The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee
Jon Spira (Elstree 1976) takes on a big subject here – and does remarkable justice to the long life, multiple on-screen and apparent career deaths (and, very movingly, his actual demise) and evolving legend of Sir Christopher Lee (1922-2015). In an audacious conceit, the film is narrated by Lee himself – with his words voiced by Peter Serafinowicz, ascribed to a Gerry Anderson-type puppet avatar – with striking animated biographical inserts, including a stretch of Tolkienery crafted by Dave McKean.
It’s probably mandatory to include John Landis and Joe Dante among the talking heads – they both worked with Lee (The Stupids, Gremlins 2) and are scholars enough to know a lot about his career – and we get valuable input from Peter Jackson (instrumental in Lee’s late-career burst of high profile franchise activity) and Paul Maslansky (more on Castle of the Living Dead than Police Academy Mission to Moscow) plus personal takes from Lee’s actress niece Harriet Walter and musical collaborator son-in-law Juan Rodriguez. A spine of the film is commentary from Lee’s official biographer Jonathan Rigby, who is not above gently chiding his subject or pointing out why Lee’s dissatisfaction with his image led him into odd career decisions and the cultivation of an air of grumpiness which possibly alienated his fans and potential fans. Typical is a telling clip of a laudatory interview given outside Buckingham Palace on the occasion of his knighthood in 2009 – at a highpoint of his life, he turns peppery when an interviewer calls him ‘king of horror’ and insists he hasn’t made a horror film for thirty-four years (though he was in Tale of the Mummy in 1998 – just to name one of several dozen possibles).
The film covers Lee’s family background, school days, slightly shadowy war and beginnings in the Rank charm school, 1950s bit roles, then his ‘graveyard period’ as a horror icon for Hammer and others, a brief tax exile in Switzerland and a flurry of European odd credits, and pivot in the 1970s away from cheapish British horror films (though that description even fits his favourite credit, The Wicker Man) to smaller roles (or shorter parts, as Rigby says) in bigger, more international films which, paradoxically, hastened his slippage into a wilderness years period before filmmakers who grew up on his work (Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Jackson) came calling. Skipped over is his turn in Richard Lester’s Musketeers films, which is pretty much on a level with his showing in two out of three of the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars prequel trilogies. Rigby cannily notes that Lee’s breakouts were often double-edged … yes, he was a Bond villain, but in one of the naffer Bond films … it may have been much more expensive nonsense, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the world who revisits Lee’s work in Airport ’77 more often than, say, The Satanic Rites of Dracula … and he wasn’t in Tim Burton’s or Martin Scorsese’s want-to-work-with lists because of A Tale of Two Cities. George Lucas even cast him as a cape-wearing Count whose name begins with a D in Star Wars – certainly not wanting to evoke his role as the founder of Pakistan in Jinnah (a career highlight compromised by the odd decision to cast a white British actor in the role – and in a film made because a certain government looked at Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and thought they ought to have one of those too).
This constant sense of not living up to his own expectations makes Lee a human, flawed, rather sweet character (as his family attest). He knew the shadow he cast, but consistently underestimated how much affection was felt for him. Spira makes him unabashedly the hero of his own story, more in the mode of the role he wanted but never played (why Terry Gilliam didn’t call him up when he lost his first Don Quixote is a mystery I’ll never fathom) than the one for which he was lastingly famous. It’s sparing in its use of clips, though we get flashes of Lee’s charisma and magnetic personality within the range his height and breeding defined for him. He was, for obvious reasons, not often cast as ordinary people – but he was in the frame for Rasputin.
I’ve recently rewatched The Scars of Dracula – to my mind, Hammer’s worst film – again, but I have a BluRay of Jinnah – which I’ve never seen – still in its shrinkwrap. Christopher Lee would give me a hard stare for that.
Jinnah is actually a far interesting and stranger film, more in common with the Story of Mankind than Gandhi. Most of it is worthy but dull, but the frame story is exceedingly weird and almost saves the film.
Posted by George White | August 25, 2024, 5:35 pmA lovely piece about the doyen of horror by the doyen of horror writing
Posted by Gimmicky | August 25, 2024, 7:46 pmLee’s 80s LA period is odd. He does actually some really good work in often very trashy but far more expensive than Hammer projects. The Harold Robbins miniseries the Pirate, where he plays the adopted Arab father of biologically Jewish Arab playboy/pseudo-sheik Franco Nero, he (alongside Eli Wallach as his former friend-turned-Israeli warlord/Nero’s real dad) really brings gravitas to a strange mix of post-Entebbe terrorist faux-Eurothriller (Olivia Hussey as Nero’s PLO serafuku-clad schoolgirl terrorist daughter) and Harold Robbins transatlantic tripe. Goliath Awaits (a project intended for HTV in association with Columbia, but moved to the US due to IBA interference, though keeping its British locations albeit faked in Long Beach and Burbank), he’s genuinely good as the well-meaning leader of an undersea colony of wartime maritime disaster survivors, who have become this dystopia driven by Euthanasia. But a lot of it is forgettable comedies. He claims in Jonathan Rigby’s book that he was offered regular TV jobs in Dallas, Dynasty, The Colby, and Remington Steele (I presume playing the character Efrem Zimbalist did, of Remington’s probable father), and the thing is, I wish he had. He says that he didn’t want to be ‘seen on the skids’ and surrounded by ’15 guest stars’, if he’d done those parts. However, the thing is, those series would have offered him better opportunities. Dynasty and Falcon Crest had this beeline for having grotesque/sinister European characters. I presume that he was on the list for John Van Dreelan’s Nazi winemaker in Falcon Crest. As for Dynasty/The Colbys, Ricardo Montalban’s Spanish playboy Zach Powers (yes, they explained the name was a pseudonym) , King Galen of Moldavia (played by a miscast Joel Fabiani who looked more like Andy Williams than a stately European monarch, in a role that probably would have suited his Department S costar Peter Wyngarde far more) and Sir Roger Langdon (the Colbys character, ironically played by David Hedison, while many of the American characters around him were Brits doing accents) all seem likely candidates. I actually wished he’d done more of those guest ‘eccentric toff’ type roles that say Patrick Macnee or Richard Johnson or Bernard Fox were doing (a friend coined the term ‘Lord Bumberchute’ for such stereotypes). I know that Andrea Romano had tried to get him for Batman – the Animated Series as Ra’s Al Ghul, but instead got David Warner.
But I am really surprised (and suspicious) he never did a Magnum or a Murder, She Wrote, two series that seemed to go through every older Brit/Commonwealth sort who had a SAG card including the two aforementioned but also everyone from Richard Todd to Bruce Forsyth. With Magnum, I bet he was on the casting list for any number of eps where ‘old mate of Higgins comes to town and gets in trouble’.
With MSW, I can think of at least a dozen roles he could have fitted into swimmingly. From James Coco’s horror amusement park mogul in We’re Off to Kill the Wizard to the disproving Scotland Yard men played variously by Barrie Ingham, Anthony Newley, Ron Moody, David Hemmings and Nick Tate, or the various cultured dastards played by Hurd Hatfield or Stewart Granger or Bernard Fox or Jeremy Kemp.
There’s an ep early on called Paint Me A Murder, where the guest cast is extraordinary for a single TV ep – Ron Moody, Cesar Romero, Stewart Granger plus Judy Geeson, Robert Goulet, Capucine and Cristina Raines. But I can see him in either Granger (knighted English art collector/MURDERER), Romero (legendary Spanish artist/VICTIM) or even Moody’s part (slightly duffery Inspector from Scotland Yard/ALLY). But sadly, no.
Posted by George White | August 25, 2024, 8:14 pmExcellent post. Well-researched and spot-on in your observations. 👍
Posted by Bill Bradshaw | August 26, 2024, 11:08 am