“On the 7th of June in the year 2015 I passed away, at the age of 93,” states Christopher Lee from the outset, adding, “By then I had become quite accustomed to dying.” It is the paradox at the centre of Jon Spira’s creative documentary: for while, famously, dead men tell no tales, here Lee has risen from the grave to narrate his own biopic. It is a necessary fiction, and Spira is careful to reveal its workings early, showing us Peter Serafinowicz in a sound booth working himself into Lee’s distinctive accent and timbre (which he does very well) before the narration proper starts. Here Serafinowicz is like Alistair McGowan in Mark Cousins’ My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock (2002), resurrecting the deceased subject though a vivid impression of his familiar tones, while reading a well-researched first-person script in fact written by the documentary’s director. Here the voiceover does an incredible job of capturing not just Lee’s life, but his humour.
While Spira deploys an abundance of archival footage – interviews with the actual Lee and clips from his many, varied films – he also fleshes out his otherworldly narrator with marionettes and beautifully abstract animated inserts. Here too, Spira foregrounds his own flirtation with fiction, initially showing not just the Lee puppet itself but also the visible puppeteer pulling the equally visible strings. In other words, this is a documentary unafraid to expose the sophisticated artifice of its own construction.
There is another paradox at work here. Lee was a ‘jobbing’ actor who would take on any part offered in even the lowest-budget, no-brain production, and would always elevate such films by bringing his very best. Yet while the documentary’s narration, and its very title, play upon Lee’s iconic rôles as the undead Dracula (with multiple variants), Lee himself looked down upon horror in much the same way that the British press did during the heights of his reign at Hammer productions. His two personal favourite performances were as Lord Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) – a highly unusual horror rôle written specifically for him by Anthony Schaffer – and as the foundational statesman Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Jamil Dehlavi’s little seen 1998 biopic of the same name, perhaps relegated to oblivion for featuring a white man in the rôle of the ‘father of Pakistan’. When a reporter covering Lee’s 2009 knighthood refers to the actor on camera as the ‘king of horror’, Lee palpably bristles and protests, obviously ashamed of the association and of hearing it cited while in the presence of actual royalty. “I’m not the king of horror,” he insists, “I haven’t done a horror film for 34 yrs!”
The documentary also covers his early years as a reluctant boarding school boy, as a soldier and spy whose wartime adventures inspired his cousin Ian Fleming’s creation of James Bond, even as Lee would eventually play the memorable villain Scaramanga in the rather less memorable 1974 Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun; his periods of voluntary exile in Switzerland and America; his happy collaborations with director Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp; his friendship with Peter Cushing and Vincent Price; his (ahem) heavy metal career; and his late-years reincarnation as the villains Count Dooku and Saruman respectively in the mega-budget, massively successful Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Judicious, affectionate third-party commentary is provided by colleagues (Joe Dante, John Landis, Caroline Munro, Paul Maslansky, Peter Jackson), relatives (Harriet Walter, Juan Aneiros) and his biographer Jonathan Rigby – but, as with a film like Jinnah, it is the fictive framing of fact here which brings Lee, impossibly yet convincingly, back to life, in a bittersweet reflection upon a man who struggled to reconcile himself to the genre that made him famous.
The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee had its world première at FrightFest 2024
