Slashdot Mirror
Actor Christopher Lee Has Died at 93
Christopher Lee (or Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee) has played his last on-screen villain. The actor and singer died Sunday at the age of 93, reports The Guardian, after a career in which he played very few positive role models, but an astounding number of antagonists in fantasy, Sci-Fi, and horror films; as a young man, Lee played a career-launching Dracula, as well as a James Bond villain, the perfectly unsettling Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, and dozens of other characters (not all of them evil). Into his 80s, still in demand for the creepiness he was so good at projecting, Lee portrayed the fallen-from-grace wizard Saruman in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaptations, and the evil Count Dooku in George Lucas's Star Wars follow-ons. He was also perhaps the only Knight Bachelor to have released an album of symphonic metal. Even at the time of his death, Lee was involved in film projects, so his legacy will always be immense but incomplete.
I met him when I was living in Germany in the '80s. I was buying a CD at Ludwick Becks (München) and this booming voice came from behind me asking if his order (for some opera) had arrived. Turning around and realising who it was and instantly turned into a nine year-old and asked him to autograph the CD I was holding. It was a BBC audio book of LotR, and he proceeded to tell me I'd be better off reading the book... :-)
At least one site begs to differ...
http://www.badassoftheweek.com...
His service records are sealed and Lee doesn't talk much about his service (when pressed on the subject, he reportedly asks his interviewer, "Can you keep a secret?". When they excitedly say yes, he leans in close and says, "So can I."), but we do know that by the time he retired as a Flight Lieutenant in 1945 he'd been personally decorated for battlefield bravery by the Czech, Yugoslavian, English, and Polish governments and was good friends with Josip Broz Tito, so draw your own conclusions.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Just had to add this bit from the article...
Lee also belongs to three stuntman unions, does all of his own stunts, once busted his face smashing head-first through an actual plate glass window for a scene, injured himself falling into an open grave while portraying Dracula, and once had his hand slashed open during a drunken sword fight with Errol Flynn.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.