Christopher Lee dies at 93; screen star of ‘Dracula’ and …

Christopher Lee, the English actor who emerged as a British horror movie icon in the 1950s with his memorable portrayal of Count Dracula and later appeared in the blockbuster Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings films, has died. He was 93.

Lee died in London of undisclosed causes, according to an official withthe Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with the policies of the borough. A death certificate was given June 8, the official said.

In a career that spanned more than 60 years, beginning with bit parts in England in the late 1940s, Lee was known by the mid-'60s as one of the screens foremost purveyors of evil and terror, having played roles such as Frankensteins monster, the Mummy and Rasputin, the Mad Monk.

Director Tim Burton, who cast Lee in several films, once described him as one of the last real icons, a figure out of another age, not just another movie age. To my generation, he was Dracula and all of them.

Lee was still a relatively unknown character actor in Britain when he played his first horror role for Hammer Film Productions: the gruesome creature in The Curse of Frankenstein, a 1957 film starring Peter Cushing, who would become Lees frequent co-star.

A year later, the towering 6-foot-4 actor with a voice that has been described as a solemn, aristocratic baritone gained international fame as the blood-sucking vampire in Hammer Films Horror of Dracula.

Billed as THE TERRIFYING LOVER WHO DIED YET LIVED! thefilm presented Dracula as a sex symbol, a nocturnal predator who awakened his female victims sexual desires.

With his eyes ablaze and eyeteeth bared, his aristocratic nostrils flaring, and his cloak clutched tight about him like the wings of a giant bat trapped in midflight, Lee made Dracula his own as no actor had before him, Denis Meikle wrote in his book A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer.

Lee once credited three films for bringing me to the fore as an actor, all of them remakes of classic films: A Tale of Two Cities (1958), in which he played the villainous marquis; The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula.

But Horror of Dracula, titled Dracula in Britain, was the one that made the difference.

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Christopher Lee dies at 93; screen star of 'Dracula' and ...

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero