Christopher Lee hated being recognized as Dracula, says Peter Jackson

His breakthrough film was the 1957 British horror film The Curse of Frankenstein, in which he played the creature; a year later, he took on the title role in Dracula, and became his cinematic albatross.

Despite subsequent roles as a pagan leader in the cult film The Wicker Man, as Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, as Saruman in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films and, incredibly now, as a Chinese criminal in five years. Fu Manchu movies, Lee was unfairly labeled as a horror actor, forever defined by his role as a blood count with fangs.

Much has been written about Lee, not least by the actor himself, who wrote several books and autobiographies, but the Sky Arts documentary The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee takes a fresh approach to his life, using never-before-seen archive material and a puppet voiced by Peter Serafinowicz, to bring the actor back to life in a surprisingly effective way.

There’s an almost overwhelming amount of material to cover, but director Jon Spira wasn’t fazed by the project.

He admits that he wasn’t particularly a fan of Lee’s work and disliked the countless Hammer films in which he starred; indeed, his interest in Lee’s story was almost accidental.

“I came across Christopher Lee’s 1974 episode of This Is Your Life on YouTube,” recalls Spira, “and he looks like he’s having a hard time. I watched it again and it was clear that he was trying to protect his own narrative.

“The world saw him as strong, scholarly, cultured, athletic, handsome and elegant, but the truth is, he was just as messed up as the rest of us. He wanted to tell the story of his insecurities.”

Spira, who used to work for the British Film Institute, had access to all of Lee’s interviews in the BFI library along with his personal notebooks.

“They start early in his career and go up into the ’70s. If he was on TV, he’d take a picture because there was no other way to record it. There are pictures of projects that didn’t make it. light, from the unfinished film of Orson Welles’ Moby Dick… is quite extraordinary.”

In addition to delving into his work, The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee explores the life of the idiosyncratic actor, from his upbringing with a military father and aristocratic Italian mother to his military career, his value as a polyglot for secret services and their tracking. of Nazi war criminals.

He also tries to find out if Lee’s cousin Ian Fleming actually based James Bond on him, a good idea even if it’s not entirely true.

The old footage mounted by Spira is fascinating, but the talking heads provide an extra dimension. Actress Harriet Walter, Lee’s niece, says her uncle was “as soft as putty” but that he “could never leave Dracula behind”. He adds that “he had a lot of rejection that people didn’t know about.”

Director Peter Jackson, who grew up a fan of Lee’s, says the late star, “tall, elegant, a bit pompous” – grunted when asked to sign a Dracula poster – clearly wanted to be recognized as a versatile actor and was: to everyone’s surprise, consumed by “a startling insecurity” in The Fellowship of the Ring.

Jackson recalls how Lee was doing a scene with Ian McKellen as Gandalf and “Ian came up to me and said, ‘Maybe you should talk to Christopher.’ He is convinced that he will be fired at the end of the day. He is convinced. he’s doing a terrible job, and you don’t like him”. It was a terrible thing to hear, I started reassuring him that he was doing great.”

There are also, inevitably, gaps in Lee’s story that will likely remain unfilled forever, namely his apparent involvement with the Secret Service during the war. “Realizing that I would never have access to his war records was so upsetting,” says Spira. “Officials said, ‘There’s nothing to see’ over and over again. If his cover had been blown, the Secret Service or MI5 would have disavowed all knowledge of him anyway.” John Landis, who directed Lee in Stupid, says he always wanted to hear about Lee’s war. Lee always replied, “John, I can’t!”

Nevertheless, the documentary is fascinating, covering Lee’s singing career (from show songs and arias to heavy metal, although he was rejected from the Royal College of Music at the age of 30, apparently because of his age) and the wonderful fact that he was 90 when he appeared in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows.

While researching the documentary, Spira watched more than 150 of Lee’s films and is honest about the lack of quality control. “Some of them were bad. A mess. Everywhere. On occasion I had to pay £200 to get a bootleg from Japan and when it arrived you couldn’t see it. That said, the joy was never knowing what you were. Lee was always able to surprise you.”

The denouement of The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee comes when Lee gives a television interview in 2009, moments after being knighted. The young presenter refers to the 92-year-old as “the king of horror” and Lee is clearly upset that his life’s work, in his eyes, has been diminished.

He opposes; she becomes more and more nervous. “It’s heartbreaking,” says Spira. “On the one hand, he should have gotten over it at that point in his life – did it really matter that he was reduced to being Dracula on a TV news story?

“At the same time, he had this amazing career, making films all over Europe because he could speak so many languages, doing really good work later in life. I just hope people watch this documentary and then go see some of their best films, such as the female-centric western Hannie Caulder with Raquel Welch.

“He took every performance he did seriously, and now he deserves to be taken seriously.”

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The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee airs Thursday 24 October at 9pm on Sky Arts; sign up to Sky TV here.

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