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Christopher Lee (Part 3) Go back to Part 1 or Part 2 of this very long interview
"Interesting. I'm not sure about this, but I have a feeling that it was one of the first television series ever made - certainly in this country - about outer space. Television shows, not films. It may have been one of the very first ever. Because I don't know if Star Trek had started then. This was 1973." Star Trek was actually late '60s. "Well, then it wasn't the first in the world, by any stretch of the imagination. But I have a feeling it was the first here. Martin Landau, and his wife, Barbara Bain. The sequence I did was with Roy Dotrice. I think I was one of the first persons to play an alien on British television. But you'd need to check that. But then of course, in my career I've been the first actor to do this or that a great many times. It's very strange; a lot of the pictures I've been in or been connected with have become cult films. They were before their time." One such cult film that I was pleased to see covered on the video was The Return of Captain Invincible. "Yes. The story itself is a very amusing and witty story. You can't ask for anyone better than Alan Arkin who, apart from Peter Ustinov, is I think quite honestly the most all-round talented man I've ever met in my life. He's a writer - I've got some of his books - he's a composer, he plays several musical instruments. He produces, he directs, he acts. The man is amazing. He's also a wonderful person, and I'm devoted to him. Marvellous sense of humour. Quite apart from anything else, the songs were so good. "And one of my great friends, who's probably the number one opera singer in the world today, he's a bass so you'd have to say the number one opera bass in the world today, is an American called Samuel Ramey. He wrote to me and said, 'I've just seen this.' I said, 'Well, I don't want any critical comments about my singing, thank you, from an opera singer.' He said, 'It's terrific.' And I said, 'What you're really saying is that the song, the number in it about the drinks, it's brilliant!' It was written by O'Brien and Hartley and there are about 36 drinks in the song. It's a mixture of rock, operatic, anything you like. "You see, if you don't promote a picture, if you don't do any publicity on it, if you don't advertise it, if you don't have the right kind of posters, or if you don't talk about it or the people don't appear on television or talk like I'm talking to you, who's going to know it's on? I remember Francis Coppola talking to me: 'What would anybody know about The Godfather if they didn't read about it or see people talking about it on television.?' If you don't promote something, who's going to know about it?"
"Wonderful music, wonderful music. But that's very much the story of my life as an actor; films that are before their time. Cult movies, if you like." One role I was surprised to find that you'd played was Faust. What was Catharsis in 1963? "A very strange film. It was done in black and white. I don't think anybody, including myself and possibly the director, quite knew what it was all about. I was playing an old man, without the right kind of make-up, who turns, in a sense, into the Devil. It's so complicated that I can't remember the story. I remember the director apparently committed suicide not very long after making the film. Whether that was as a result of seeing the rushes or the rough cut or whether it was what somebody said, I really don't know. "It's a very strange film. I've never actually seen it but I've got some stills from it, where I'm the old man with white hair and a young face. They didn't have the time to do 'old' make-up, so to speak. And there's some marvellous stills of me as the Devil. But I've no idea what happened to the film, except that I did make it." Are all your films still in existence, or have any of them been lost? "I know one picture where the negative was lost." The Wicker Man. "Well, if you believe that. I can't say that I do. I'm firmly convinced, for various reasons that we won't go into, that the negative of that film and the out-takes do exist somewhere but are being deliberately hidden, and have been ever since we wanted them. Because we shot every word of that brilliant script. Oh, wonderful. What you saw on the screen, marvellous as it is, it's almost a shadow of what was in the script, what we shot, because we shot every word. Of course it's not possible to have every word we said used in the film. It would have been too long. But if we'd done a little bit of retouching, a bit of this and a bit of that, the film would have been a masterpiece. "It's close to that already. And that is a cult film. And it became one from the first time it came. That is an incredible story. In fact, if you ever read the magazine Cinefantastique, they devoted an entire issue to the film and the story behind it. It went through seven distributors or something, and there's a long version, there's a short version. The negative has never been seen again since the time we first looked for it."
"Well, it does the case of that film. I think it's disgraceful. Because it's a remarkable and outstanding picture; one of the best pictures ever made in my opinion, and most people would agree with that. When you say, 'The Wicker Man', everybody all over the world says, 'Ah.' And I've presented it in countries like Spain and Italy and Egypt at various film festivals as the best picture I've ever been in and the best part I've ever had, because it was written for me. If something goes wrong with some of the films I've been in, or they don't turn out the way you hope they'll turn out, which frequently happens: 'This is not the film I made. This is not the performance I gave.' If it's been cut to ribbons, or badly put together or badly shot or whatever, you have to accept that because that's the way the industry functions or doesn't function. There's an awful lot of amateurs still around. So you say to yourself, 'What a pity' because on the printed page it was good. So that's happened. You just have to be resigned to that sort of thing. There's no point getting upset about it. "But as far as The Wicker Man is concerned, to this day - and that's 24 years later - to this day I'm outraged about what happened to that film: the disappearance of the negative and the out-takes. That is an outstanding and remarkable and brilliant film, and it should have been recut, in my opinion, then we really would have had something, which we're proud of anyway, but even more so. I'd even be prepared to pay for the film to be recut if we could find it." That was the interview proper, but one regular feature of an SFX interview in those days was always a section where the subject summed up their memories of particular films or books or, in this case, roles: Dracula "A character that is romantic, heroic and erotic, doomed to immortality, a terrible fate. Sadness is the main element in a character like that, and that's the right way to play a character like that. And I read the book. It's all there in Stoker's book, and I put that onto the screen, because nobody could tell me how to play that part and nobody ever did."
"We weren't allowed to copy the famous make-up that Boris wore because that was Universal copyright, so we were shooting in the dark totally. One of the critics said that I looked like a road accident, which actually is what one would look like if you were literally patched together from bits and pieces of other people. Provided you accept the fact that those sort of transplants could take place. And God knows, since we made that film, they have taken place. The only transplant, as far as I know, that hasn't happened - and it certainly will one day - is a brain transplant. But everything else - put together from bits and pieces of other people - has virtually happened. "That was important to me because up till then I had been told I was too tall and too foreign-looking. So I decided, quite specifically and quite carefully that I would play that part where I would become completely unrecognisable. Then if it was successful, people would say - as they did - 'I wonder what he really looks like.'" Sherlock Holmes "I'm one of - good heavens - how many actors have played Sherlock Holmes? The first time I played him was in Germany in 1963. You know the story of that. They put somebody else's voice in, but it was pretty good actually, along those lines. The second time I was in a Holmes film, I had the great privilege of working with one of the greatest directors of all time, Billy Wilder. I played his brother Mycroft. Dear Bob Stephens was Holmes. Then I played him twice on television with Patrick Macnee. "Holmes is Holmes. What can I add to it? I had to try and suggest the amazing brain, the analytical ability - based on Dr Joseph Bell, we are told - and still portray what the author wrote. People seem to forget that so often. They give their interpretation. Holmes was a drug addict; he was therefore slightly unbalanced in some respects. He had a brilliant brain; he was physically very courageous and a master of styles combat. He could be charming when he wanted to, but there was a very cold side to Holmes, sarcastic and unkind, even to Watson. "I try always, where there is a book or a story, to be the character that the author wrote about. Holmes is an immortal; Dracula is an immortal; Fu Manchu, to a certain extent, is an immortal. And so I've been fortunate enough to play a lot of immortal characters, who won't ever die." Fu Manchu "He happens to be Oriental. A man like Holmes describes Moriarty: 'the Napoleon of crime' with a brain to match. A man of great power, of great ability, amazing brain and all that, who happens to be Chinese. I tried to play him like a superior warlord, almost like a priest. Because you must always do that, you must never condescend to those sort of characters." The Mummy "That was very difficult, because of course that was done without speaking. I don't speak for the entire picture. Or did I? Maybe I did say something at the very beginning when the princess was buried. I may have come up with some of the prayers. But of course after I'd had my tongue cut out there wasn't very much I could say. "That was a very difficult film, very demanding, probably physically the toughest picture I've ever had to make, because I do everything with body movement, in terms of suggesting feelings, reactions. All you could see were the eyes. Physically very, very tough because I had to smash through glass, had explosions all over my body, smashed through a locked door which was bolted with a chain on the inside, which somebody had done without thinking. Then I had to carry these girls out here, to the full extent of my arms. Because they were unconscious they couldn't put their arms around my neck to help me, and I had to carry them both eight yards several times. "Then at the end I had to carry Yvonne Furneaux, hold her above the water and the mud at the full extent of my arms, crashing into all these pipes and things underneath the mud in the tank. That was a really tough picture. Physically tough and difficult in terms of performance because it could only be done with the eyes and the body."
"Ian Fleming was my cousin. Ian Fleming wanted me to play Doctor No. By the time he got around to suggesting it, the producer said, 'Well, we've already cast another actor.' By the time I came to play Scaramanga, Ian was gone. I just hope that he enjoyed it. The important thing about playing Scaramanga - who incidentally was a boy who was at Eton with Ian, who disliked him so much he decided to make him into one of his villains. "Ian wrote the book and the character was just a thug. What the director and the writer did was to make him into a man who was totally lethal but who had great charm and was most amusing and could be very witty. In other words, a human being. So many of the Bond villains have been cardboard cut-outs and they've just been irredeemably bad from start to finish, but Scaramanga was completely different because he got the chance to be entertaining, attractive, polite, amusing and lethal. With every part I've played, I've always tried to produce something unexpected on the screen, something unconventional that people won't expect. And I think to a great extent I've succeeded." Rasputin "I can only go on what I've read, and what I've been told by people who knew him. When I was a small boy, I met two of the people involved in the assassination: Prince Yusupoff himself and the Grand Duke Dimitri, cousin of the Tsar. Many years later, I played the character in '65. "In '76 I met Maria Rasputin, the daughter; he had three illegitimate children. She'd seen the film, she said I looked like him. I said, 'Surely Madam, your father wasn't quite as tall as me and he had blue-grey eyes.' She said, 'That's not what I mean: the expression.' Don't ask me what she meant by that. Then in 1981 my wife and I went to the house in what is now Saint Petersburg where the whole thing took place. "The story of the dreadful Rasputin is very well known and I believe it's been done recently again in Saint Petersburg, with Alan Rickman, on a much bigger scale of course. This was a Hammer film. I tried to play the man as he was: an enigma, a mystery, a misty creature - you couldn't really find him. He was part saint, part sinner, like we all are - more sinner than saint - who had extraordinary authentic powers of healing, who was a terrible lecher and a fearful drunk. But that's the way he was. And that's the historical Rasputin. How else could I play him? "You're always confined by what's in the script, but I played the character that most of the world recognises as Grigori Rasputin, the monk who had the influence over the Tsarina and through her over the Tsar, who could cure the haemophilia of the heir to the throne. He even did it by telegram once, and then wrote a letter which I've seen: 'Russian Tsar, if anything happens to me ... the Romanoff house will come to an end.' That was probably the most interesting character I've ever played because we really don't know the answer, even now. His daughter gave me a book she'd written about him. She was so nice to me, I had my picture taken with her. She looked just like him, except for the beard of course. She said, 'You came very close.' She wasn't particularly sympathetic to the portrayal." Mr Sender "I'm not sure that I can discuss that because the film hasn't come out. The film is called The Stupids. Tom Arnold plays Stanley Stupid, and he has a wife and two children, all called Stupid. I think it's a very funny movie. I play their adversary, not a very big part, but that doesn't matter. This is very European, as opposed to American. Some of the big stars will happily do a day in a film - Orson Welles said that - if it's an important contribution and people will remember it. But you won't get that from an American leading actor because the agent won't allow it; not enough commission. All I can say is that it's most amusing. That's all I can say at the moment because if I say anything else then I'm giving the story away. "But the most important part of all was Lord Summerisle because it was written for me by one of the best writers of all, who'd just had tremendous success with Sleuth." Go back to Part 2 of this very long interview, where Christopher Lee discusses working for Hammer, A Feast at Midnight and his unseen Edgar Allan Poe TV series Or go right back to Part 1 where he talks about his association with Dracula, playing Fu Manchu and working with Jesus Franco | ||
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