Beloved horror thespian, Christopher Lee, passed away at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on Sunday due to heart and respiratory failure. At 93 years old, his career spanned multiple decades and he even dabbled in heavy-metal singing.
But the actor will always be most well-known as The Master of the Macabre.
In a latest interview, Lee was quoted as saying, "When I die, I want to die with my boots on."
Sure enough, he passed away just a month before diving into filming a new movie project. He was in preparation to star alongside Uma Thurman in a movie called The 11th.
But Lee leaves us with a legacy of film history that will keep him alive in our hearts and imagination forever. Here is a look back at some of his most memorable roles.
DRACULA
One of his most iconic roles which he revisited over many films was that of the Prince of Darkness, Dracula. Although he would later on jokingly say that he only took on so many of the Dracula films because of blackmail.
"The process went like this: The telephone would ring and my agent would say, 'Jimmy Carreras [President of Hammer Films] has been on the phone, they've got another Dracula for you.' And I would say, 'Forget it! I don't want to do another one.' I'd get a call from Jimmy Carreras, in a state of hysteria. 'What's all this about?!' 'Jim, I don't want to do it, and I don't have to do it.' 'No, you have to do it!' And I said, 'Why?' He replied, 'Because I've already sold it to the American distributor with you playing the part. Think of all the people you know so well, that you will put out of work!' Emotional blackmail. That's the only reason I did them," he said.
FU MANCHU
Although he was covered up in heavy, over-the-top make-up to make him look Chinese, Lee played the evil criminal genius in the Fu Manchu films produced between 1965 and 1969.
LORD SUMMERISLE
Among his many horror movie roles, Lee said that the villain in the original 1973 The Wicker Man was his favorite. He had developed the character with screen writer Anthony Shaffer.
SCARAMANGA
In 1974, Lee got to play a Bond villain, Scaramanga for the film The Man with The Golden Gun. But what not many people may know is that James Bond author, Ian Fleming, is his step-cousin, and he recommended Lee to be the title villain in the first Bond film, Dr. No. That role, however, went to Joseph Wiseman.
CAPT. WOLFGANG VON KLEINSCHMIDT
Although Steven Spielberg's Word War II comedy, 1941, was not met with critical acclaim back in 1979, the cast and crew said they had a blast during filming which was originally scheduled for 14 weeks, but ballooned into 6 months. Screenwriter Bob Gale said that the whole production was surreal.
"The whole idea that we wrote a scene for Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee and Slim Pickens was totally surreal," he said of his screen play which he wrote with Robert Zemeckis.
MOHAMMAD ALI JINNAH
Christopher Lee played the founder of Pakistan in this 1998 film. He considers it one of his most important and favorite pieces of work in his entire career.
"The most important film I made, in terms of its subject and the great responsibility I had as an actor was a film I did about the founder of Pakistan, called Jinnah. It had the best reviews I've ever had in my entire career - as a film and as a performance. But ultimately it was never shown at the cinemas," he said of the film.
COUNT DOOKU / DARTH TYRANUS and SARUMAN
Christopher Lee played villains in two of the biggest films in movie history - the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Star Wars prequel trilogy. He was the only cast member from the Tolkien franchise to have actually met J.R.R. Tolkien.
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Photo: Henry Burrows | Flickr
