LONDON, (Reuters) – Master of the macabre Christopher Lee, who portrayed Dracula in outrageous Hammer Films horror classics but became known to later generations for roles in “Star Wars” and as the wizard Saruman in the “Lord of the Rings”, has died aged 93.
Lee died last Sunday in hospital, where he had been undergoing treatment for respiratory problems, a copy of his death certificate posted online showed. Lee’s agent, in an emailed statement, said his family “wishes to make no comment”.
Roger Moore, who played James Bond in “The Man with the Golden Gun” (1974) in which Lee was the villain Scaramanga, paid tribute to Lee on Twitter and offered condolences to his wife of 54 years, the former Danish model Birgit Kroncke, their daughter Christina and her husband, Juan Francisco Aneiros Rodriguez.
“It’s terrible when you lose an old friend, and Christopher Lee was one of my oldest,” Moore said. “We first met in 1948.”
The London-born Lee achieved fame from the late 1950s into the 1970s playing characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Mummy for Hammer Films.
With his deep, mellifluous voice and ramrod 6-foot 4-inch (1.93 metre) frame, Lee was the last English-language horror movie star in a line that traced back to silent era luminary Lon Chaney and included Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, Lee’s regular Hammer Films co-star.
Lee brought to his monsters a sense of pitifulness that he called “the loneliness of evil.” Despite being a master of the horror genre, Lee did not even like the word.
“It implies something nauseating, revolting, disgusting – which one sees too often these days. I prefer the word ‘fantasy,’” he told the New York Times in 2002.
Many leading directors sought out Lee’s talents, especially in the latter stages of his career when he was already elderly.
