Christopher Lee

The Spy Who Preferred Silence

Christopher Lee stood nearly six feet six inches tall and spoke six languages with aristocratic precision. Before stepping onto a film set, he spent years hunting Nazis for British intelligence. He never gave details about those secret missions, because he signed documents that obliged him to keep silent until the grave.

That military discipline carried over into his early film career. In 1957, he played the creature in The Curse of Frankenstein, and a year later he donned the cape in Dracula. He didn't need to say a single word to terrify audiences of the time.

Christopher Lee was not an ordinary actor.

His imposing physique and baritone voice quickly typecast him in the horror genre at Hammer Film Productions. But he hated being called a horror star. He felt that his training and his lineage deserved more than plastic fangs and corn-syrup blood.

He appeared in more than 200 productions over six decades. Most of them were B-movies that nobody remembers today.

The Escape to Hollywood Sunshine

Tired of playing British monsters, he decided to move to the United States in the 1970s. He wanted to prove he could do anything. In 1974, he played Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. It was an interesting move, since Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, was his distant cousin.

Despite that role, work began to dry up alarmingly. He took part in disaster movies such as Airport 77 and accepted supporting roles in forgotten TV series.

Horror cinema owes him its life.

He spent years in a professional limbo, where only his personal prestige kept him afloat. But everything changed when a young New Zealand director called him on the phone. Peter Jackson knew that Lee was the only man on Earth who had met J.R.R. Tolkien in person.

In 2001, the world rediscovered him as Saruman in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. He was nearly 80 years old and on the verge of the most commercially successful period of his career.

The Elderly Man Who Sang Heavy Metal

George Lucas also called on him to play Count Dooku in the second trilogy of Star Wars. Lee filmed his fight scenes with an agility that defied his own biology. He performed nearly all of his action sequences himself, with no stunt doubles needed for the close-up shots.

But his ambitions didn't stop at the big screen. At age 88, he released a symphonic heavy metal album titled Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross. He enjoyed the idea of being the oldest musician ever to chart on the hit lists.

He kept an iron discipline until the end. In 2011, he worked under Martin Scorsese in Hugo, and a year later he reunited with Tim Burton in Dark Shadows.

He didn't believe in retirement.

He continued lending his voice to video games and animated projects until his heart gave out. He died on June 7, 2015 at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital from respiratory problems. He left behind 280 credited titles in his official filmography.