Inveigling Suzan Farmer in Dracula: Prince Of Darkness, Terence Fisher, 1966
I don’t know why I took the news of Sir Christopher Lee’s death so hard this morning. It’s not as if his face and his voice have been crucially intertwined with all the reasons I love movies, or anything. Oh, wait. it is that. But, you know, he WAS 93. Maybe I thought he was going to live forever.
One of the greatest pleasures of my professional life, hell, maybe of my life, period, was an hour-long interview I conducted with Lee in late 1994. I don’t even remember what the occasion was, but it was for a column I had at TV Guide so I guess he had a special or some sort of hosting gig. In any event, I had been told that Lee could be a prickly interview subject, but that absolutely turned out not to be the case when I spoke with him. Perhaps he was in a terrific mood. Maybe I had good questions. All I know is that at a certain point I thought, “I’m not going to be able to get him off the phone.” This observation was not a complaint.
The most moving and surprising portion of the conversation was when Lee was recalling his friend Peter Cushing, who had just passed away in the summer of that year. Lee missed his friend terribly but also delighted in telling me the way the two would keep each other entertained in the down time during the shoots of the many films they worked in together. Apparently they were both keen Looney Tunes fans, and used to conduct entire conversations in the voices of their favorite characters. To demonstrate, Lee actually laid his Foghorn Leghorn impersonation on me.
I’ll let that sink in for a second.
I also asked Lee about his occasionally misbegotten work with microbudget auteur Jesus “Jess” Franco, and elicited a rather amusing backhanded compliment from Lee about the filmmaker: “Not an untalented man, by the way.” There was more, quite a bit of it, too much for a 500-word column in TV Guide (which my editor, cheekily and to my great delight, headlined “Christopher And His Kind”) and I thought that when I could get around to it, I’d whip up a complete transcript and give it to my friend-who-I’ve-still-never-met-in-person Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog.
I bet you know what happens next. I lost the tape, and have never been able to find it. To this day, whenever I come upon an unmarked audio cassette in the bottom of some drawer and file cabinet, I pop it in my recorder with the small mad hope that it might be the Lee conversation. It never is. But I still remember. And I’ll never forget.
RIP to one of my two favorite actors. The other was Peter Cushing.
Your opening paragrapgh is better than anything I could even hope to write about him (them):
“I don’t know why I took the news of Sir Christopher Lee’s death so hard this morning. It’s not as if his face and his voice have been crucially intertwined with all the reasons I love movies, or anything. Oh, wait. it is that. But, you know, he WAS 93. Maybe I thought he was going to live forever.”
Thanks, Glenn.
He was everything to me at one time in my life and the memory of those years weighs heavily right now as I grieve the changes and his passing. R.I.P.
Thanks, Glenn.
When I saw the headline “Star Wars/LOTR Actor Dies” this morning, it didn’t occur that Sir Christopher Lee was the reference. “Tall, Dark & Gruesome” is one of my favorite autobiographies, and I’ve long believed that the Most Interesting Man in the World title was actually a tossup between Lee and Chris Blackwell. Thank you very much for this entry. Somehow it feels as if movies died today. And now news of Ornette Coleman…
Like Count Dracula, my eyes are red.
“There’s nothing like the introduction of Dracula in that [1958] picture, in which Christopher Lee just walked down the stairs, sort of bounced down, and said, ‘Hello, I’m Dracula.‘Having been raised on Bela Lugosi, with whom you knew you were in trouble, Lee seemed like a very sensible, sophisticated gentleman. So that later on, when one of his ‘brides’ tries to suck Jonathan Harker’s blood and Dracula turns up, eyes bloodshot, in an extreme close-up, it was absolutely terrifying.”
– Martin Scorsese
In a peculiar way, through my magazine and other publications, I knew Christopher for close to a quarter century – but like you and I, we never met. I have some hilarious letters from him, including his meticulously typed-out replies to my questions for the Bava book, and memories of the many phone calls he shared with my late friend Bill Kelley, who would always call me right after he spoke with him, while the details were still fresh. (Bill once mentioned my name in conversation, which led the Great Man to intone, “Ah, yes. The Video Watchdog himself.” – I wish there was a recording of that, but somehow I can’t hear it in my head.) Bill also shared with me a Foreword that Chris had written for a book that Bill intended to write, about the American New Wave of the 1970s, which he intended to call CUTTING EDGE. Bill hadn’t written the book yet, and never did – but as Bill told me before he died, if you read the Foreword, it was so colorful and yet nondescript that it could be used as a Foreword to almost ANY book about movies. Damn if it’s not true.
That should have read: “… but somehow I can hear it in my head.”
Beautifully written. Having just watched Horror of Dracula in tribute, the image of Christopher Lee doing Foghorn Leghorn is unbelievably hilarious. Really hope you find those tapes Glenn.
Probably my biggest thrill ever at my day job was getting a call from Mr. Lee regretfully turning down our invitation to appear at our public screening of The Return of the King. Just to hear that voice on the phone… (decades before, in my younger years with fewer boundaries, he filmed Serial in my home county and I repeatedly called his hotel hoping to talk to him, but it’s probably fortunate I never got him).
My second biggest thrill was a similar call from another wonderful actor sadly gone, Rod Taylor, turning down our invitation to a screening of The Birds “as I am residing against my will at Cedars-Sinai.”
I never got to hear Mr. Lee do any Looney Tunes characters, but when I met Clint Eastwood in the mid-80s, he happened to mention how much he enjoyed the recent film of Little Shop of Horrors, chuckling “Feed me…feed me…” in Eastwood fashion.
Wonderful remembrance, Glenn.
I interviewed Christopher Lee, too, probably around the same time. He was lovely, charming, urbane. And he wanted to talk! He was delighted to talk to an interviewers who knew his films and appreciated his work. My particular favorites were The Devil Rides Out and The Wicker Man. One thing I remember, he reveled in playing the hero, the good guy. And if he couldn’t play the hero, he’d play the bad guy as though he were the hero – seductive, compelling, winning. Don’t all bad guys believe they’re right?
And he spoke fondly of Peter Cushing.
I have no idea where that tape is.