Sir Christopher Lee

Died: June 7, 2015

Sir Christopher Lee, who has died aged 93, was an actor who spent much of his career trying to escape the three Hammer horror roles that brought him fame but also the curse of typecasting: the vampire, the monster and the mummy. He did break free later in his career but his speciality was always the bad guy, which he played memorably in Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and in his favourite film The Wicker Man. "I learned from the outset," he once said, "that the best lines are given to the baddies."

He learned that lesson in the first part he ever played: Rumpelstitlskin in a production at his school in Switzerland. Christopher was born in Belgravia in 1922, but moved to Switzerland with his mother after his parents divorced. His mother was Estelle Marie Carandini di Sarzano, a member of an old European family; his father was Geoffrey Lee, a lieutenant colonel with the King's Royal Rifle Corps who fought at the Somme.

As his mother was rather cruelly fond of pointing out, Christopher was a mistake. Not only that, she hated being pregnant and often complained about it to the family doctor (although he was a straight-talking Scot who is said to have told her "it's there noo!"). A fateful fact that Christopher Lee only noticed much later on life was that, as he was being made in his mother's belly, Nosferatu, the silent film version of Dracula, was being made in Germany.

After six years in Switzerland, the family moved back to Belgravia and Christopher was sent to Wellington College. After school, he took a junior position with a shipping company before volunteering to join the RAF during the Second World War. He trained in Tiger Moths in Rhodesia and was in his element until a doctor told him that his optic nerve was unreliable and his career as a pilot was over. Stuck for what to do, he applied to join intelligence and was seconded to the Rhodesian Police Force, where he served as a prison warder.

After the war ended, the former pilot and intelligence officer tried to adjust back to office life but failed and it was a cousin of his who suggested he try acting. Through a family friend, he got a foot in the door of the Rank Organisation and ended up on a seven-year contract at ten pounds a week.

The contract was not an immediate route to success, however, and for much of the seven years, the young actor was stuck in bit parts. In his first film, 1948's Corridor of Mirrors, he had one line; in his second, Hamlet, it was just one word: "Lights!" - and he wasn't even seen on screen.

Part of the problem for Christopher Lee was that he was considered too different. For a start, he was 6ft 5in tall and many casting directors also considered him too foreign looking. It was only later that these qualities began to be seen as an asset when the young actor started being cast as the swarthy villain. He played the role in many films of the 1950s and came to a violent end in most of them.

His first Hammer film was 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein which featured Peter Cushing as the Baron. Cushing and Lee first encountered each other on set when Lee, who was playing the monster, stormed into the studio and said "I haven't got any lines!" Cushing is said to have replied: "You're lucky, I've read the script."

Whatever the failings of the script, the film was a big hit and led directly to Lee being cast for the first time as Dracula. He would go on to play the role seven times for Hammer, each time with increasing reluctance and each time in a film that was a little bit sillier than the one before. Sir Christopher had finally found the success he craved - just not in the form he wanted - and he was always rueful about the long-term effects of being so strongly associated with the role.

"It brought me a name, "he said, "a fan club and a second-hand car, for all of which I was grateful. It also brought me the blessing of Lucifer. Count Dracula might escape but not the actors who play him."

Sir Christopher offered different explanations over the years of why he kept playing a part he hated: he once said Hammer would emotionally blackmail him by saying other actors would be out of work; he also said it was his living and he had no choice. Whatever the explanation, his association with Hammer continued throughout the 1960s and 70s. Together with Frankenstein's monster and Dracula, his other great role for the studio was under layers of bandages in The Mummy.

Away from Hammer, Sir Christopher's roles were also mostly villains. He appeared in five Fu Manchu films in the 1960s and in 1973 was Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun opposite Roger Moore. The same year, he also appeared in what he considered his best film, The Wicker Man, as the crazed laird of a Scottish island Lord Summerisle. The picture of him, arms outstretched, eyes ablaze, in front of the wicker man has become one of the symbolic images of horror cinema.

By the mid 1970s, he was fed up of horror roles and it was the director Billy Wilder who told him the only way to escape typecasting was to move to America. Sir Christopher took his advice and worked in Hollywood for many years, although the roles he was offered were hardly inspiring, with the exception of the career-defying part of a gay Hell's Angel in the film Serial.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the leading roles had become more infrequent, although Sir Christopher was always busy - the longest he was ever out of work was four months - and in 1998, he played what he considered his most important role: Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the biopic Jinnah. He was also much in demand for voice work and fulfilled that role several times for Tim Burton, in Jabberwocky and The Corpse Bride among others.

By this point, it would have been no surprise if Sir Christopher's career had started to wind down, but it was about to enter a new reinvigorated stage that would not only make him recognisable to a new generation but bring two roles he relished.

The first was in the Lord of the Rings films. Sir Christopher was a lifelong fan of the original book - he read it once a year for most of his life - and had hoped to play Gandalf. In the end, that part went to Ian McKellen, but Sir Christopher was still chillingly memorable as the wizard Saruman.

The second role was Count Dooku, the Jedi knight in two of the Star Wars prequels, Attack of the Clones in 2002 and Revenge of the Sith in 2005. A pleasing coincidence for Sir Christopher was that his great chum Peter Cushing appeared in the first Star Wars film in 1977; in all, Cushing and Lee appeared in 22 films together.

Away from films, Sir Christopher was obsessed with golf (he was a member of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers) and loved music. He also had a considerable singing voice and recorded several albums, including, most surprisingly, a heavy metal album Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross, when he was 90.

He was knighted in 2009 and is survived by his wife, the Danish model and painter Gitte Kroencke, and their daughter Christina.

MARK SMITH