On St. John’s Eve, as Mercury joins Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn to form a five-planet alignment, and the near-full moon obscures the peak of the Boötid meteor shower, Lord Summerisle requests your presence at the Wicker Man!
Take the night to cavort with Faust on the Brocken, share a few laughs with the demon Chernobog as he emerges from the Bald Mountain – but then rest up, as tomorrow, Midsummer, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Christopher Lee (born May 27, 1922).
On the next “Roy’s Tie Dye Sci Fi Corner,” Roy and I will discuss Lee’s life and storied career, which leaves a legacy of hundreds of films and television shows (“…and not all of them begin at 3 AM on Channel 9,” as he once quipped when hosting “Saturday Night Live” in 1978 – at which point he had only made 130 movies).
On his mother’s side, as a Carandini, Lee belonged to one of the oldest families in Europe. His lineage could be traced to the first century AD, and he claimed descent from Charlemagne. The Carandinis were granted the right to bear the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. When his mother remarried, he became the half-cousin of Ian Fleming. At school, he knew ghost story writer M.R. James and composer John Addison. He once encountered his idol, actor Conrad Veidt, on a golf course. Jussi Björling was so enamored with his rich, bass-baritone voice that he offered to take him on as a pupil. He served in the Royal Air Force as an intelligence officer during World War II. And this was all before Lee became famous.
The connections and coincidences keep piling up in a long and fortunate life. Lee died in 2015 at the age of 93. He remained a familiar face into the 21st century, thanks to his collaborations with Tim Burton and Martin Scorsese, and his roles as Count Dooku in the “Star Wars” prequels and Saruman the White in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings.” In his final decade, he lent his voice to video games and, believe it or not, recorded two heavy metal albums. His autobiography, “Lord of Misrule” (formerly “Tall, Dark and Gruesome”) is required reading.
Join us during a Midsummer syzygy for a panegyric to Christopher Lee, on the next “Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner.” The comments section will be festooned with garlic, for a salute to this most prolific of cinematic Draculas. It will be a Midsummer night’s nightmare when we livestream on Facebook, this Friday evening at 7:30 EDT!
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