‘Never be terrible in a terrible movie’

3 June 2006

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Hammer had won the Queen’s Award for Industry scarcely half a dozen years earlier, but by the time The Satanic Rites of Dracula was in production, it was very obviously about to go bust. Desperate for a success, the company had turned its most famous monster into a pantomime figure with a scarlet cloak and ladled on the gore and sex. Always a stickler, Lee would stalk the set with a copy of the original novel, despondently pointing out that Bram Stoker’s Dracula had come to have at best a nodding acquaintance with Hammer’s. Some lines he refused to say. Mostly he was required only to hiss. And bite. And gurgle.

Allowed so little dignity as an actor, Lee made the decision to ‘Draculate’ — as he put it — no longer and made the shrewdest move of his career: to relocate to Los Angeles. He immediately found work in such high-profile ventures as the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun — as Scaramanga — and a doomed passenger in Airport ’77. Like the character that had made him famous, he found that it was possible to rise from the grave.

And so to different generations, Lee is different people. To people under 40, he is Saruman the White or Count Dooku, but to people over 40 he remains, stubbornly, Count Dracula and a ‘horror film star’, a breed of actor that, with the passing of his old friends Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, is now all but extinct.

One wonders why there aren’t horror film stars today. ‘Probably because no one could possibly have replaced Peter or Vincent,’ says Lee, modestly but unreasonably omitting himself from the list. The critics tended to talk with disdain about their horror films, but now — and this makes Lee smile wryly — they are suddenly in fashion. All three men have hugely successful websites devoted to them. The National Theatre recently revived one of Price’s classic films, Theatre of Blood, as a homage to the actor and, writing in The Spectator the other day, Gyles Brandreth asserted, remarkably, that he considered Price to have been one of the four most charming men he had ever met, along with Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu and John Profumo.