Last week, cinema lost a figure who could legitimately lay claim to the title of ‘legend’. Sir Christopher Lee was one of my favourite actors and I wasn’t originally going to blog about his passing. However, I changed my mind because yesterday I watched the BBC 4 edition of Timeshift about Sherlock Holmes, and it was a genuine pleasure to hear him talk about the late and great Peter Cushing. Obviously Cushing played the eponymous detective in Hammer’s The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959, while Lee played Henry Baskerville, the intended victim of the family curse. Lee himself played Sherlock in Valley of Fear (1962) and the TV movies Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1991) and Incident at Victoria Falls (1992). He also played Mycroft Holmes in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970).
The more I thought about him, the more I wanted to pay tribute to the owner of one of cinema’s finest voices, not only as a diehard devotee of classic horror, but as a fan.
I think I first encountered Lee through endless repeats of James Bond films on TV, when he played Scaramanga in The Man With The Golden Gun (1974). Later I would watch him as the suave Duc de Richlieu in The Devil Rides Out (1968), and naturally as Dracula (beginning with Dracula in 1958). As much as I loved Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the role, Christopher Lee will always be my Dracula. True, I’ve seen him in some terrible films (The City of The Dead of 1960 and To The Devil A Daughter of 1976 spring to mind) but even when the film around him was awful, I always enjoyed his performances.
I was pleased when a new set of fans discovered him through Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and I think it’s a testament to his screen presence that his career spanned eight decades. He comes across as likeable and charismatic through his autobiography, Tall, Dark and Gruesome, and he always seemed modest and approachable in interviews – a far cry from the monster or villain that he often portrayed on screen. It’s funny to think that it was his height (6′ 5″) forced him to take such roles, yet it was precisely these roles that helped him to become so iconic. Who could forget him as Doctor Catheter in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), where he so gloriously sent himself up?
I often lament that we’ll never have another Vincent Price or Boris Karloff, both actors so firmly entrenched in the horror genre, but it is a testament to Lee’s versatility that he managed to break away from horror – even if he never truly shook off the ‘villain’ tag. Despite that, he appeared in some films that genuinely challenged the ‘norms’ of horror – he played Prof. Karl Meister in The Gorgon (1964), which saw Hammer break away from the cycle of monsters associated with Universal and allowed them to investigate the female gaze, and The Wicker Man (1973) has gone on to become a classic.
So it is sad that he’s gone, but I like to think he left cinema a richer place.
RIP Sir Christopher Lee, 1922 – 2015.
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