Icons all. I’ve spent many, many hours of my life watching their various performances and now the last of them is gone.
Yusaku Matsuda was a fantastic actor but may have had, um, a bit of a blind spot regarding illnesses.
RIP, Sir Lee. Thank you for all those many hours we have spent, and will spend, together. I’m listening to both Charlemagne albums now and will leave them on all day in your honor.
\m/
You know those “Most interesting man in the World” commercials? Christopher Lee actually was that person. Though he strikes me as more of a single malt man than a Dos Equis drinker. I like to think Peter Cushing has a bottle waiting for him in the next world.
He was only 17 in vampire years. 
Wallace will play Knight & Johnson “King of Elfland’s Daughter” lp.
I’m glad we had him as long as we did, but still wish it could’a been just a bit longer.
I thought he’d just go on forever. He left behind an amazing body of work though.
Perfectly put - you could scarcely accomplish much more than he did in a single lifetime. RIP.
My dad was a huge fan. He even named me after him.
RIP.
Youtube has some good clips of Lee reading poetry. J.R.R. Tolkien, Edgar Alan Poe, Lewis Carroll.
Out of all the hundreds of roles, many with signature lines, the one that comes to mind whenever Lee is mentioned is Gremlins 2, when his somewhat-mad scientist character opens his Disease Of The Month package:
“Rabies? I’ve got rabies. I was supposed to get the flu this month!”
From the book: “I could die for you in every way known to man, and in a few ways known only to scriptwriters. I could see now that provided that I remained fit, the future held many more deaths yet. I could only hope that they would serve some purpose, and that perhaps a reputation might come in the same way as a coral formation, which is made up of a deposit of countless tiny corpses.”
RIP Mr. Lee.
The last of his kind. Rest in peace, Sir Christopher.
I’ve heard that it’s actually Lee, not Kevin Bacon, who is the actor closest to the center of the “co-starred with” network. That is to say, if you took every actor’s Christopher Lee number and added them all up, the total would be less than if you did the same with Kevin Bacon numbers.
There can’t have been many actors who got to keep working so late in life and be so much in demand–he was in the middle of 4 more projects when he passed!
I can’t find the clip, but my favorite is him on NBC Saturday Night (1977?) playing “Mr. Death” with Larraine Newman as her standard little girl character; she keeps asking questions he shouldn’t answer and finally she says something like When will it be MY turn, Mr. Death? Up until now, he’d been conversational, but when she asks that final question THE VOICE booms out I’ll come for you on your 16th birthday.
Thank you, Mr. Lee. You were always a class act.
^ Six degrees of Christopher Lee? It’s catchy.
“I’ll come and visit you on your 93rd birthday!”
“…what!?”
“Just kidding, Mr. Lee. You’d better get some sleep…”
RIP, Mr Lee.
Dracula, James Bond, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Avengers, SNL…
…not to mention appearing on the cover of “Band On The Run”.
Strength in deeds, strength in will.
Depth of shoe, no blood can fill…
Blucher!
::Neigh-eigh-eigh-eigh-eigh::
(It’s been awhile)
He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
(His first appearance with Peter Cushing–though their roles were relatively small, and they shared no scenes–was in Olivier’s Hamlet.)
Other reasons he was just plain cool:
He was a devoted and loyal friend. He spoke highly of his dear friends Peter Cushing and Vincent Price for years after their deaths, and was a mainstay for Peter when the poor man was a wreck over his wife’s death.
He spent over fifty years with his one and only wife. (He married a bit late–his early forties–but seemed to have gotten his wild-oat-sowing out of the way before that.)
Was related to Ian Fleming by marriage, and served with him in WWII. Fleming is said to have based Bond on three people: himself, Christopher…and Jon Pertwee.
Going on from that–he was in intelligence services during the war, and after his service with the RAF was part of a special force (nicknamed “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”) whose purpose was, according to Churchill, to “set Europe ablaze.” Much of his work is STILL classified, so he never spoke in detail about it, but while filming Saruman’s death scene in LOTR he indicated to Peter Jackson that he knew very well the sound a man makes when stabbed in the back…
Was a trained singer, and an opera fan, but also dabbled in heavy metal–even releasing several metal songs. He said that headbanging in the car helped loosen up his neck muscles. (He did a studio recording of The King and I, as well, but I would have LOVED to hear him as Emile DeBecque in South Pacific.)
Was the Narrator on a studio cast recording of Rocky Horror.
Was, as some of you have mentioned, on Paul McCartney’s Band On The Run cover.
Was a fan of Warner Brothers cartoons (as was Peter Cushing) and used to make Peter laugh with a spot-on Yosemite Sam impression.
Was the only member of the LOTR cast to have met Tolkien personally.
Was quite conscientious about his fantasy roles–besides Saruman, he voiced King Haggard in the animated Last Unicorn. He took the book with him on set and discussed certain passages with the director that he felt HAD to be in there for the characters’ sake, and why.*
Played a good golf game, too.
*For a while, they were trying to get a new live-action adaptation off the ground, with Sir Christopher reprising Haggard once again. Efforts have once again picked up…but now we’ll never get to see Sir Christopher do the role again.
Lee’s close to the top, if not THE top: Six degrees of Kevin Bacon: scientists expose the seedy underbelly | Mathematics | The Guardian
He lived an incredible life.
RIP Sir Christopher
Donald Pleasence was also in a huge amount of movies and was nearly the center of the Hollywood universe.