‘Never be terrible in a terrible movie’

3 June 2006

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He celebrated his 84th birthday on 27 May and, unlike most octogenarian actors, he can genuinely say that he is at the height of his career. He has had parts in two of the most successful blockbuster franchises of our times — Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars sagas — and has also found the time to strike up an unlikely but artistically profitable relationship with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, with whom he has collaborated in Sleepy Hollow and more recently Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

‘When he holds up his right hand, displaying a permanently crooked little finger, and says “Errol Flynn did this to me”, you realise Christopher is himself a legend,’ says Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. He recalled how, after Lee had completed his final scene as Saruman the White on a cold day in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2003, the entire crew burst into spontaneous and sustained applause. ‘Looking around the room, I realised that we weren’t just his fans,’ Jackson adds. ‘We were saluting an icon.’

In person, Lee is as self-deprecating and unshowbizzy a man as you could hope to meet. He describes himself matter-of-factly as a ‘survivor’ and seems uneasy with people who seem to know too much about him and his work. He says, as he sits down, that he has never been to Le Caprice before. ‘Oh yes, you have,’ I replied. Aida Young, the Hammer Films producer, had taken him here in 1969 to persuade him to do Taste the Blood of Dracula. Lee is momentarily stunned into silence. The look on his face said the obvious: oh dear, a fan.

Lee lists only a few of his Hammer films in his Who’s Who entry and even edits down some of their more lurid titles: thus he says he appeared in Rasputin rather than Rasputin — the Mad Monk, which was that potboiler’s actual title. You get the impression that he has spent a lifetime trying to live them down, although some of them are now regarded as classics. He says someone gave him a video of The Mummy the other day and he sat down to watch it with his Danish-born wife, Gitte, and found it ‘unexpectedly good’.

That was, however, one of the early ones, made in the 1960s. It is hard to imagine quite how depressing it must have been for Lee, by the time he was making his final Dracula for Hammer in 1974, to have to get up on those cold winter mornings to travel to Elstree Studios and listen to the news about Watergate and the miners’ strike on the radio, knowing that he was about to have yet another stake driven into his heart.