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Christopher Lee
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Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
"Peter Cushing and I have made so many horror films," Lee once said, "that people think we live in a cave together." He was kidding, of course, but there's no doubt that this towering, sharpfeatured actor has enjoyed his most memorable screen roles opposite the suave, aristocratic Cushing in such stylish Hammer Films chillers as Curse of Frankenstein (1957, as the monster), Horror of Dracula (1958, as the vampiric Count, the first of many appearances in that role), The Mummy (1959, in the title role), The Gorgon (1964), Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974), not to mention such other spine-tinglers as The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959, as Sir Henry Baskerville), Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965), The Skull (1965), The House That Dripped Blood, Scream and Scream Again (both 1970), The Creeping Flesh (1972), and House of the Long Shadows (1982, teamed with fellow horror veterans Vincent Price and John Carradine).
Lee has, however, done some films on his own-dozens of them, to be exact. His early movies include Hamlet (1948), Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951), The Crimson Pirate, Moulin Rouge (both 1952), and Storm Over the Nile (1956). He played Dracula sans Cushing in many films, among them Dracula-Prince of Darkness (1965), Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969), The Scars of Dracula the German-made Count Dracula (both 1970), and the 1976 spoof Dracula and Son He's essayed the classic "yellow peril," Fu Manchu, in five films-EB> (1965), EB> (1966), EB> (1967), EB> (1968), and EB> (1969). And he's the only man to play both Sherlock Holmes (in the 1964 German-made Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace and a British-made miniseries that yielded the 1991 feature films Incident at Victoria Falls and Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady and brother Mycroft (in 1970's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes).
Among the other titles that stand out on Lee's lengthy roster are Taste of Fear (1961), Rasputin-The Mad Monk (1965, the title role), The Devil's Bride (1967), Julius Caesar (1970), Hannie Caulder (1972), The Wicker Man (1973), The Three Musketeers (1974 and sequels in 1975 and 1989, as Rochefort), The Man With the Golden Gun (also 1974), Airport '77 (1977), Return From Witch Mountain and The Silent Flute (both 1978). He has also demonstrated a flair for comedy, playing a Nazi officer in 1941 (1979), a cycle-riding guru in Serial (1980), and a genetic scientist in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). Like John Carradine, to whose career Lee's own bears a striking similarity, he is an actor of the bravura school who's not averse to self-parody. (In 1983's spoofy The Return of Captain Invincible he even sang. And he turned up as a host one week on TV's "Saturday Night Live.") Since the 1980s Lee has also been active in made-for-TV productions. |  |
