One good lunch deserves another. In the course of Michael Winterbottom’s “The Trip,” Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon toy with their glasses of wine over an indolent meal and trade impersonations of James Bond. They fire Connerys at one another, reach deep into their baritones for a Moore, and even feed a little Irish brogue into their Brosnans. When it comes to “The Man with the Golden Gun,” however, they turn aside from 007, for a minute, and pay homage to his adversary in that film—Scaramanga, played by Christopher Lee. He is the only Bond villain whom the master impressionists deign to mimic; over and over, they repeat the same line, refining the intonation until Lee’s impeccable cadences fall into place: “Come, come, Mr. Bond, you get just as much pleasure from killing as I do.”
The joke is that they get the line wrong, although, in the process, they improve it. What Scaramanga says is, “You get as much fulfillment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”—more of a mouthful, although Lee was never one to let a few indigestible consonants spoil his appetite. Suavity, whether of costume, gait, or voice, was not a style imposed upon life but a means of deflecting any slings and arrows that happened to come your way and, whenever possible, returning them with interest. A cloak was as good as a dagger. As for fortune, it was outrageous, and that was the joy of it. Scaramanga’s plan, over a luncheon served by his pocket-sized butler, is to needle away at Bond, whom he regards as little better than a civil servant—armed, predictably, with a weapon of lesser metal. “You work for peanuts. A hearty ‘Well done’ from her Majesty the Queen, and a pittance of a pension. Apart from that, we are the same,” he says. 007 looks genuinely discomfited, not only because the pane check of his mid-seventies plaid jacket makes your corneas melt, but because his status, as both gentleman and spy, is under threat. If anything, Scaramanga is being modest, for he is not the same as Bond. He is better.
By bloodline and biography alike, Christopher Lee, who has died at the age of ninety-three, was the stuff of Bond—more so, perhaps, than any other actor of his stamp. He was the offspring of a retired British Army officer and an Italian countess, described by her son as “a fizz.”After they divorced, his mother married Harcourt George St-Croix Rose, who sounds like a fine wine, or a flower, but who was in fact the uncle of Ian Fleming. Lee’s interview at Eton, where he narrowly missed a scholarship, was attended by M. R. James, the most able (and the most frightening) composer of British ghost stories, although, in the event, Lee wound up at another school. Adept at fencing, cricket, French, and German, he had a dashing war: he served as an intelligence officer with the Royal Air Force, first in North Africa and then during the invasion of Sicily and the battle of Monte Cassino. In the wake of the conflict, he served with the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Nazi-hunting was the game. I like to think that he met Blofeld along the way.
None of this makes a good actor, of course. But it does guarantee that, should your talents nudge you toward the stage or screen, you are likely to arrive with a natural sense of where acting belongs in the scheme of things—with a feel for its specific gravity and, at the same time, an air of civilized irony that you abandon at your peril. In movies, it has long been a mark of urbanity, among men as different as Conrad Veidt, Vincent Price, and Lee’s friend Peter Cushing, to seek out the delicacy in schlock. Merely to mock it would be vulgar (luring one into the unmanly zone of camp, where a performer such as Lee would never stray), but also wasteful, because, after all, are we not held prisoner by our fears—willing captives, perhaps, but captives nonetheless? Time and again, sometimes against his better judgement, Lee went back to the role of Dracula, and, even when his lines were minimal, those red-veined eyes and the wordless mouth—widening in a hostly smile or in preparation for the midnight feast—said all that was required. He was tall, dark, handsome, and undead; who could ask for anything more? Whether he was in it for the money, for the fans (who were as innumerable, in Lee’s case, as a swarm of bats), for contractual reasons, or simply out of habit, he was schooled in the incontrovertible truth that nobility and cruelty made excellent bedfellows. It was the Count that counted.
Run your finger down the Lee filmography, and the titles spring out as much as the names. One of his earliest aristocrats gave a clue of the venomous charm to come: the Marquis St. Evrémonde, in the 1958 version of “A Tale of Two Cities.” Go back to the novel and you find the figure of Lee, as it were, preparing to exist: “As he bent his head in his most courtly manner, there was a secrecy in his smiling face.” Dickens, as so often, wrote like a casting director making notes: “The thin straight lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin straight lips, and the markings in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that looked handsomely diabolic.” Lee was up and running. He played the Comte de Rochefort in “The Three Musketeers.” Decades later, he played Count Dooku in two later episodes of “Star Wars.” He played lords and kings and, in “The Golden Compass,” a first high councillor. He played Sir Henry Baskerville, as well as—needless to say—Sherlock Holmes himself, although his finest hour, in the realms of Conan Doyle, was as Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, in Billy Wilder’s “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.” Then there was “The Wicker Man,” a tale of cultish killings in the Hebrides that has itself become a cult. It featured Lee as Lord Summerisle, merrily locking arms with his fellow pagans as their victim, caged in a giant basket, burned to death.
No surprise, I think, that Lee should have aged as well as the best Burgundy. He became Sir Christopher, after a knighthood was bestowed on him, in 2009—together with, one hopes, a hearty “Well done.” Only Max von Sydow, in recent generations of film actors, has conjured equal value from longevity. Both men have the loftiness that comes less from measurable height than from indefinable authority. Both have the sort of face that one expects to encounter carved in stone, on a crusader’s tomb, or incised in brass on the floor of an ancient nave. And both, in their majestic fashion, are allergic to mush. One advantage to making yourself at home in the sinister is that, however the years creep up on you, and whatever the fondness of the public’s embrace, your reputation forbids you to slump into the sentimental. Not for Lee the ripening leaves of “On Golden Pond.” Instead, he grew into Saruman, in “The Lord of the Rings.”
For someone who had welcomed so many innocents to Transylvania, the switch to a more consuming wickedness, blessed with yet wider ambitions and a subtler history (for Saruman, like Lucifer, fell from a glorious height), was an easy one. Lee had always been a Tolkien buff and enjoyed the rare distinction, on set, of having met the author. And so it was that we were granted the heartening spectacle of one white-haired senior citizen locked in competitive wizardry with another—Lee’s matching knight, Sir Ian McKellen—in a tower. No more decisive case against early retirement has ever been mounted by the movies. It was also a contest of tongues: two mellifluous men, each striving to outdo the other in enunciating the high-flown melodies of Tolkien talk. The amused grandeur that Lee liked to carry about his person, and that hint of immense forces lightly held in check—everything cohered behind the priestly robe, the waterfall of beard, and the seismic rumble of the voice. “Concealed within his fortress, the Lord of Mordor sees all,” Saruman says, carefully spacing those last two words, and adds: “His gaze pierces cloud, shadow, earth, and flesh. You know of what I speak, Gandalf: a great eye, lidless, wreathed in flame.” There are so few actors who can carry off this kind of thing; as of yesterday, there is one fewer.
Could those capacious lungs have borne him in another direction? As if heaven had not loaded him with sufficient gifts, Lee could sing, too. His great-grandmother had been a celebrated contralto in the nineteenth century, although she might have raised an eyebrow at his choice of genre; in the autumn of his days, he found himself much in demand from heavy-metal bands. If you cannot decide upon the most proper manner in which to mourn the great man, may I recommend his rendition of “Little Drummer Boy,” from his 2012 EP “Heavy Metal Christmas”? I do solemnly swear that you will never have heard anything quite like it, in here or in Middle-earth.
Nonetheless, we are left to wonder whether, with the right training, and a different roll of the dice, Lee might have ventured not into cinema but opera. Dracula is all very well, but imagine what lusty aplomb he would have brought to more expressive bluebloods—to Almaviva in “The Marriage of Figaro,” or, better yet, to Don Giovanni. There are certain actors, it seems fair to say, who could only have been actors; De Niro, like Brando before him, is pretty much inconceivable in other professions, however convincing the mobster, the boxer, or the taxi driver whom he became onscreen. Lee was not like that. We can readily picture him in alternative guises, thinking none the less of himself, let alone ruing opportunities missed. It was his cousin, the Italian ambassador in London, who suggested after the war that he give acting a shot; but what if the cousins had swapped roles, and Lee had ended up as the diplomat, hatching niceties and holding court? His death is cause for sorrow, but a life as bountiful as Christopher Lee’s, and an art so generously deployed, somehow gives hope to us all. Scaramanga’s line, I think, deserves a final rewrite: “Come, come, Mr. Bond, you get just as much pleasure from living as I do.”
