Christopher Lee is the first knighted vampire!

The career of Christopher Lee, the veteran screen actor who has received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list, has lasted 60 years and includes roles in more than 250 films.

   It is for his long line of memorable villains that he is best known – a distinguished lineage that includes Bond bad guy Scaramanga and evil wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings.

  The Rings trilogy, coupled with the Star Wars prequels in which he played the nefarious Count Dooku, were the most successful films of his career from a commercial standpoint.

For all that, the 87-year-old will always be associated with Count Dracula, a malevolent hero he invested with a demonic charisma and a dash of sex appeal.

Born into affluence, the imposing actor can trace his lineage to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor. After public school he served in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve during the Second World War, where he was mentioned in dispatches.

His screen career began when he joined the Rank Organisation in 1947, training as an actor in their so-called “charm school”. Yet it was his association with British studio Hammer that made him a household name, playing such iconic characters as Frankenstein’s Monster, The Mummy and, of course, Dracula.

   Critics said Hammer’s movies were films to disgust the mind and repel the senses, but audiences lapped up their ghoulish, blood-soaked excesses.

Lee would go on to reprise his trademark role in a number of sequels before finally laying him to rest in the 1970s. A move to Hollywood offered a wider range of characters to sink his teeth into – among them a gay Hell’s Angel in 1980 film Serial. A measure of his popularity came when he hosted Saturday Night Live, a comedy show watched by 35 million Americans.

   Among hundreds of films, Lee’s personal favourite is cult thriller The Wicker Man. He also cites Jinnah, a biopic of Pakistan’s founder, as his most important work.

“It had the best reviews I’ve ever had in my entire career – as a film and as a performance,” he told the BBC News website in 2004. A distant cousin and golfing partner of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, Lee was in the frame to play Doctor No in the first Bond movie.

   Joseph Wiseman won the part, but Christopher Lee would later appear opposite Roger Moore’s 007 in 1974′s The Man With The Golden Gun.

In 2000 he was seen as Flay, the loyal yet verbally challenged manservant in the BBC adaptation of Gormenghast. In recent years he has also been seen in a number of Tim Burton movies, among them Sleepy Hollow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

In the flesh, the tall and authoritative actor is nothing like the larger-than-life grotesques who chilled generations of moviegoers.

   His knighthood for services to drama and charity reflects the esteem with which he is held and his unique ability to make screen villainy devilishly attractive.

More GoreMaster People at GoreMaster.com

 Christopher Lee’s Autobiography

 

Learn to make Vampire Effects at Goremaster.com!

 

 
Christopher Lee’s Movies and Books
 

Guillermo del Toro takes on Hobbit, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde

Guillermo del Toro speaks to BBC Newsnight Review

   Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is on a quest to catalogue things that go bump in the night. Having tackled Hellboy and Blade, he is about to start filming his two part film version of J R R Tolkien’s Middle Earth drama The Hobbit. He is also planning his own filmic takes on Frankenstein’s monster and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

As if that wasn’t enough to be going on with, he has just published The Strain, the first of a planned series of horror novels about vampires written with Chuck Hogan.

Frankenstein, Jekyll, vampires – you’re steeped in horror at the moment, will it spill over into The Hobbit?

The intensity of the scenes of the Hobbit will have the intensity they had in the book when I was a kid reading them.

The spiders of Mirkwood are a pretty harrowing experience and facing the great goblin in the caves is quite a thrilling moment. The Battle of the Five Armies, the first encounter with Gollum – there are scary moments in the book.

But they are already there. We are not inventing or trying to do horror for horror’s sake we are trying to imbue those moments of intensity in the book into the movie.

 

Are you going to do anything different with Gollum to heighten that?
From a design standpoint it will be the same creature just a few years earlier, but I think that there is never a scene quite like riddles in the dark in the trilogy.

As an introduction to Gollum and a flashpoint in the origin of that character, it is so powerful and so primal that it would be different in that way. We are presenting a side of the character that is very strong and very beautiful and iconic.

What’s been the biggest challenge of working on The Hobbit so far?

Believing that it’s real! I am so happy doing this movie that I truly dread that it will be a dream. It’s fantastic.

I am 44, and it has taken me 44 years to really start living like a child. I go to work every day with the joy and enthusiasm of a kid, playing with his friends in a fantastic sandbox.

And next you get to put your own stamp on two other favourites, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frankenstein. How will you do that?

They’ve never been told quite the way I am planning to tell them. I have a very strong and interesting take on Frankenstein. It’s my favourite creature ever, both in film and literature.

But I think there is still one story to be told, at least from my point of view. And that’s using the monster of Frankenstein as a very Miltonian figure, a man abandoned by his creator in a world he doesn’t understand.

For Jekyll and Hyde I have a very interesting take. It’s quite perverse.

There are two key things in the story I’m attracted to. One I will not reveal because it’s a good surprise. But the second one is the fact that Jekyll becomes addicted in a joyful and liberating way to becoming Mr. Hyde.

We always see addiction from the puritanical point of view. We always talk about the horrors of addiction. But people are addicted to substances and experiences for a reason. There is a powerful thing that fills something missing in their lives. Jekyll becomes addicted to Hyde.

Both Jekyll and Hyde and Frankenstein I would do as period pieces. I don’t want to modernise them or try to set them in the present day.

You have tackled vampires before in Blade II, why choose to return to them for your novels?

Both Chuck Hogan and I wanted to take Eastern European oral folklore about vampirism but give it a very CSI influenced, happening now, pandemic emergency feeling. Because that is what Bram Stoker did with Dracula in the 1890s. That book was a sort of brisk, procedural book that was steeped in Eastern European lore.

Little by little, in the trilogy, we’re going to reinvent anatomy, biology, the spiritual origins of vampires and the mythology.

I’ve been studiously reading both vampire fact and fiction since I was a kid. I love John Polidori’s The Vampyre, a penny dreadful called Varney the Vampyre, I love Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. I’m even more influenced by studies in Vampirism as fact in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Vampires as fact? Do you think they exist in some form then?

No, but I believe that creatures and places can exist if they exist in the collective imagination. Although we’ll never find a vampire corpse or a real alternate species of human or sub-human, they do exist by virtue of the fact that we have all willed them into reality. The same as dragons and a few other creatures.

 

What draws you to all these dark creatures in your work?

Actually, normally I write and direct movies that show the monster as a creature more human than the humans.

But in the case of The Strain, the vampires nest in places of great tragedy [the site of the Twin Towers, Treblinka] and they ultimately represent our inhuman side. An inhumanity that is beyond our scope.

Guillermo del Toro’s filmography

2008: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

2006: Pan’s Labyrinth

2004: Hellboy                                                                            

2002:Blade II

2001: The Devil’s Backbone

1997: Mimic

1993: Cronos

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I, Frankenstein

I Frankenstein

 

 

 

4/16/09  – 

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Director Patrick Tatopoulos, Underworld co-creator Kevin Grevioux and Death Ray Films are partnering up on the film I, Frankenstein.

I, Frankenstein is a soon to be released Darkstorm Comic that was written by Grevioux. The film combines classic monsters of horror like Frankenstein’s Monster, the Invisible Man, Dracula and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in a present day “film noir” setting.

In the film Frankenstein has learned to control his inner demons and is now a private detective. As for Dracula, he is a crime leader and the the Invisible Man works as “a secret operative.”

Producing will be Robert Sanchez and Chris Patton through Death Ray. Ryan Turek is helping to develop the project.

Death Ray hopes to launch a franchise with I, Frankenstein.

 

 

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Frankstein Head Knocker