Christopher Lee, Actor Who Made Dracula Count Again, Dies at …

Christopher Lee, the second most famous Dracula of the 20th century an impressive feat and a memorably irrepressible villain in James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun, in the Star Wars films and in The Lord of the Rings pics, died Sunday in London after suffering heart failure and respiratory problems. He was 93.

Lee appeared in 10 films as Count Dracula (nine if his uncredited role in the comedy One More Time is excluded).

His first role for famed British horror factory Hammer Films was not the Transylvanian vampire, however, but Frankensteins Monster in 1957s The Curse of Frankenstein. His close friend Peter Cushing, with whom he would co-star in horror films frequently, starred as the Baron.

Lee made his first appearance as the sharp-toothed Count in 1958s Horror of Dracula.

For reasons not quite certain, he skipped the 1960 sequel Brides of Dracula, but he returned to the role for 1965s Dracula: Prince of Darkness a movie in which he hissed a lot but had no dialogue, because the dialogue was so bad, Lee later claimed.

Lee said later that he was reluctant to continue in the role but appeared in Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969) and Scars of Dracula (1970), hit films that are all now considered classics of the genre. In his last Dracula films for Hammer, Lee starred in the less-successful Dracula A.D. 1972 and Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (1973), which brought the character into a contemporary setting. (Lee also starred in Count Dracula, a film by cult exploitation director Jess Franco that was made in 1970 and released in 1973; in 1976, the multilingual Lee appeared as Dracula in a French film called Dracula and Son.)

Lee made horror films for Hammer that were not vampire-centered. He was the title character in 1959s The Mummy and 1966s Rasputin, the Mad Monk. He also brought Dennis Wheatley, an acclaimed author of occult thrillers, to Hammer, where two adaptations were produced, both starring Lee: The Devil Rides Out (1967) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976). The first is considered among Hammers best work. The second, although financially successful, was something of a disaster, with the author disowning the film, which was the studios last horror pic.

He also appeared in a number of non-Hammer horror films, including the Fu Manchu series of the late 1960s; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adaptation I, Monster (1970); The Creeping Flesh, with Cushing; and Lees favorite thriller effort, The Wicker Man, in which he played Lord Summerisle.

After 1977s wretched Meatcleaver Massacre, for which, Lee claimed, the filmmakers had slapped on voiceover narration the actor had recorded for an entirely different movie, he largely steered clear of horror films, though Lee did appear, along with Cushing and Vincent Price, in 1983s House of the Long Shadows, an American-produced horror comedy that in many ways brought the era of British horror pics to an end.

Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born in Belgravia, Westminster, England, the son of a career military man and his wife, a famous beauty and contessa who was part Italian. They separated when Lee and his sister were still young, and their mother took the children to live in Switzerland.

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Christopher Lee, Actor Who Made Dracula Count Again, Dies at ...