Christopher Lee: Tall, Dark and Gruesome by Christopher Lee (9-Jan-2009) Paperback

by Christopher Lee

This is the life story of a star whose acting career has spanned many dark roles, from Sherlock Holmes, Rasputin, Bond villains and Dracula. Here he describes his extraordinary career, acting with stars such as Errol Flynn and John Belushi, and his role in the animated TV Terry Pratchett series.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Horror, Biography Memoir, Memoir

Paperback Bunko

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ was an English actor and musician who first became famous for his roles in Hammer Horror films and, latterly, for his roles as Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movie trilogies, and Count Dooku in the Star Wars film franchise.

Reviews

[Chris Steeden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I absolutely loved the Hammer Horror films. I admit that Peter Cushing was my favourite actor of those movies but Christopher Lee, as Dracula, was second-to-none, in my opinion anyway. Lee’s life is far more than Dracula though. Lee says of Peter, ‘He really was the gentlest and most generous of men. It could be said of him that he died because he was too good for the world’. Lee always seemed to be a prickly customer to me. I can imagine he was quite high maintenance on set.

I had read this before but found it in a bag in the loft and decided to have a re-read. This is an oddly written book, I thought initially, and his delivery certainly took some getting used to. Once I did get used to it then it was quite a jaunt. From his schoolboy days and into the Second World War when he was in the RAF and nearly killed in the North African campaign when his squadron’s airfield was bombed. To be honest I am still a little baffled to his role in the war. He certainly went to a lot of places. It was like a crazy travelogue filled with bombs, bullets and malaria.

His background is certainly privileged and he did get a leg-up into the film business in the latter part of 1946 by his cousin, Niccolò Carandini, who was the Italian Ambassador to Britain. Saying that, he did not start at the top and did have to work his way up. He goes over a lot of those early acting roles. Meeting stars like Errol Flynn, Oliva de Havilland and Boris Karloff who Lee said was much loved by everyone. Karloff would become his neighbour many years later.

For me, the interest in his films begins just after halfway with chapter 37, ‘A Taste of Blood’. This was when Hammer were going to remake Frankenstein in colour and he gets the part of the Creature. From that he gets the part of Dracula but that was not without its pitfalls, ‘Count Dracula might escape, but not the actors that play him’. I loved these chapters. He gets married to Gitte and they have a daughter. He has been in so many films and must have so many more stories to tell if he was still with us. He rounds up his favourite films and TV work. The edition I read was published in 1998. He died in 2015.

If you are a fan of Lee then you probably have already read it, if you have not then go find it.

[Iseult Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A witty, charming book full of accounts that are almost too incredible to believe. Lee glosses over instances terrifying and disturbing with the same debonair way he describes make up malfunctions and poor scripts. He is delightfully honest, while at the same time leaving much out of the book, and is quite humble about himself, his abilities and his career.

Each chapter is very short, and it’s very hard to put the book down without reading one more chapter. Lee’s writing style evokes a pleasant evening of conversation with the actor, and it’s hard to tear yourself away. While some of the stories of endless European castles and aristocracy made my eyes glaze - I really don’t think there is anyone he hasn’t met - it gives a strong picture of the man and his life.

Before reading this book I was most interested in learning about his time during the Second World War, his experience of making certain horror movies, and his love of Tolkien. Unfortunately I was disappointed on all three counts. While he goes into details of his life in the RAF, he keeps the narrative light. He mentions his movies, and talks about them with some detail, but recounts much more about golf and the courses he has played and the people he has played with.

However, this is Lee’s autobiography about his life, so it’s inevitable he will focus on what he wants to tell and not fulfill my idle curiosity. As such, I’ve a much better idea of who he was as a man and, while it differs greatly from my impression gleaned from his movies and interviews and anecdotes I’ve read, I’m glad I read the book. He led a fascinating life, and I’m impressed that he saw the last public guillotine execution in Paris and met the assassin of Rasputin.

There are also lots of photographs of Lee and his family throughout the book, which was nice to see.

A note on the edition I ordered. The book was not well made and the pages came out of the binding as I turned them.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the book! I particularly like the story about the events following his car breaking down in Switzerland on a stormy night. . .

[Yasmin · Rating 5 out of 5]

His final remark is what will he do for an encore? Work with Tim Burton is the up to date answer. Fitting some how for a man of his mould. The reviewer that is indelibly stamped on the cover of books when they go to print can be invariably an understatement or an overstatement. In this instance understatement. His book is funny to hilarious to hysterical, almost, I laughed out loud many times. It's not meant to be a comical book, far from it, but his style of writing is wonderful. Altho' one is left with the aching question, does he still throw things and is it still knives? When you come across a person of masterful talents you can't help but think he/she was more well suited to something else. In his case it would have definitely be opera. But then he wouldn't have made the long trusted friends and likely would never have met the love of his life, his wife, some may call it cliché, but then there really isn't anything wrong with clichés, I think people by and large are unnecessarily uncomfortable by them, at least in clichés one is still honest. One wonders could there be an encore memoir? Is there anything left to say that he hasn't already said? One does think that at age 91 there may be some more chapters to add, if he elects not to this is still a superb book and one I would look out to add to my collection.

[Mike Jennings · Rating 5 out of 5]

In general I am not an admirer of Christopher Lee. I have a passing interest in certain of the roles he has played: Scaramanga, Lord Summerisle, Saruman to name but 3. His identification with Count Dracula only extends to the first 2 Hammer movies on that theme - I kind of prefer Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu - and I enjoyed his part in Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein. And here's the link: I AM a very great admirer of Peter Cushing, they met on that movie and he and Christopher Lee had what I understood to be a wonderful friendship, so I was looking forward to reading a good chapter or two devoted to that relationship. Alas it isn't here: there is only one short chapter which deals with Mr C, and he has to share those few pages with the other 2 great working friendships Christopher had - Robert Bloch and Vincent Price.

It's not a disappointment as such, this story is interesting and well told, I would simply have liked to know more about his friendship with Peter Cushing. Then again, perhaps he has done his friend a service by NOT writing about it, in which case that's fine by me.

[Pritish · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a lovely book, taking one point off only because there's too much golf.

[James Powell · Rating 3 out of 5]

3½ 🌟

A tad too much golf talk for me, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. Also, I now have dozens of films to hunt down.

[Darren Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although it is full of serious and interesting details about Christopher Lee's long and varied life this has to be the funniest autobiography I have ever read. Maybe it demonstrates my sense of humour but the anecdote about sharing the stage with someone who couldn't stop breaking wind had me in tears of laughter. As did the tale of being on stage with a recalcitrant wheelchair on a slanted stage.
It even managed to maintain 5 stars despite there being a lot of pages devoted to golf but he even managed to make that game sound entertaining.
Unlike many actors who seem to be dull, on screen and off, Christopher was one of the old school actors who did things the long and hard way and the much deserved stardom didn't appear overnight. Despite having distant aristocratic Italian noble blood in his veins and being related to Ian Fleming he learnt his art through lots of stage work and many minor 'blink and you miss him' film roles.
The one drawback is that the up-dated version of his story was published in 1997 so there was so much of his life that he didn't cover. No Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or Heavy Metal collaboration album stories but, even without those, it is a book that is well worth reading.

[Vagabonda Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sir Christopher Lee had a most extraordinary life. His mother an Italian countess, his father a member of the elite King's Rifles, Lee was born into the aristocratic class of London circa 1922. From his childhood in Belgravia (where, as a very young boy, he was awakened by his mother to be introduced to the men who murdered Rasputin), to the film sets of Hammer and beyond, Lee writes candidly, and with a self-effacing humor about his life. (It may not be common knowledge to those who know of Lee from the Lord of the Rings films, but Lee was a raconteur of the first order, and that talent is most evident in this autobiography.)

Lee will probably be most remembered for his iconic portrayal of Stoker's Dracula, but there is so much more to this man than a costume, whether it be a wizard's robe or vampire's cape. Husband, father, brother, actor, singer, writer, war hero, adventurer -- he did it all with grace and humility. Tall, Dark and Gruesome is a very worthy read.

Five Stars

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating autobiography of this British actor often associated with Dracula or Fu Manchu despite a large number of roles over his long and diverse career. Lee takes us through his ancestry and adventures as a privileged British youth, his WWII experiences in the RAF, and his entrance into acting in movies. Interspersed with anecdotes about his fellow stars, the movie industry, and his deep love of golf, this book was an interesting look into the life and career of a movie star so many of us grew up with - whether he was a monster in the Hammer Films, a villain in a Bond film, or a dark figure in so many other roles.

[Lee Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well. Mr. Lee's life is pretty dang interesting. It was a long, long read. But I enjoyed reading his anecdotes, especially about his friendships with great actors and his life as a father and husband. I'm amazed he survived so many bouts of malaria too. Kudos to him. I now have a desire to see every single one of his films. I respect him even more than I already did, after reading this.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book at Forbidden Planet (London) for a book signing with the great man himself!
I enjoyed this very interesting and amusing autobiography.
Even if you a not a fan, the interesting life of Mr Lee is still very much worth reading about.

[Igenlode Wordsmith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the original pre-Lord of the Rings edition of Christopher Lee's autobiography and has the better title; I have also read the updated edition (Lord of Misrule), but since I have no great interest in Peter Jackson or the Star Wars prequels I was happy enough to pick up this version second-hand, the balance/structure of which strikes me as generally more satisfactory.

As is so often the case, the pre-fame arc of his life story is on the whole the more interesting, and in his case there was a good deal of it - he ended up joining the Rank Charm School in the post-war years more or less on a whim, at the suggestion of one of his Italian cousins at a point in his life when he was more or less at a dead end and had nothing better to do, having had a truncated and mediocre public-school education and failed to become an RAF pilot in WW2 due to intermittently defective eyesight. (He never mentions any problems with his vision later in life, so either the condition cleared up with age or else was not severe or frequent enough to interfere with anything other than operating an aircraft at speeds of hundreds of miles an hour.) As a result he spent his war years collating Intelligence reports for the squadron, a role that was far from risk-free - some of the dangers coming courtesy of the Americans - but probably increased his life expectancy over flying combat missions, though it didn't preclude some risky sorties. At a later stage it also included, amongst other things, visiting various recently-liberated concentration camps in search of war criminals, an experience on which he is tellingly reticent ("The impact of those dread places came back to me as fiercely" fifty years later).

To what degree the complete absence of any of the more lurid stories of his wartime service represents the influence of the Official Secrets Act and to what degree the former are simply fictional I obviously don't know, but on the whole I'd assume this is probably a reasonably accurate account. At any rate, after six years he came out of a war that had precluded his obtaining any academic qualifications, having reached his mid twenties without any usable civilian skills, and was signed for a contract with the Rank Organization thanks to the influence of the Italian Ambassador, who happened to be his aristocratic cousin: "They already had seventy or so amateurs signed up... so one more addition was neither here nor there". The career was, apparently, his cousin's idea and not his: "There was nothing for me to consider. I knew nothing about [the profession]".

Under the obligation of earning a living somehow, he turned his intelligence and application to the task of learning this new set of skills, despite "looking too tall and too foreign", and over the course of his seven-year Rank contract appeared in bit-parts in various films, a few of them still famous for other reasons, as well as subsequently getting work in the "Douglas Fairbanks presents" and "Errol Flynn Theatre" TV series, and helping to dub for other actors: "if I had very few lines of my own to speak, I had at least the consolation when everyone else had gone home or off to other pictures of re-speaking their lines in English". At the end of ten years of what he describes as a "sado-madochistic switchback of a film career", "I had gone into acting without a natural gift for it [...] I was as tall and as foreign and almost as unknown as when I started". Rank had not considered it worth renewing his contract.

Then came an offer from Hammer Horror that presented itself as merely "one more indignity on a grander scale", for a role that involved no lines but a vast amount of makeup as the Creature in "Frankenstein", followed by the Count in "Dracula": "My pay for that film was £750" - enough for a second-hand car - and the eventual gross for the film was allegedly "something like twenty-five million dollars", a record profit/cost ratio. But it brought "a weird kind of fame [...] with many dotty side effects" that would transform the rest of his career, and lead to major villain roles (including, eventually, in Star Wars as well as James Bond).

This isn't a book to read if you are interested in Christopher Lee's film work in itself; I originally picked it up to try to corroborate a story I'd heard elsewhere involving his interaction with Oliver Reed on the set of "The Three Musketeers", but like most of the productions name-dropped in this book that one gets little more than a passing mention (and even so more than most). This is mainly a collection of rueful and occasionally laugh-out-loud anecdotes about his life, arranged in roughly chronological order, although it does go backwards and forwards a little according to theme. Not quite as funny as David Niven's famous The Moon's a Balloon (although possibly less apocryphal), but Lee is clearly a raconteur of similar order.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

As something of a personal hero of mine, it was intriguing to read about Christopher Lee from the man himself (at least I hope it was he, and not a ghost writer)

The book deals primarily with his younger years, what he did during World War 2 and, finally, the many many films. Unfortunately this book came out in the late 90s, so no mentions of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings as films are present. A reader will notice, though, that he's a fan of the book and mentions taking it with him when he travelled.

Now, such a trove of information, funny stories, interesting facts, details and so on... surely that merits 5 stars? Ordinarily I would say yes, and indeed I'm glad I didn't let my bias of Lee cloud my judgement. The book is dry. So very dry. 300 odd pages of A5, including pictures, ought to be a breeze, but at times, I struggled to get through certain passages. There's a lot about golf. I have no interest in the game, so these sections weren't overwhelmingly interesting.

But to hear about Christopher Lee both on and off film is a marvel of itself and I'm happy to have read about him, even now I feel a pang to think we will never see him in a new film or hear that amazing voice.

[PenguinKaiser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Los que me conocen saben que estoy obsesionado con Christopher Lee, tanto en su carrera como en su vida personal, así que es sorprendente que jamás hubiera leído su autobiografía.

Pues resulta que ahora soy incluso más fan que antes, es quizá una de las personas más interesantes que han vivido.

Cuenta sus aventuras de joven, viendo la última ejecución en guillotina, su participación en la guerra en los servicios de inteligencia, cacería de criminales de guerra al finalizar y su larga trayectoria fílmica, justo antes de El Señor de los Anillos y Star Wars. Hay una autobiografía más actualizada, pero no la encontré.

El único pero que le pongo es el formato, ya que es de letra pequeña y mucho texto, por lo que la lectura se vuelve un poco cansada para la vista, pero eso sí, nunca aburrida entre tantas anécdotas.

[Hannah Honegger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Lee was a giant of a man, & not just in regards to his height! His story is fascinating, from the origins of his family to his experiences in the war to his venerable film career. It was a slower read & some references were made that were relevant to his time & confusing to understand nowadays. I wished to learn more about his childhood & wartime experiences, but there were a good bit of details to enjoy in regards to his film career. For fans of film, history, or Christopher Lee, this is a must read!

[Christopher Hood · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a full review see https://hoodcp.wordpress.com/2021/06/...

[Jonas Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeg ejer en signeret udgave af denne selvbiografi, og i Guder hvor ville jeg dog gerne have drukket en kop te med Sir. Lee

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

First of all, I had a very, very hard time finding this book. It seems very unusual to me that a story of an actor of his calibre isn't available to buy and wasn't recently republished. Especially after his death. It took me over 3 years to find a copy of "Tall, Dark and Gruesome". It was worth the wait. The storytelling is slow and very aristocratic, filled with small details that reminded me how long ago he was born and how many decades of adventures he lived through. When we perceive a person as a celebrity (an amazing actor in this case), we tend to forget about all the other aspects of their life and this book is a wonderful way to explore the entirety of character.

I loved reading about Sir Christopher Lee. I had the honor of seeing him speak live at a very small gathering in Istria, Croatia (where I live) and will always remember the depth of his voice, it was incredible hearing him speak about one of his favorite roles - Rasputin. The moment when he said that Rasputin was not a mad man, just a very interesting man, along with his wicked grin (that gives me goosebumps) will always be buried in my memory, along with the stories of his life from his autobiography.

[GAIL MRS GRAY · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read all of Sir Christopher lee's autobiography books and they are awesome as i read through the book for page to page i feel like i have been on a journey with him. I found in some parts of the book sad i felt sorry for him and there are times i was excited and thrilled.He is a clever actor, i have enjoyed what he enjoys like Golf and Opera,I hope one day if i get to heaven i would meet him there and have a good chat.

[Steelwhisper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievably amusing!

[Nathan Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some good anecdotes. But a bit too much golf for my liking.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a total hoot from beginning to end. What an interesting life he has had and his stories are terrific.