I've always enjoyed his roles in movies. Although I can't remember when he ever played a hero. He's had pretty steady work since 1948 and I believe may be in 200 films or more. I didn't know he was that sick so its quite a shock to me. What are your favorite movies he was in?
I liked him Wickerman, Lord of the Rings, The Man with the Golden Gun, and the Hammerfilms I have seen him in (forget their names now).His most famous Hammerfilms character is most likely Dracula though.
(This post was last modified: 06-11-2015 07:16 AM by kbell.)
Interesting Christopher Lee fact, he was a WW2 vet and was apparently attached with the special operations executive (precursor to SAS) and was attached with Gurkhas in the battle for Monte Cassino. His whole WW2 profile reads like an adventure novel.
He was also the only actor in Lord of the Rings that actually knew Tolkien in real life before Tolkien passed.
Dude lived life hard, like a man, and won the game. It's always sad to see an old classic gentleman like this go.
I liked him in the man with the golden gun, when he's on the beach with his bitch, she dries him off then he ignores her and starts eating oysters and drinking champagne.
(This post was last modified: 06-11-2015 07:27 AM by Disco_Volante.)
“….and we will win, and you will win, and we will keep on winning, and eventually you will say… we can’t take all of this winning, …please Mr. Trump …and I will say, NO, we will win, and we will keep on winning”.
Glad to see I'm not the only one that's brought up The Man With The Golden Gun. Even though it was far from one of the best Bond movies, I liked him in it, and I loved the Golden Gun when I was a kid thanks to GoldenEye 007.
(06-11-2015 07:38 AM)Libertas Wrote: Glad to see I'm not the only one that's brought up The Man With The Golden Gun. Even though it was far from one of the best Bond movies, I liked him in it, and I loved the Golden Gun when I was a kid thanks to GoldenEye 007.
This is legit frame here.
Quote from Christopher Lee on James Bond: “Pierce Brosnan was by far the best and closest to the character.”
“….and we will win, and you will win, and we will keep on winning, and eventually you will say… we can’t take all of this winning, …please Mr. Trump …and I will say, NO, we will win, and we will keep on winning”.
A truely great man, and contender for the most interesting man in the world. I recommend everyone to read his wikipedia article at least. Or this for a more lighthearted version. Christopher Lee´s life reads like an adventure novel.
Quote:[On doing Military Intelligence in World War II]
"When people say to me, you know, were you in this? Were you in that? Did you work in this? Did you work in that? I always used to say "Can you keep a secret?". And they would say "Yes, yes" and I would say "So can I"."
"I've seen many men die right in front of me - so many in fact that I've become almost hardened to it. Having seen the worst that human beings can do to each other, the results of torture, mutilation and seeing someone blown to pieces by a bomb, you develop a kind of shell. But you had to. You had to. Otherwise, we would never have won."
[On life]
One should try anything he can in his career, except folkdance and incest.
I think that - apart from the fields of science and medicine - we live in an age of decline. Look at the world. There is decline in morals, ideals, manners, respect, truthfulness: just about everything, in fact.
I'm a massive Wicker Man fan, so he was a hero of mine growing up. His Lord Summerisle performance is a masterclass in frame control - watch the scene where Sergeant Howie confronts him in his castle.
My favourite Lee anecdote has to be this one:
"In a scene reserved for the extended version of Return of the King, underling Grima Wormtongue stabs Saruman in the back. Director Peter Jackson was coaching his actors on how to approach the scene, when something unexpected happened. Christopher Lee asked Jackson if he knew what it sounded like when someone was stabbed in the back. He then followed it up with: “Because I do.” According to Peter Jackson, Christopher Lee then began talking about “some clandestine part of World War II,” although, as always, he withheld details. Jackson had wanted him to shout in pain when he was stabbed. Lee explained that when you are stabbed, “the breath is driven out of your lungs,” and he gave a good impression of what it would actually sound like—more like a strangled gasp."
06-11-2015 10:37 AM
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Player_1337
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Christopher Lee is one of the most inspirational men to have ever graced this earth for me on a personal level. I love his films, and his varied interests such as doing heavy metal albums in his 80s and beyond just demonstrates his badassery. RIP - what an incredible life you lived.
06-11-2015 12:49 PM
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The only two times I remember seeing Christopher Lee as a good guy is in "Airport 77", where he attempts with the plane commander (played by Jack Lemmon) to reach the surface but he gets killed (the plane crashed and it's underwater) and in Space : 1999 as the captain of an alien ship bound for Earth.
Damm, I was checking his IMDB profile last week and even read somewhere he was still looking for new work.
Maybe will watch "The Man with The Golden Gun" tomorrow after many years.
"Wynik jest jawnie niedemokratyczny. Wiadomo że demokratyczny wynik jest tylko wtedy, gdy popiera lewacką utopię. Każdy inny wynik to faszyzm i nazim. Rasizm i ksenofobia. I jeszcze homofobia i zacofanie. Oraz antysemityzm"
(This post was last modified: 06-11-2015 06:36 PM by whoishe.)
Quote:On Twitter Thursday, Paul "HHH" Levesque announced the passing of Virgil "Dusty Rhodes" Runnels Jr. He was 69.
Rhodes was one of the most charismatic pro wrestlers in history and among the most popular wrestlers and biggest drawing cards of the 70s and 80s. He was born Virgil Riley Runnels Jr. and took his name from a baseball star of an earlier era.
The only details we've hearda as of this time is that he had a fall at his house earlier Thursday, his kidneys were shutting down and he started to get dehydrated.
Rhodes is generally considered the biggest star in the history of the Florida regional territory and booked Jim Crockett Promotions in the 80s and WCW in the 90s. He's been working in WWE developmental for years as a promo coach.
Rhodes was a college football and baseball player at West Texas State, a contemporary of Bruiser Brody and Terry Funk. He got into pro wrestling after playing semi-pro football. He made his first name in wrestling as a heel, teaming with Dick Murdoch, as the Texas Outlaws. The team held numerous championships, and had strong runs in a number of territories.
Eventually, they went their separate ways. Rhodes had become the top singles heel in the Florida territory when Eddie Graham sensed the crowd was starting to get with him because of his colorful interviews and mannerisms.
Before the turn, Graham tested his theory in a world title match where Rhodes faced then-champion Jack Brisco who had been Florida's most popular wrestler for years. He put a spot in where Rhodes delivered his elbow drop and Brisco, instead of kicking out, put his foot over the ropes. That one move caused the crowd to get behind Rhodes, proving Graham's theory.
He then booked an angle where Gary Hart and Pak Song turned on Rhodes in a tag team match. Rhodes became the biggest draw and most popular wrestler in the state with his first run setting box office records in most cities.
He became a touring star and was brought into all the big money territories, whether it was the WWWF, AWA, Carolinas, Georgia or wherever a main event attraction was needed, while remaining mostly based in Florida.
When Georgia Championship Wrestling starting getting a national foothold, Rhodes was its top babyface with a feud with Ole Anderson & Ivan Koloff.
In 1984, Rhodes moved to the Carolinas to become the booker for Jim Crockett Promotions. This led to a huge increase in business in 1985 and 1986, but things started faltering in 1987 and for a variety of reasons, between going with a pat hand and repetitive main event finishes, attendance fell while spending increased.
Crockett sold the promotion to Turner Broadcasting in 1988 after significant money losses. Rhodes had a falling out quickly with Jim Herd, who was put in charge of WCW. This led to his run as the "Common Man" in polka dots with WWF. Some of this was retribution since Rhodes (as booker) was considered Vince McMahon's biggest adversary just a few years earlier in quest for national domination of the business.
After being fired by McMahon after a few years as a headline wrestler, Rhodes' active career was over and he went back to WCW, where he performed a number of roles including booking and television announcing.
As far as an ability to work and control a crowd as a babyface, Rhodes ranks right up there with anyone at any point in pro wrestling history and was an unquestioned all-time great.
"Wynik jest jawnie niedemokratyczny. Wiadomo że demokratyczny wynik jest tylko wtedy, gdy popiera lewacką utopię. Każdy inny wynik to faszyzm i nazim. Rasizm i ksenofobia. I jeszcze homofobia i zacofanie. Oraz antysemityzm"
06-11-2015 06:51 PM
kbell
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When opening my forum account I considered adopting 'Sir Christopher Lee' as my username. In the end, I opted for Porfirio Rubirosa as I deemed it more appropriate for a forum of this sort but I deeply admired Sir Christopher. The man was truly a genius.
Oh yes, I'm so privileged you literally can't even.
Interested in joining the FFL? I tried (and failed).
06-13-2015 12:46 PM
Sombro
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Quote:It took Hammer horror films to make both men stars,albeit B-movie stars. Lee was a very suave and seductive Dracula trying to stay one step ahead of Cushing's van Helsing while leaving a trail of blood-drained totty behind. As a teenager, I loved the Hammer movies, although I had a mild preference for the lesbian-vampire ones with Ingrid Pitt, Pippa Steel, Yutte Stensgaard et al. The bottom seems to have dropped out of the whole lesbian-vampire genre. No doubt, in these touchy times, it would be a fraught business reviving it. But Sir Christopher's count holds up pretty well. Aside from bloodshot eyes and stick-on fangs, there weren't a lot of special effects: Today you'd do it all with CGI, but back then there was nothing to make the horror but lighting and acting. You can see, in middle age, all the techniques that would give Lee an enduring cool well into the Nineties: the mellifluous voice; the flicker of an eyebrow - and then suddenly the flash of red in the eyes and the bared fangs, the ravenous feasting on some dolly bird's neck, and all the scarier for emerging from Lee's urbane underplaying.
[…]
Quote:By now, Lee, in his mid-eighties, had more work than ever. On the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, he was the only member of the cast who'd actually known Tolkien. Yet my favorite moment in the series isn't even on camera, but in the DVD commentary. It's the scene on top of the tower where Lee's Saruman gets stabbed in the back by Grima Wormtongue, for which the director, Peter Jackson, wanted Lee to let out a scream.
The actor felt obliged to explain to Sir Peter why that would be all wrong. He proposed to let out a small groan, a quiet gasp, as the air is pushed out of his punctured lungs. The director was resistant, so Lee said: "Peter, have you ever heard the sound a man makes when he's stabbed in the back?"
"Um, no," replied Jackson.
"Well, I have," said Lee, "and I know what to do.'" And from somewhere deep in the recesses of his memory an old SOE agent conjured the sound a Nazi makes when you plunge the knife in.
A full life, on-screen and off.
06-14-2015 11:15 PM
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RawGod
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Only a few months ago I watched him in a couple of Hammer movies, caught up on his career via Wikipedia, and was pleased to see that he was still doing cool things like recording heavy metal albums. A truly inspirational man, and one of the last of an almost vanished generation.