THE MANY FACES OF SIR CHRISTOPHER LEE FROM FRANKENSTEIN TO SARUMAN

The goal of this thesis is to analyze some of the many roles played by Sir Christopher Lee in his long cinema career, which began at the end of the 1940s and ended in 2014, few month before his death. The first chapter is dedicated to the stardom, since Lee was a peculiar cinema star, the second one to his biography, the list of movies he played in and the Battle of Cassino, where he fought in 1944. Christopher Lee became famous also thanks to the Hammer, the movie studio for which he collaborated in many movies: the first movie was The Curse of Frankenstein (T. Fisher, 1957), an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. Here Lee played the Creature, whilePeter Cushing played Dr. Frankenstein. After the success of The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer adapted Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with Lee as the Evil Count, Cushing as Van Helsing and the direction given to Terence Fisher. After that, the trio Cushing-Fisher-Lee became the diamond top of the producing company. The period 1970-1989 was marked by new successful “faces”: Dr. Jekyll and his evil version Mr. Hyde in I, Monster (S. Weeks, 1971) , Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man (R. Hardy, 1973), the Colonel Birgham in Nothing but the Night (P. Sasdy, 1973), Mycrosoft Holmes in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (B. Wilder, 1970) and finally the antagonist Count de Rochefort in The Three Musketeers movies, adapted from Alexandre Dumas’ novel: The Three Musketeers (R. Lester, 1973), The Four Musketeers (R. Lester, 1974) and The Return of the Musketeers (R. Lester, 1989). The 1990s began with Lee taking part in the role of a millionaire to the movie The Rainbow Thief (A. Jodorowsky, 1990), where he makes a short appearance at the beginning. This movie marks the beginning of briefer and briefer appearances. Despite the age, he did not want to retire and continued to appear in many movies and TV series; he also dubbed many actors in several TV Series and videogames. After that movie, for Lee it began a period of new success: he was cast for The Lord of The Rings trilogy (P. Jackson, 2001-2003), where he played Saruman despite his desire to play Gandalf, but he was too old for the part, so he accepted that part, since he wanted to participate to the adaptation of Tolkien’s novel.