Lee's great roles too numerous to Count
Christopher Lee's career in the movies had a lot of bite. And a lightsaber. And magic. And a golden gun.
The tall British actor loomed over cinema in an intimidating fashion by creating some of Hollywood's greatest villains, most notably as Count Dracula, and leaves fans with a filmography as broad as his smile.
Lee, who died Sunday in his birth city of London at age 93, had a genuine grin that belied the legendary antagonists that became synonymous with his acting.
Horror hounds of the 1950s, '60s and '70s got a very different Dracula and Frankenstein's monster in Lee than they did with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in the 1930s. The Hammer Films horror movies were in color and upped the scares and the frights — it's an iconic vision seeing Lee in 1958's Dracula, eyes filled with lust and blood running from his fangs.
When it came to living horror legends, "I am, it seems, the only one left," Lee told USA TODAY in 1999, when he was 77.
But as he'd quickly remind you, he was much more than that.
Lee brought a high-end bad guy to the Star Wars universe with his lightsaber-wielding Count Dooku. Two of George Lucas' prequels in the 2000s sorely needed someone of the stature and gravitas of Darth Vader, and Lee fit that mold perfectly — and he didn't need a mask to do it.
He also added presence to Peter Jackson's Middle-Earth as the wizard antagonist Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a fitting opposite to Ian McKellen's heroic magic man Gandalf. (Lee was also in the The Hobbit movies but as more of a good guy, opposing the evil Necromancer.)
Unsurprisingly, he turned up on Tim Burton's radar, and Lee became a featured player in Burton's company of regulars, appearing in Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows.
Fantasy and horror pretty much built Lee's wheelhouse, but he also played in James Bond's cool universe as 007 foe and master assassin Francisco Scaramanga in 1974's The Man With the Golden Gun. His interesting tie to the spy franchise: Lee was the step-cousin of Bond creator and author Ian Fleming.
And then there was Fu Manchu — Lee starred as the criminal mastermind in a bunch of movies in the 1960s beginning with The Face of Fu Manchu in '65.
Sherlock Holmes? Yep, Lee played him in 1962's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace. (For a change of pace, he was the detective's brother Mycroft in Billy Wilder's 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.)
There were some disaster movies on his résumé — the classic Airport '77 being the most noteworthy — and animated films as well, putting his trademark deep voice to work as the evil King Haggard in 1982's The Last Unicorn and Death in 1996's Welcome to the Discworld.
Lee liked to put a spin on his image as Hollywood's go-to heavy. As a Nazi captain, he had a memorable exchange with Slim Pickens' excitable cowboy in Steven Spielberg's hilarious and underrated 1979 comedy 1941. Lee put together a string of funny roles in the 1980s and '90s, among them a college dean in the 1987 teen film Jocks and a Russian commandant in 1994's Police Academy: Mission to Moscow.
He made us laugh, he creeped us out royally, he took on some Jedi, but best of all Lee put together a fantastic — and fangtastic — film life not so easily duplicated.
