumed intelligence work, he was then moved between three Squadrons and was promoted again to a commissioned officer, He ended up in Egypt where Lee’s department provided Intelligence for air support to bomb strategic targets to support ground offences. Lee, broadly speaking, was expected to know everything as the Allied forces advanced into Libya, through Tobruk & Benghazi and on to Tripoli with Lee's squadron averaging five missions a day. As they advanced into Tunisia Lee was almost killed when the squadron's airfield was bombed. After the Axis powers surrendered in North Africa in May 1943 Lee was moved to Zuwarah in Libya in preparation for the Allied invasion of Sicily.
He was then moved to Malta after it was captured by British forces, He was then moved to Sicily. At the end of July 1943, Lee was promoted again, this time to flying officer.
After the Sicilian campaign was over, Lee contracted malaria for the sixth time in 11 months, and was flown to a hospital in Tunisia for treatment.
When he returned to his squadron they were restless, there was a lot of personnel in his squadron from the USSR and they were frustrated with a lack of news about the Eastern Front or The USSR in general the troops had no mail from home and had no alcohol. Unrest spread and threatened to turn into mutiny. Lee, who was now an expert on Russia, talked them into resuming their duties, which made Lee a hit with his commanding officer.
After the Allied invasion of Italy, Lee was based in Foggia & Termoli , where Lee was then seconded to the Army from the RAF during an officers' swap scheme, he was attached to the Gurkhas of the 8th Indian Infantry Division.
While on leave in Naples, Lee climbed Mount Vesuvius, which then erupted 72 hours later.
While based in San Angelo, Lee was nearly killed when one of the planes crashed on takeoff, shed its payload of bombs near Lee but the bombs did not explode.
Lee’s squadron moved to airfields just outside Rome, and Lee visited the city, where he met his mother's cousin, Nicolò Carandini, who had fought in the Italian resistance.
In November 1944, Lee was promoted to flight lieutenant and left the No.260 squadron to take up a posting at Air Force HQ.
Lee took part in the forward planning in preparation for the Arial assault on Hitlers Berghof home in the Bavarian Alps.
After the war ended, The final stint of his service, Lee, who spoke fluent French, Italian and German, among other languages, was seconded to the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Here, he was tasked with helping to track down Nazi war criminals.
On his time with the organisation, Lee said:
"We were given dossiers of what they'd done and told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could and hand them over to the appropriate authority ...". He completed his service with the RAF in 1946 with the rank of flight lieutenant.
Lee mentioned that during the war he was attached to special forces, but declined to give details about his experiences. The only incite we got was while he was filming The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, Lee gave director Peter Jackson an on-set tutorial on the actual sound a human makes when you lodge a knife in the person's unsuspecting back.
Ah, classic Lee.
END OF WAR STUFF!
Returning to London in 1946, Lee was offered a possession to teach at a University via a scheme The Armed Forces were doing sending veterans with an education in the Classics to teach at universities, but Lee felt his Latin was too rusty and didn't care for the strict curfews and rules.
During lunch with his cousin Nicolò Carandini who was the Italian Ambassador to Britain at the time, Lee was detailing his war wounds when Carandini said,
"Why don't you become an actor, Christopher?"
Lee liked the idea and as soon as he calmed his mother down regarding the decision he did what Lee did best… Schmooze!
Christopher’s Ambassador cousin Nicolò had a friend Filippo Del Giudice, a lawyer-turned-film producer who was the head of ‘Two Cities Films’ which was a division of the ‘Rank Organisation’. Lee recalled that Giudice "looked me up and down... [and] concluded that I was just what the industry had been looking for."
Then he was sent to see film producer Josef Somlo for a contract!
Easy when you know how !!
On first meeting Somlo told Lee
“He was too tall to be an actor”.
In an interview later in life Lee said,
“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..."
Rank signed Lee to a seven-year contract but he struggled to be cast in a production… perhaps because he was too tall?”
He finally made his film début in Gothic romance “Corridor of Mirrors” (1947)
directed by Terence Young.
The director got around Lee’s height issue by placing him at a table in a nightclub where he delivered a single line.
In this early period, he also had an uncredited appearance in Laurence Olivier's film version of “Hamlet” (1948), as a spear carrier.
His later co-star and close friend Peter Cushing played Osric in the same film.
A few years later, he appeared in “Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N.” (1951) as a Spanish captain. Lee landed that role when the director asked him if he could speak Spanish and fence,and he could.
Lee appeared as an uncredited chariot driver in the American epic “Quo Vadis” (1951).
His breakthrough role came in 1952, when Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. began making films at the British National Studios. He was cast in various roles in 16 films he even appeared with Buster Keaton and this run of parts turned into Lee’s Film Acting school.
The same year, he appeared in John Huston's Oscar-nominated “Moulin Rouge” (1952). Again a film that also featured Peter Cushing.
Over the next six years he appeared in 20 films, playing mostly stock action characters with a few lines.
Lee's first film for Hammer Productions was “The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957), in which he played Frankenstein's monster, with Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein.
It was the first film to co-star Lee and Cushing, who ultimately appeared together in over twenty films throughout their careers and became close friends.
When Lee arrived at the casting call for the role of Frankenstein’s monster,
they looked him up and down an asked him if he wanted the part, He said yes and that was that.
In true Christopher Lee anecdote style he already knew Boris Karloff personally having appeared with him in, "At Night, All Cats are Grey" an episode of the British television series Colonel March of Scotland Yard in 1955. Lee later co-starred with Boris Karloff in the film
“Corridors of Blood” (1958) and Karloff and Lee were later neighbours and friends in London for a time in the mid-1960s. Because obviously they were!
Lee's appearance as Frankenstein's monster led to him getting the roll as the vampire Count Dracula in the Hammer film “Dracula” (1958) AKA “Horror of Dracula” in the US.
Lee’s depiction of the nocturnal Transylvanian count became the definitive representation of Dracula in popular culture for generations to come.
Hammers “Dracula” (1958) often ranks among the best British films of all time.
The film magazine Empire ranked Lee's portrayal as Dracula the 7th Greatest Horror Movie Character of All Time.
Lee introduced a brooding sexuality to the character of Dracula, a sensuality that was daring for the late 1950’s that hinted that women might quite like having their neck bitten by a suave Eastern European count.
The year after playing Dracula he starred as Kharis The Mummy in the Hammer Horror film “The Mummy” (1959).
Christopher Lee was weary of his success as Dracula and feared beeing type cast resisting reprising the role for seven years until Hammer's “Dracula: Prince of Darkness” (1965)
Although Lee's role has no lines of dialoge, he merely hisses his way through the film.
Lee stated he refused to speak the poor dialogue he was given, but the screenwriter Jimmy Sangster claims that the script did not contain any lines for the character.
Lee went on record to state that he felt virtually "blackmailed" by Hammer into starring in the subsequent Dracula films Hammer being unable unwilling to pay him his going rate, they would resort to reminding him of how many people he would put out of work if he did not take part. “Emotional blackmail. That's the only reason I did them.” claimed Lee
His resistance to playing the Count seems weird when he was happy to put in multiple turns in “yellow-face” playing Fu Manchu for other production company and if Lee’s involvement in a Vampire film at Hammer was make or break his agent should have leaned on Hammer harder.
Regardless of Lee’s story the fact is he appeared in 21 films made by Hammer Productions, He played Count Dracula 7 times for Hammer, so make of that what you will.
His success in his early roles for Hammer directly lead to a slew of roles in Horror films. He worked regularly with Hammer between 1958 - 1976 making 21 films but in the same time period Lee was in 36 Horror films made by other studios and production companies wanting him based on his fame and notoriety due to his work with Hammer.
The other major film roles and performances that cemented Christopher Lee as the Icon that he became were,
"The Wicker Man" (1973), "The Man with the Golden Gun" (1974), "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" (1990), "The Lord of the Rings: Trilogy" (2001-2003) &
"Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)"
Christopher Lee also popped up in numerous episodes of television over the years including and episode of The Avengers in 1967 and Space: 1999 in 1975.
He was also a singer and had a bass operatic voice and sang on many projects, He also recorded 16 audio books and read the M.R. James ghost stories for the BBC.
Lee was featured on a commemorative UK postage stamp in his role as Count Dracula issued by the Royal Mail to mark 50 years since the release of “Dracula” (1958),
He was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2001,
Christopher Lee was knighted for services to drama and charity in 2009,
In 2011, on the 164th anniversary of the birth of Bram Stoker, Lee was honoured with a tribute by University College Dublin, and described his honorary life membership of the UCD Law Society as "in some ways as special as the Oscars." He was awarded the Bram Stoker Gold Medal by the Trinity College Philosophical Society, of which Stoker had been president, and a copy of Collected Ghost Stories of MR James by Trinity College's School of English.
He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2011, and the BFI Fellowship in 2013.
Christopher Lee passed away at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on the 7th of June 2015 after being admitted for respiratory problems and heart failure, shortly after celebrating his 93rd birthday.
His wife delayed the public announcement until 11 June, informing his family of the death before releasing the news to the press.
Following Lee's death, fans, friends, actors, directors and others involved in the film industry publicly gave their personal tributes and he was honoured by the academy at the 88th Academy Awards on 28 February 2016 in the annual in Memoriam section.
Thank You Christopher!
