What are the odds of two horror icons being born on the same day? It’s like Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler sharing a birthday (February 2), or Ferruccio Busoni and Sergei Rachmaninoff (April 1). Today is the birthday of both Vincent Price (1911-1993) and Christopher Lee (born 1922).
Though he’d been a professional actor since the 1930s (he appeared as Sir Walter Raleigh in “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” with Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, in 1939), Price settled into the horror genre in the 1950s, with films like “House of Wax,” “The Fly,” “The House on Haunted Hill,” and “The Tingler.”
In the 1960s, he became closely associated with Roger Corman, appearing in a series of films loosely inspired by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
Of course, he turned in great performances in a number of extra-genre classics, such as “Laura,” “The Baron of Arizona,” and the rib-tickling “Champagne for Caesar,” but he will always be remembered as Prince Prospero, Dr. Phibes and the narrator on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
He was an actor blessed with campy self-awareness (though he could dial it down when required), and he was quick to capitalize on both his image and his indelible voice.
Though he too has played a broad range of roles over the course of a career which has spanned more than six decades, Christopher Lee will always be linked to the Hammer Studios horror explosion of the 1950s and ‘60s. Younger fans will recognize him as Count Dooku, from the even more horrid “Star Wars” prequel trilogy, and as the turncoat wizard Saruman, in Peter Jackson’s self-indulgent “The Lord of the Rings.”
When Lee determined to become an actor, his plan was to model himself on Conrad Veidt, the German Expressionist icon who had created Cesare the Somnambulist in “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” and later played a string of refined though despicable Nazis – notably Major Strasser in “Casablanca” – in Warner Brothers films of the 1940s.
Lee’s imposing stature and bass-baritone voice make him a natural for screen villainy – though some of my favorite Lee roles are heroic (for instance, that of the Duke de Richelieu, the gentleman occultist who matches wits with a band of Satanists in “The Devil Rides Out”).
Thankfully, at 92, Lee is still very much with us, with recent appearances in “The Hobbit,” Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” and Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland.”
Fun fact: it had at one point been Lee’s ambition to become an opera singer. In fact, it was Jussi Björling who recommended Lee audition for the Swedish Opera. Lee did just that and was accepted. Unfortunately, he was unable to afford the training, but whenever he filmed in Scandinavia, he made it a point to go slumming with Swedish amateur companies under an assumed name.
His singing talent has been sinfully underutilized on film, though he does get to belt out a couple of numbers in “The Return of Captain Invincible,” also starring Alan Arkin. The film, with songs by the composer and lyricist of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” was widely panned.
Happy birthday, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee!
Lee in “The Return of Captain Invincible:”
Price playing Mendelssohn’s “The War March of the Priests” in “The Abominable Dr. Phibes:”