WHAT makes a man noble? Blood, above all; and Christopher Lee possessed it. Through his mother, the Contessa di Sarzano, he was related to the 19th-century nobilità nerà of Modena and Parma as well as to the Borgias, who added to the flow in his veins an underlick of venom. Extend the line yet further, into a past roiling with sepulchral fire, and it reached as far as Charlemagne, first holy Roman emperor and wearer of the iron crown of Lombardy. (The family arms, much like the Habsburgs’, were the eagle sable displayed.) But by the 1930s, though the blood remained impeccable, the money had gone on the horses; so it was Wellington, not Eton, for young Christopher, and an office boy’s chores rather than some cushioned billet in a City brokerage house. His eventual fame rested, too, not on his own aristocratic credentials but on those of a count of Transylvania, whom he played in no fewer than ten films between 1958 and 1976; and Count Dracula’s blood, though undeniably blue, needed regular topping up with copious scarlet streams of best Hammer-horror gore.
Nobility also consists in the habit of authority. Mr Lee was very tall, aquiline, saturnine and with the lithe, determined stride of a man who knows his own mind. The very quirk of a jet-black eyebrow could enforce obedience. As a child he was used to staff and was expected to be, at the least, an ambassador. From his first days at Rank, however, where he played a Spanish sea-captain tangling with the hero Hornblower, it was evil orders on celluloid he most memorably handed down.
He had long wanted to play Fu Manchu; and as the Chinese master-intellect and criminal, in five films, he icily dispatched his agents to do his killing for him with spiders, snakes, bacteria and their own bare hands. As the tweed-jacketed Laird of Summerisle in “The Wicker Man” (1973), a favourite role, he calmly directed the servile villagers to set their flaming brands to the wickerwork giant in which poor Police-sergeant Howie was burned alive as a sacrifice to Nature. In “The Man with the Golden Gun” (1974), as Francisco Scaramanga, he controlled a whole household of servants, chief among them the midget Nick Nack, who was sent not only to spy but to cook lunch, move interior walls, and welcome James Bond to the secret island with a bottle of chilled champagne. (“I could have shot you down when you landed,” Scaramanga purred, “but that would have been ridiculously easy.”)
Familiarity with weapons and coolness under fire were part of any nobleman’s portfolio. Mr Lee’s father, an officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, had been one of the best shots in England. He himself did gallant war service, won medals and was mentioned in dispatches; but much of his work, in special forces, was so secret that he could not talk about it. This added to his air of mystery, as well as to the implacability with which he approached the business of murdering people on screen. He had seen so many people killed, he said—beginning with the last public guillotining in France, observed when he was 17—that he had acquired a shell every bit as hard as those of his villains. Guns, knives and swords were handled with a tenderness that approached love. He knew, he told one director, just what sound people made when they were stabbed in the back: a soft groan, as blood seeped into their lungs. He had seen it done.
These points were made in a voice that, in itself, was redolent with good breeding: deep, measured, forceful, and with perfect enunciation. He might have been an opera singer, regretted that he never was, and lustily tested his baritone on the sets of the 278 films in which he ultimately appeared. At 90, he sang as Charlemagne in a heavy-metal version of his ancestor’s life. When reduced to speaking roles, he made sure they throbbed with power. “I speak to the entire world,” cried Fu Manchu. “What I tell you to do must be done immediately, or 10,000 will die.” The voice of silvery-garbed Saruman, the evil wizard in “The Lord of the Rings”, rang out chillingly over Middle-earth, and would have done so yet more forcefully if his final scenes had not been cut, to his fury, from the general release. He had originally wanted to play the good wizard Gandalf, and said Tolkein himself had told him the part was his; similarly Ian Fleming had told him he should play Bond. But his habitat, after “Dracula”, was almost always the dark side.
Out of the shadows
Marvellous as it was, even the voice was not essential to the persona. When scripts were bad, as they often were, he refused to speak them. Some of his best performances were silent, save for the odd gasp and groan: both as the Mummy in 1959, and as the Creature in “The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957), he contrived to bring pathos, stateliness and complexity to characters almost entirely swathed in bandages, patched with stitches or smothered in fake gangrene. The original “Dracula” of 1958, which made his name and dominated his career, gave him only 13 lines to say. Yet even those were hardly necessary as he slowly, relentlessly materialised out of the dark, his cloak swishing, his black eyes sparkling with joy, his red lips nuzzling the white, submissive, swooning neck and his incisors, just slightly showing, beginning to glisten. Noblesse oblige.