Happy Birthday, Christopher Lee

Sir Christopher Lee, here masterfully photographed by Nadav Kander, celebrates a glorious 90^th birthday today, May 27.

We send our best wishes, our love, admiration and gratitude to Mr. Lee who continues to entertain and amaze us. Recently in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and currently in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Mr. Lee will voice Dracula in Burton’s Frankenweenie later this year, and returns as Saruman in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films.

Worth noting: Mr. Lee shares a birthday with Vincent Price, who would have been 101 today, and Peter Cushing would have turned 99 yesterday, May 26.

Also worth noting, Mr. Lee’s wife, Brigit Kroncke, was chosen and fabulously featured on the cover of Advanced Style by Ari Seth Cohen, a blog-based book described as an “ode to the confidence, beauty, and fashion that can only be achieved through the experience of a life lived glamorously.” The book was published earlier this week.

           

The Official Christopher Lee website.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Famous Monsters Fearbook 1971

Famous Monsters “Fearbooks” were all-reprint annuals, this one published between regular issues number 87 and 88, in the winter of 1971.

Gleefully hyperbolic cover blurbs were standard for Warren and Ackerman’s Famous Monsters, getting your fanboy heart racing as soon as you caught sight of an issue on the newsstand. Best Issue Ever was used often enough to become a sort of FM mantra. Variations included Most Exciting, Biggest, Special and Super-Special, the ever-popular Collector’s Edition, and an occasional Super Spooktacular!

The portrait of Christopher Lee from 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein was painted by the great Basil Gogos. The same character had previously appeared on a Warren magazine cover in a version executed by Russ Jones. Both covers featured the same solid, fire engine red background for the flayed-faced Monster.

Book: Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos.

Related:
The Covers of Frankenstein: Famous Monsters Strike Back!

Sir Creature

Splendid news has come that actor Christopher Lee, who celebrated his 87th birthday on May 27, has earned a Knighthood. It’s SIR Christopher Lee, now! By the way, last April, Lee and his wife of 46 years, Gitte, were given a Couple of the Year Award by the readers of the German Gala magazine. Deserved honors all around.

Lee’s friend, Peter Cushing, was awarded an OBE, making him an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, and Hammer Films, the studio that launched Lee and Cushing as gothic horror film stars was given the Queen’s Award to Industry for their contribution to the British economy in 1968. That presentation was made on the set of Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, with the Queen’s emissaries shaking hands with Lee in Dracula cape and fangs.

Back in 1957, though he complained that the part had no dialog, Christopher Lee’s career got a supercharged boost with his appearance as the gangly Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein. Shortly thereafter, he rocketed to international stardom as Dracula (1958), a high orbit from which he has never descended.

The photograph here is another stunning portrait from the excellent Life Magazine online archives. It captures Lee in a quiet moment, wearing gruesome over the head makeup indicating crude brain surgery after being shot in the eye, for the film’s climax.

Related:

Posts about Christopher Lee

Happy Birthday, Christopher Lee

A superb, saturnine portrait in profile of Christopher Lee in heavy makeup as The Creature in the 1957 classic The Curse of Frankenstein.

It’s Lee’s birthday today, he turns a glorious 87, and he is still a busy actor. Thank you, dear sir, for a lifetime of entertainment and may you continue doing what you so obviously love as long as your heart desires.

Lee’s photo comes from the Life Magazine archives, a spectacular resource. Go and enter your search words and enjoy the wonderful returns. Try “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and you’ll see rare color photos of the Gillman. Enter ‘Destination Moon” and you’ll see tons of behind the scenes photos.

It’s also Vincent Price’s birthday today, he would have been 98. I have posted pics of Lee — including a wonderful shot of him at the start of his film career, mugging for the camera — and Price on Monster Crazy.

Related:
The Monster: Christopher Lee
Vincent Price and Christopher Lee
All posts related to Christopher Lee
All posts related to The Curse of Frankenstein

Vincent Price and Christopher Lee

It’s a wonderful coincidence… Peter Cushing was born on May 26 and, today, May 27, we celebrate Vincent Price (1911-1993) and Christopher Lee (born in 1922). Three horror icons, contemporaries, sharing birthdays on two consecutive dates. Even better, the three men were good friends.

Vincent Price played literate, highbrow villains and haunted men who wore their doom like penance. He also enjoyed sending up his roles and did so often, with glee. In a Frankenstein register, Price played the patchworked, retrofitted Dr. Phibes, and he was The Inventor who put Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands together.

Of his meeting Christopher Lee in 1968, Price said, “I had heard he was very pompous, and I was really a little worried about meeting him. Well, we took one look at each other and started laughing… We find each other hysterically funny.”

Christopher Lee had a similar experience a dozen years earlier meeting Peter Cushing when he reported to the set of The Curse of Frankenstein. Lee wrote, “Our very first encounter began with me storming into his dressing-room and announcing in petulant tones, ‘I haven’t got any lines!’ He looked up, his mouth twitched and he said dryly, ‘You’re lucky. I’ve read the script.”

With that, the two men were instant and permanent friends.

It was a hard-working but happy set. “I was never so content”, Lee said. He would entertain the crew singing opera while encased in head-to-foot monster bandages. Playing the Frankenstein Monster launched Lee on a superlative career as a movie villain, much like it had done his friend and neighbor, the elderly Boris Karloff. There is no evidence the two men ever discussed the role they shared, but the Frankenstein Monster was certainly good to both of them.

Lee, a robust 86 years old, is still very active and very much in demand. Among the blockbusters he appeared in recently, he played Count Dooku, closing out the Star Wars series that his old friend Peter Cushing had helped launch.

Lee’s official website features a Christmas Day video message in which he tells the wonderful story behind his colorful Christmas hat. It’s worth clicking through to hear it.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Lee!

Quotes are from Vincent Price, A Daughter’s Biography by Victoria Price, and Christopher Lee’s very entertaining autobiography, Tall, Dark and Gruesome, still available from Midnight Marquee Press. A new, reworked version is available, now called Lord of Misrule: The Autobiography of Christopher Lee.

Wiki pages for Vincent Price and Christopher Lee.

Christopher Lee sings! One of several clips available on YouTube.

Elizabeth : Hazel Court

No sooner had I posted a birthday celebration for Valerie Hobson that news came of another screen Elizabeth. Hazel Court, the ingenuous fiancée to Peter Cushing’s cruel Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein of 1957, passed away on April 15. An autobiography, Horror Queen, is due for publication on the 23rd.

I am surprised how sad the news made me. I can’t believe how deep my heart sank. I realize now how important Hazel Court was to me. I remember how I sought out her pictures and how her presence elevated so many films that I loved. Her list of horror films is long and storied, with significant contributions made at Hammer Films of England and American International of Hollywood.

In the winter of 1956, Court joined Cushing, Christopher Lee, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and director Terence Fisher at Hammer’s Bray Studios to make cinematic history, in the form of The Curse of Frankenstein. Court’s four-year old daughter, Sally Walsh, appeared briefly as a young Elizabeth. When the film went out around the world in the summer of ’57, despite being shredded as sadistic and repulsive by British critics, it was box-office gold, and the Hammer era of Gothic Horrors was launched.

Hazel Court was ravishing, “a beauty among the beasts” as one reviewer put it. You couldn’t possibly miss her, of course. Imagine: A redhead with green eyes, and generous cleavage bound in Victorian corsets. She was tagged as a “Scream Queen”, and she did have to shriek off the threats of monsters and villains, but she was also one hell of an actress. When given a proper role, she could make it swing. Look at her beguiling turn in Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963) — see a YouTube clip here — and see how she holds her own in a scene with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and a desperately young Jack Nicholson.

By the late sixties, Hazel Court was mostly working in American television, and then she walked away and went on to other things. Encouraged by her friend, art expert Vincent Price, she became an artist, another thing that made me connect with her. She was a painter first, then a sculptor of Italian marble. Admirably, Hazel Court was proud of her horror films, always willing to share her memories, and generous in her recollections of fellow actors and co-stars.

Thinking back, there are three brief scenes that instantly come to mind when I think of Hazel Court. She always seemed to be wearing one of those spectacular opera dresses. In The Raven, she exchanges lines with the venerable Boris Karloff, her back turned to him as he fixes her dress. In The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), she backs up the stairs, keeping a horrified distance from a clawing Anton Diffring, disintegrating before our eyes as his rejuvenation experiment fails. And the most memorable scene, an instant, indelible recall for me, comes in The Curse of Frankenstein, as she prowls the abandoned laboratory and steps out on the balcony…

That’s how I remember the unforgettable Hazel Court, in her bustled, off-the-shoulder dress, holding a gasoline lamp, unaware of The Monster lurking close behind.

Hazel Court's autobiography, from Tomahawk Press.

An obituary in The International Herald Tribune.

Wonderful, touching posts about Hazel Court by Arbogast and Tim Lucas.

A fan page.

The trailer for The Curse of Frankenstein.

Updates:

A recent interview with Hazel Court in a Lake Tahoe paper.

An obituary at Cinefantastique Online.

A rememberance by Tom Weaver on Fangoria.com.

The Covers of Frankenstein : Famous Monsters Strike Back!

Christopher Lee’s pie-in-the-face Frankenstein Monster never looked so good as in this painting by Russ Jones.

Famous Monsters Strike Back!, published by Paperback Library in 1965, was the third and last paperback reprint package of articles and photos from Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

The strong art was originally half of a dramatic double portrait by Jones of Chris Lee in his star-making roles as Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula on the cover of 1964's Famous Films No.2. Art directed by Jones with Joe Orlando, and published by Jim Warren, the magazine was an experiment in using stills from films in a comic book-like “photo-story” format.

The paperback version of the art comes off best, uncropped, with sharper reproduction and more vibrant colors.

The Canadian-born Jones was a multi-tasking artist who wrote and drew comics for all the major publishers. In 1964, he was the founding editor of Warren’s Creepy, even designing the title’s distinctive host character.

In 1966, Jones edited the short-lived but handsomely done Monster Mania for Renaissance Productions. The magazine is memorable for its extensive coverage of Hammer Films, a welcome change to the largely Universal-centric coverage of Famous Monsters and many of its imitators. In the late 60s, Jones traveled to England and worked as a storyboard artist for Hammer.

Warren magazine cover gallery. Here’s another one.

Russ Jones Wiki page.

Happy Birthday Boris and The Daughters of Frankenstein

On this day, November 23, in 1887, William Henry Pratt was born in Camberwell, England. In 1909, an athletic and adventurous young man of 22, Billy Pratt set sail for Canada, chosen over Australia by a lucky coin toss. He arrived at Montreal on May 17 and headed west, working odd jobs as he traveled across the Prairies, over the Rockies and into British Columbia. Somewhere along the way, he fell in with a theatrical troupe and found his true calling.

Adopting the ominous sounding stage name of Boris Karloff, the young actor barnstormed all over America with two-bit stock companies, learning his trade. In 1919, he landed in Los Angeles where the new business of making motion pictures was underway. Karloff’s gaunt profile and dark complexion landed him the usual villainous parts of the day, playing Hurons, Arabs, French-Canadian trappers, Mexican outlaws, evil princes and assorted henchmen. In 1926’s The Bells, Karloff memorably plays a Mesmerist copied off Werner Krauss’ Dr. Caligari.

In 1931, director James Whale picked Karloff to play The Monster in Frankenstein. To Karloff, it was just another job, one of 18 films he made that year. 

Frankenstein, of course, was a sensation and Boris Karloff was not only propelled to movie stardom, but his version of the Monster attained mythic status.

We celebrate another Karloff family birthday, today. On this day, November 23, 1938, Karloff donned his Frankenstein gear and reported to the set at Universal to film the mirror scene with Basil Rathbone in Son of Frankenstein. The crew surprised Boris with a birthday cake. That very same day, there were more celebrations on the set when word came that Boris’ wife, Dorothy, had given birth to a baby girl, Sara Jane.

Today, Sara Karloff keeps the memory of her father alive, appearing at conventions and operating the official Boris Karloff website. In 1996, with the complicity of fellow monster-star offspring Bela Lugosi Jr. and Ron Chaney, Sara Karloff successfully petitioned the US Post Office into issuing stamps honoring their famous fathers.

And yet another happy coincidence: Christopher Lee’s daughter, Christina, was born on this date, in 1963. Lee, of course, is another actor whose career was launched playing Frankenstein’s Monster.

From all of us Frankenstein fans, here’s a heartfelt happy birthday to dear Boris — the most famous Frankenstein of them all — and to the Daughters of Frankenstein, Sara Jane Karloff and Christina Lee.

The photo of Karloff with Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi comes from the Basil Rathbone website where you can see more pictures from the Son of Frankenstein set.

The photo of Christopher Lee and daughter appears in Lee's autobiography "Tall, Dark and Gruesome".

The Monster : Christopher Lee

“It was a case of inventing a being who was neither oneself nor anybody else, but a composite piece of other people, mostly dead.”

— Christopher Lee, from his autobiography, Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1977)

2007 is the 50^th Anniversary year of the release, on May 2, of The Curse of Frankenstein, the film that put Hammer Films of England on the map and rebooted the Frankenstein movie saga.

Christopher Lee played a gangling, spastic Creature, as if every part of him had a mind of its own. The makeup was a mess, but it worked. I saw the film in a second-run house in 1960. When the camera rolled up and Lee ripped the bandages from his face, everyone in the theater jumped a foot out of their seats, the combined effect of the sudden sight of Lee’s leering mashed-potato face and an entire row of teenage girls SHRIEKING on cue. The rest of the movie was watched from one’s seat edge, everyone in the house pumping adrenaline until the final scene unspooled.

It was one of those unique, memorable, communal film experiences. I never experienced anything like it again, with the sole exception of Alien, in 1979, which had everyone in a packed theater on opening night crawling out of their skins.

By the end of 1957, with The Curse of Frankenstein a stunning, worldwide box-office hit, Christopher Lee, his friend Peter Cushing, and director Terence Fisher reunited at Bray Studios on November 11 and began work on Dracula (aka The Horror of Dracula).

50 years on, Christopher Lee is still busy, and we’re all grateful for it. We’ll see him next in The Golden Compass, come December.

Christopher Lee: Official website. On Wikipedia. IMDB page (258 films listed, plus 107 documentaries!)