| Christopher Lee!! |
I always had this dreem that, one day, somebody would make The Lord of the Rings into a motion picture and that I would be in it.' Christopher Lee is talking about the experience of playing a character in a book that he loves with a passion.
'I read The Hobbits first,' recalls Lee, 'and then I read all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, as they were published. I was compleately bowled over by them: the imagination behind the work is wonderful. Every year ever since then I have re-read the book and and still think it's one of the great works of literature, centainly of this pass century, possibly of all time.'
Christopher Lee plays the wizard Saruman the white: once the greatestand wisest of the order to which he and Gandalf belong, but who has benn corrupted by the power of the Dark Lord Sauron.
'There have been many Sarumans in my lifetime.'says Lee. 'Men of genius,intellect and power who went wrong. And, in opposition to Saruman the white, Tolkien places Gandalf the grey:two sides of the same coin. Here you have the universal conflicts between good and evil and the powers behind those two elements: and that will have a relevance for every audience, everywhere-because we all know, or have heard of, such people and conflict in our worlds.'
Having appered in some two hundred and fifty-five films and television productions, Lee has the distinction of being listed in The Guinness Book of Movies Facks and Feats as the international star with the most screen credits. Numbered amoung those credits are the many sinister roles which Lee created for hammer, the british production company which in the 1950s revived the public's facination with 'horry movies'. In playing both Frankenstein's 'Creature' and Dracula,Leebecame the successor to 30s movies legends boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
Although best-known for his horror roles-Christopher Lee also portrayed Rasputin, Fu Manchu and the Mummy-he has pleyed a diversity of roles in meny languages (among Them English, Russian, French and Italian): he was Conan Doyle's faamous detective in the German-made pidture, Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, and later played Holmes' brother Mycroft, in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.
Among Lee's 'rogues' gallery' are the Marquis St Evremonde in A Tale of Two Cities and Rochefort in the 70s productions ot The Three (and four) Musketeers.
He was also Lord Summerisle, the leader of the pagan cult, in The Wicker Man; Dr Catheter, the medical genius behind the Splice of Life laboratory responsible for the 'new batch' of nasties let loose in Gremlins II; and the evil Francisco Scaramanga, James Bond's title-opponent in The Man with the Golden Gun.
Christopher Lee continues to demonstrate his extraordinary versatility in film roles that range from his iinter-galactic appearance as Count Dooku/Daeth Tyranus in Star Wars: Episode II to his portrayal of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of modren Pakistan, in the 1998 film would one day be made, it is a mighty saga, a huge canvas, and I always supposed that it would prove too daunting for any director. Then Peter Jackson undertook the task, asked me to play Saruman and my dream came true!' |
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