The thing about Sir Christopher Lee being dead is that it doesn't immediately strike you as much of a career setback. For as long as he was an actor, his characters have often exuded not immortality exactly, but a kind of ennobled deathlessness. You always sensed they'd been around for longer than was perhaps entirely natural, and would more than likely outlast you.
Christopher Lee 1922-2015
Part of it was his face and imposing 1.95m frame, which had the sharply hewn angles of a medieval woodcut. And part of it was the wood-fire crackle of that bass-baritone voice, which made every script sound like an illuminated manuscript. But there was also something less easily explicable: he imbued every character with a cold and granite grandeur, as if each one was a monument that would withstand whatever time and the weather could throw at him.
Whether he was stalking across windblown Scottish clifftops in The Wicker Man, or swishing, leering and hissing his way through any number of the Dracula pictures he made for Hammer Film Productions, Lee imbued each role with the depth of feeling you expect actors of his reputation and calibre to save for their big Shakespearean comeback at Stratford.
But at the age of 92, there was his Saruman, in Peter Jackson's final Hobbit film, fighting off the forces of the Nazgul with hitherto-unseen powers of kung fu. The scene was preposterous, but his unbreakable dignity was the framework on which the entire sequence was built. He regularly brought more to a film than the film perhaps deserved, which is what separates a truly great actor from a talented one.
