Christopher Lee and Why You Should Care That He Died, Jamie.

If I was Larry King, I would be very very nervous right now, because Death apparently is having a celebrity clearance sale. About one particular death, I read today on Facebook some wise acre's post puzzling as to why we should care about Christopher Lee's passing. Well, for me on a personal movie nerd level, here's why.

Back in the distant past, when I was a very impressionable lad, late one night on the t.v. a movie came on that ran it's credits over a stone coffin in a tomb, After the credits, there was a pause, then bright red blood began dripping down the side of the coffin and IT FREAKED ME THE F OUT. An image like that, it can get past your defenses pretty quick (about a year later Kubrick topped that with an entire elevator full of blood, but I was so twisted by then, it was fascinating and not horrifying.)  A while after this, I was casually flipping through a huge book on horror movies, and was confronted with a double page, full color blow up of this:

Holy crap! Who is this guy snarling his way through Dracula? Christopher Lee, kids. Reading on, turns out this guy played all the big Monsters Of Filmland starting back in the fifties. The mummy, Frankenstein's monster, and Dracula, that film turning back up on the channel eight late night movie. Getting past the bloody coffin scene at the top of the movie, here's your intro to Dracula, silhouetted at the top of the stairs, his stride crossing the set with elegance and a certain, barely restrained urgency.

Of course, this being a Hammer film, just about everything from the book is tossed out and just a couple of scenes later Chris is a snarling red eyed animal. So, the man had range. I was to discover that he brought his innate elegance and rich mahogany voice to an incredible range of characters, including one of my favorites, The Man With The Golden Gun. Nobody entered a scene better than Christopher Lee:

He was rarely a member of the team, I find. He often stands alone in these scenes, his royal gravitas isolating him from everybody else on screen. And when he did cross the screen and move his six foot five frame amongst his fellow actors, the effect was subtle and subconsciously devestating.

He even pulled off roles entirely in German.

He played Death. Because of course he did.

And of course this last generation of filmgoers remembers him as the conniving Count in the last round of Star Wars movies and the evil Saruman, rocking the white nightgown and throwing Middle Earth into turmoil in The Lord Of The Rings:

So why should nerds and non-nerds celebrate Christopher Lee? Because the breadth of his roles was highly uncommon, and the elegant intelligence he brought to even the silliest of roles needs to be celebrated, memorialized and learned from. Study those moves, kids, that's a grown up. That's a real man.  R.I.P. Christopher Lee. Thanks for your fantastic time on this planet. We should all be so lucky.

And while you are down here, check out this thing we did: