About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Christopher Lee

Encyclopedia : C : CH : CHR : Christopher Lee

This article is about the English actor. For other uses, see Christopher Lee (disambiguation).
Christopher Lee portrays Count Dooku in '
Enlarge
Christopher Lee portrays Count Dooku in 

Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE (born May 27, 1922 in Belgravia, London) is a  legendary and prolific English actor known for his versatility, his professional longevity, and his distinctive basso delivery.  


Lee is best known for his portrayals of villains; he became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a string of Hammer Horror films.  Other notable roles include Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man and Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. Lee is now over eighty years old, and still appearing in films such as The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy,  ' and ', and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
[Extensive biography at Tiscali UK]





Contents





Early life

Lee was born in London in 1922, the son of Geoffrey Trollope Lee, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the 60th King's Royal Rifle Corps, and the Marchesina Estelle Marie Carandini di Sarzano, whose grandfather had been an Italian political refugee who had sought refuge in Australia. Lee's mother was a famous Edwardian beauty who was painted by Sir John Lavery, as well as Oswald Birley, Olive Snell and sculpted by Clare Sheridan, a cousin of Winston Churchill.
His parents separated when he was very young and his mother took Christopher and his sister Xandra to Switzerland, where Christopher was enrolled in Miss Fisher's Academy in Wengen and he played his first villainous role as Rumpelstiltskin. The family returned to London where Christopher attended Wagner's private school. His mother then married Harcourt 'Ingle' Rose, a banker and uncle of the James Bond author Ian Fleming. Lee then attended Wellington College, where he won scholarships in classics. He volunteered to fight for the Finnish forces during the Winter War against the Soviet Union in 1939 - though, as Lee admits in his autobiography, he and his fellow British volunteers were in Finland for a fortnight and kept well away from the Russian forces the whole time.  He went on to serve in the Royal Air Force and intelligence during World War II. He trained in South Africa as a pilot but was forced to drop out due to eye problems. He eventually ended up in North Africa as Cipher Officer for No. 260 Squadron RAF and was with them through Sicily and Italy. Additionally, he has mentioned serving in Special Operations Executive in interviews, and claims to know the sound a man makes when you stab him in the back and puncture his lung.  Lee retired from the RAF after the end of the War in the rank of Flight Lieutenant.



Career as an actor




Christopher Lee in his signature role, as Dracula (1958)

Christopher Lee in his signature role, as Dracula (1958)





In 1946, Lee gained a seven-year contract with Rank Organisation after discussing his interest in acting with his mother's second cousin Nicolò Carandini, the Italian Ambassador. Carandini related to Lee that performance was in his blood as his great grandmother Marie Carandini had been a successful opera singer in Australia, a fact of which Lee was unaware. He made his film debut in Terence Young's Gothic romance, Corridor of Mirrors, in 1948. Throughout the  next decade, Lee made nearly thirty films, playing mostly stock action characters. His first film for Hammer, made in 1956 with his close friend Peter Cushing, was The Curse of Frankenstein, in which he played "The Creature". That led to his first appearance as the infamous Transylvanian count in the 1958 film Dracula (known as Horror of Dracula in the U.S.) Lee would become indelibly associated with the role and with the horror genre, making another six films as Dracula, five of them for Hammer, as well as many other horror films.  Lee also appeared in the infamously bad series of Fu Manchu films, starring as the eponymous villain in heavy "oriental" make-up.


Lee has played roles in over 220 films since 1948. He has had many notable television roles, including that of Flay in the BBC television miniseries Gormenghast that was based on Mervyn Peake's novels and  Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński in the 2005 CBS film, John Paul the Second.


Christopher Lee had recently played the role of DiZ in the Square Enix/Disney video game Kingdom Hearts II. Much publicity and excitement was given over this role, as DiZ is a major character in the game.



Honors

In 2001, Christopher Lee was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II.[British Honours, 16 June, 2001], BBC website.


Lee was named 2005's 'most marketable star in the world' in a USA Today newspaper poll, after three of the films he appeared in grossed $640m.[In brief: Christopher Lee 'most bankable' star.] The Guardian, URL accessed 26 April, 2006



Trivia




Lee as Francisco Scaramanga facing off against James Bond (played by Roger Moore) in The Man with the Golden Gun

Enlarge

Lee as Francisco Scaramanga facing off against James Bond (played by Roger Moore) in The Man with the Golden Gun













Christopher Lee, 'Lord of Misrule'.










|- style="text-align: center;"






Books by Christopher Lee



Selected films



Notes and references






External links




























































 





From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.














Search Titles









0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?










E-mail this article to:



Personal Message: