Christopher Lee: Goodnight to cinema's prince of darkness

His death at the age of 93 robs British cinema of one of its most enduring stars

Sir Christopher Lee 1922 - 2015 (AP)

Sir Christopher Lee seems to have been around almost as long as his two most famous roles, Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. His death at the age of 93 robs British cinema of one of its most enduring stars.

Though it has been long and eclectic, his career will probably always be most associated in the public mind with those Hammer horror film roles of the 1950s, as well as the quartet of tall, debonair, deliciously evil screen figures – Lee, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, all real-life friends – who scared the living daylights out of innocent matinee audiences in a golden age of British film.

Indeed, one only has to look at the Lee CV to be struck by how it evokes British cinema, and its different eras. It’s not just the journey in cinematic cults from Hammer horror via The Wicker Man to (in his eighties) Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. It is where he was obliged to do some of his actor training that also catches the eye. That was at the Rank “charm school”. When did that wonderful little institution disappear, and what on earth went on there?

Sir Christopher, always as impeccable in manners as in dress, hardly needed charm-schooling. His father, Geoffrey, a colonel decorated in the First World War and an inveterate gambler, was married to Estelle, a society beauty of the 1920s and the daughter of the Italian Marquis de Sarzano. Christopher was born in Belgravia and educated at Wellington College, Berkshire, and could trace his ancestry to the emperor Charlemagne. He served in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve during the Second World War, where he was mentioned in dispatches.

It was a background that oozed confidence and charm. He was even a distant cousin of another debonair Englishman, Ian Fleming (who wanted to cast Lee as the villain in the first Bond film, the eponymous Dr No, a role that would have suited him perfectly).

A possessor of a rich baritone voice, which he is said to have exercised every day, he could have become a singer but opted for the movies, making his first film in 1947. It was a career that continued right up to the present. He was even slated to star opposite Uma Thurman in a film about 9/11 due to begin shooting in November.

And it was a career that stretched well beyond horror film. I was on a trip to Karachi in the 1990s and was surprised to bump into him in a hotel lobby. He was making a film about the founder of Pakistan, Jinnah, in which he played the title role. He said it was one of his most important films. And it speaks volumes about the respect afforded to him around the world that Pakistan was happy to see him playing its most revered hero.

He was bewilderingly eclectic, even when he should have been in his dotage. He made a record of Broadway and light opera tunes in his seventies, and graduated to heavy metal in his eighties. In 2010, his album Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross won a Spirit of Metal Award from Metal Hammer magazine. He marked his 92nd birthday by releasing an album of heavy metal cover versions. His 2013 single, “Jingle Hell”, entered the Billboard Hot 100 in America at number 22 – which made him the oldest living artist ever to enter the charts.

News of Sir Christopher’s death was released by his wife, the former Danish model Birgit Kroencke, who had held back the information for four days until all family members and friends were informed. The couple had been married for over 50 years and had one daughter, Christina.

Among the many tributes to Sir Christopher was one from David Cameron, who called him a “titan of the golden age of cinema”. That would, indeed, have been sufficient, but his was a career that went well beyond that golden age and even beyond cinema.