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User:Tiller54/Christopher Lee in the 1940s

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Sir Christopher Lee
CBE CStJ
Lee at the Berlin International Film Festival, February 2013
Born
Christopher Frank Carandini Lee

(1922-05-27) 27 May 1922 (age 101)
Belgravia, London, England, United Kingdom
Alma materWellington College
Occupation(s)Actor, singer, author
Years active1946–present
SpouseBirgit Krøncke (1961–present)
Children1
Military career
Allegiance Finland
 United Kingdom
Service/branchFinnish Army (December 1939)
British Home Guard (1940)
 Royal Air Force (1941–1946)
Years of service1939–1946
RankFlight Lieutenant
Battles/warsWinter War
World War II (North African Campaign, Allied invasion of Italy, Battle of Monte Cassino)
Websitechristopherleeweb.com

Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ, (born 27 May 1922) is an English actor, singer and author. Lee initially portrayed villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a string of popular Hammer Horror films. His other notable roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Saruman in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and The Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014), and Count Dooku in the final two films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005).

He was knighted for services to drama and charity in 2009, received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2011 and received the BFI Fellowship in 2013.[1][2][3] Lee considers his best performance to be that of Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the biopic Jinnah (1998), and his best film to be the British horror film The Wicker Man (1973).[4]

Always noted as an actor for his deep, strong voice, he has, more recently, also been known for using his singing ability, recording various opera and musical pieces between 1986 and 1998 and the symphonic metal album Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross in 2010 after having worked with several metal bands since 2005. The heavy metal follow-up titled Charlemagne: The Omens of Death was released on 27 May 2013.[5][6] He was honoured with the "Spirit of Metal" award in the 2010 Metal Hammer Golden God awards ceremony.

Christopher Lee is one of the highest grossing actors of all time, having grossed $8,321,486,066 worldwide.

1940s edit

Returning to London in 1946, Lee was offered his old job back at Beecham's, with a significant raise, but he turned them down as "I couldn't think myself back into the office frame of mind." The Armed Forces were 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.[7] Having lunch with his cousin Nicolò Carandini, now the Italian Ambassador to Britain, Lee was detailing his war wounds when Carandini said: "why don't you become an actor, Christopher?"[8] Lee liked the idea and after assuaging his mother's protests by pointing to the successful Carandini performers in Australia, which included his great-grandmother Marie Carandini, who had been a successful opera singer, he met Nicolò's friend Filippo Del Giudice, a lawyer-turned-film producer. The head of Two Cities Films, part of the Rank Organisation, Giudice, "looked me up and down... [and] concluded that I was just what the industry had been looking for." He was sent to see Josef Somlo for a contract, who immediately announced that he was "much too tall to be an actor". Somlo sent him to see Rank's David Henley and Olive Dodds, who signed him on a seven-year contract.[9] His "apprenticeship" lasted ten years as he mostly played supporting and background characters. Throughout the next decade, he made nearly 30 films, playing mostly stock action characters.

I was around a long time – nearly ten years. Initially, I was told I was too tall to be an actor. 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..." At the beginning I didn't know anything about the technique of working in front of a camera, but during those 10 years, I did the one thing that's so vitally important today – I watched, I listened and I learned. So when the time came I was ready... Oddly enough, to play a character who said nothing [The Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein].[4]

Like many of his fellow students at Rank's "Charm School", Lee had difficulty finding work.[10] He finally made his film début in 1948, in Terence Young's Gothic romance Corridor of Mirrors.[11] The director got around Lee's height by placing him at a table in a nightclub alongside Lois Maxwell, Mavis Villiers, Hugh Latimer and John Penrose. Lee had a single line, "a satirical shaft meant to qualify the lead's bravura."[10] The same year, he appeared in Young's second film, the musical comedy One Night with You. He had a small role as another character's assistant, and spoke only a single word of dialogue.[12] His next role was also a one-word part, making an uncredited appearance in Laurence Olivier's film version of Hamlet, as a spear carrier. His role had no spoken lines, but he was "determined to get a word in somehow - even anonymously" and shouted the word "lights!" while standing in the dark.[12] This marked his first film with frequent co-star and close friend Peter Cushing, who played Osric, though the two did not meet yet.

Lee found himself used mostly as a stand-in for more famous actors while actresses were being screen tested for roles alongside them. Standing in for Stewart Granger led to him being cast in a minor role alongside Granger in Basil Dearden's historical drama Saraband for Dead Lovers, as Duke Anthony von Wolfenbuttel. However, his scene was deleted from the final film.[13] At the Charm School, he learnt method acting and took elocution lessons and learnt about on-screen fencing.[13] He had a "miniscule" role as a nightclub MC in Terence Fisher's drama A Song for Tomorrow and was "lent out" by Rank to make the mystery film Penny and the Pownall Case. It was a "free-for-all" for parts, and he won his first significant role, as Jonathan Blair. He also had his first on-screen death scene, which he modelled on his experiences in the war. Director Slim Hand requested he redo the scene, saying: "There's toppling and toppling. Oblige us with another sort of topple, do."[14]

A fan of opera and classical music, Lee was sent, either as a joke or for genuine reasons, he was unsure which, for singing lessons. First with the Italian singer Ezio Pinza,[15] then auditioning with the singer Elena Gerhardt and finally for lessons with an Australian madame, who tried to train him into a tenor. Though his vibrato was good, he could not quite turn into a tenor. His voice was judged "unusual and distinctive, but inconvenient."[16] Hoping for a more positive second opinion, he went to the Royal College of Music, where he was told: "You should have been a singer, but we can't take you at your age."[16] Not disheartened, and still at the stage in his career where he was "too tall and too foreign looking to be cast, even sitting down with my back to the camera, in any British film", he auditioned for the role of Lord Windermere in Noël Coward's musical After the Ball, an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere's Fan. After performing a song that sounded "more like a call to arms than a seductive love offering", Coward advised that he might have made a tenor but had not won the part.[17]

In the musical comedy Trottie True, Lee had a small role, but his performance as a policeman was cut from My Brother's Keeper, supposedly because the camera was tilted so high to include his helmet that the gantry was visible.[18] He considers his first real role to be in the film Scott of the Antarctic, which depicted Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition. He played the Australian Bernard Day, who ran the motor sledges. He missed the filming in Norway, where he was doubled, but had "immense satisfaction" working for Ealing Studios.[19]

As part of their education, Rank students were sent to the seaside town of Worthing for several weeks at a time, to perform in the town's Connaught Theatre. Lee did twenty-seven plays in Worthing, staying with the actor M. E. Clifton James.[20] He enjoyed the experience but knew he wasn't right for it, having a tendency for "over-stimulation". On his début in The Constant Nymph, as Roberto the butler, he overacted so much that he "all but ruined the play", even mirroring other characters' emotions. However, the producer managed to see the funny side and critics felt he brought "welcome light relief" to the comedy.[21] Other memorable performances included drowning out the rest of the cast as an unnamed singer in As You Like It; being distracted in his role as a junior counsellor in Libel because his co-star Alan Robinson passed him notes full of rude jokes about the audience; failing to reach the high notes during a performance of La donna è mobile in See Naples and Die, instead delivering a "sequence of desperate strangled shrieks" that made the audience cry with laughter; and accidentally spilling wine and serving pudding in place of fish as a butler in By Candlelight.[22]

With practice, he felt that he "disgraced myself less frequently", appearing as The Devil in five-hour long performances of the whole of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, also starring in Shaw's Major Barbara and as Iago in Othello.[23] His "great moment" came in Eynon Evans' Wishing Well, playing the seemingly wheelchair-bound lead. On the second night, he got into an off-stage argument with Alan Robinson, who had put on an inappropriately large fake beard. Robinson then got Lee's wheelchair stuck in the doorway onto the stage and, after much effort, tore off a part of the set as he managed to get him on. On the third night, Lee was wheeled on so quickly that he had to leap out of the wheelchair, which fell off the edge of the stage.[24]

References edit

  1. ^ "Hammer Horror star Lee knighted". BBC. Retrieved 7 May 2012
  2. ^ "Christopher Lee to receive Bafta Fellowship". BBC. Retrieved 7 May 2012
  3. ^ "Depp surprises Sir Christopher Lee with film award". BBC. Retrieved 14 December 2013
  4. ^ a b "The Total Film Interview – Christopher Lee". Total Film. 1 May 2005. Archived from the original on 12 June 2007. Retrieved 25 August 2013.
  5. ^ Sir Christopher Lee releases second heavy metal album
  6. ^ Farrell, John (28 May 2012). "Christopher Lee Celebrates 90th Birthday By Recording Heavy Metal". Forbes. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
  7. ^ Lee 2003, p. 109.
  8. ^ Lee 2003, p. 110.
  9. ^ Lee 2003, p. 111.
  10. ^ a b Lee 2003, p. 112.
  11. ^ "Christopher Lee- Biography". Yahoo.com. Retrieved 7 May 2012
  12. ^ a b Lee 2003, p. 113.
  13. ^ a b Lee 2003, p. 114.
  14. ^ Lee 2003, p. 115-116.
  15. ^ Lee 2003, p. 330.
  16. ^ a b Lee 2003, p. 116.
  17. ^ Lee 2003, p. 118-119.
  18. ^ Lee 2003, p. 119-120.
  19. ^ Lee 2003, p. 121.
  20. ^ Lee 2003, p. 125-126.
  21. ^ Lee 2003, p. 126.
  22. ^ Lee 2003, p. 126-127.
  23. ^ Lee 2003, p. 127.
  24. ^ Lee 2003, p. 127-129.

Bibliography edit

  • Christopher Lee's Treasury of Terror, edited by Russ Jones, illustrated by Mort Drucker & others, Pyramid Books, 1966
  • Christopher Lee's New Chamber of Horrors, Souvenir Press, 1974
  • Christopher Lee's Archives of Terror, Warner Books, Volume I, 1975; Volume 2, 1976
  • Tall, Dark and Gruesome (autobiography), W.H. Allen, 1977 and 1999
  • The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films, by Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, Titan Books, 1997 and 2007 – Foreword by Christopher Lee
  • Christopher Lee: The Authorised Screen History by Jonathan Rigby, Reynolds & Hearn, 2001 and 2003
  • The Lord of the Rings: Weapons and Warfare by Chris Smith, HarperCollins, 2003 – Foreword by Christopher Lee
  • Lee, Christopher (2003) [1977]. Lord of Misrule: The Autobiography of Christopher Lee. London: Orion Publishing Group. ISBN 0-75285-770-3.
  • Dans les griffes de la Hammer by Nicolas Stanzick, Le Bord de l'eau Editions, Paris, 2010.
  • Sir Christopher Lee by Laurent Aknin, Nouveau Monde Éditions, Paris, 2011.
  • Monsters in the Movies: 100 Years of Cinematic Nightmares, by John Landis, DK Publishing, 2011 – Interview with Christopher Lee
  • Le Seigneur du désordre (autobiography, a French version of Lord of Misrule), Christopher Lee, Camion Blanc (Coll. "Camion Noir"), 2013.

External links edit

 
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