'Dracula' hammers the label that just won't go

Christopher Lee hasn't done a horror movie for 25 years, yet his name will be forever associated with Dracula, finds MATTHEW SWEET.

The towering frame, the volcanic black eyes, the voice like a bassoon which went to all the best schools: Christopher Lee was born to rule. "Would you like a biscuit?" he asks, sliding a plate across the polished table.

My hand moves towards the most boring, flapjacky option. "Not that one!" he bellows. Had some lolloping hack attempted to deprive Rasputin, Fu Manchu or Mohammed Ali Jinnah of an earmarked Hob-Nob, the injunction would have fallen with a similar charismatic severity.

If you don't recall having seen Lee in Jinnah, Jamil Dehlavi's biopic of the father of the Pakistani state, you're forgiven. The film was shot in 1997, was a huge success in Islamabad, received approving notices on the festival circuit, and has yet to reach mainstream cinemas.

"It is the greatest challenge I've had as an actor, and the greatest responsibility I've ever had," he rumbles. "I'm not a Muslim. I'm not an Asian. To go to a country where a figure is an icon and play the founder of the nation, well, I consider it a privilege."

Before they were won over by Lee's performance, some Pakistani commentators thought it was one privilege too far. Dissenters called for the actor to be jailed for treason. Death threats were issued, armed bodyguards drafted in.

According to a BBC news report, it wasn't the cross-cultural casting to which these critics were opposed, just the decision to employ an actor associated with a certain Transylvanian gentleman.

"Do you realise how long it is since I've done a horror movie? The last one I did was To The Devil - A Daughter, in 1975. So why does the press refer to me as a horror actor?

"It's sloppy journalism. If you ask the press, or any casting directors, what Christopher Lee did when he was in America for 10 years, they haven't a clue. I hosted Saturday Night Live. It was their third biggest audience of all time. And I did a hell of a lot of comedy."

These days, Lee is more in demand than he has been since Hammer made him wear the pointy dentures. After Tim Burton cast him in Sleepy Hollow, he landed sweet roles in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and George Lucas' next Star Wars picture.

Security around these projects is paranoid: the Tolkien script has his name printed diagonally across every page to prevent him selling it. Each page of his Star Wars script is embossed with a metal security tag ($150,000 is the going black-market rate for a complete copy).

Completing the third instalment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which he plays the wizard Saruman, is now Lee's principal professional goal.

His uneasy relationship with his horror reputation is, I suppose, the price of iconisation. And whether he likes it or not, Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, born in Belgravia in 1922 to a Boer War veteran and a glamorous contessa, now personifies a certain kind of furiously intelligent, aristocratic evil.

There was a time, however, when he thought he could drive a stake into this body of work.

"I only tell the story now because everyone concerned is no longer with us, but after the first two Dracula films I turned them all down. Not for money reasons but because they were nothing whatever to do with Bram Stoker's story.

"I used to get these hysterical phone calls: 'We've already sold it to an American distributor with you playing the part. And think of the people you'll put out of work if you don't do it.' And that's how they got me back. It's the only reason. It was a form of blackmail, really."

Things like this seemed to keep happening to him. In 1969, he accepted a script about Judge Jeffries, the noose-happy 17th-century Lord Chancellor - and was dismayed when it reached cinemas as Night of the Blood Monster.

Maybe he hadn't noticed that the CV of its director, the Spanish exploitation king Jesus Franco, included Miss Death and Dr Z in the Grip of the Maniac (1966) and Prostitutes in Prison (1969).

"I've been in films that I regret being in," he says. "I was caught in a picture I did in America because I was told there were six other distinguished actors in it, and it wasn't true.

"Almost the first thing I was told when I arrived in America in 1976 was, 'You have to understand, Mr Lee, in this town a signed contract means nothing."'

Horror movies, however, did bring Lee something of incalculable value, a close friendship with his regular co-star, Peter Cushing.

"You'll find one day, maybe when you're much older, that there will be one particular person who will go and they'll be the only person with whom you share certain stories or a certain sense of humour. And it'll shake you, believe me. I miss him very much. I say things sometimes, to myself, as if I'm talking to him."

When he died in 1994, Cushing, fearing that any tangible memorial would become a shrine for cinematic taphophiles, arranged for the remains of his wife, Helen, to be exhumed, and reburied with his own at an undisclosed location. Lee has no idea where the grave is found.

"It must be somewhere in the Whitstable area, but I don't know and I don't want to know, and I'm sure if I asked Joyce Broughton [Cushing's secretary of 35 years] she wouldn't tell me." A tradition of cremation in the Lee family means that he will not have to make the same elaborate provisions.

Horror helped to put him in this position, and I can't help wondering why he doesn't take more pleasure in the huge cultural impact of those early genre performances.

My mother still talks about how she was scared doolally by the terrible things Lee did to Barbara Shelley in Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1965).

Robert Mighall's article, "Vampires and Victorians: Count Dracula and the Return of the Repressed" gives him the credit for hoodwinking a generation of academics into believing that Stoker's novel is an allegory of Victorian sexual repression.

And surely it was Lee's body into which Philip Larkin imagined himself when, in 1960, he wrote: "Me and my cloak and fangs/Had ripping times in the dark./The women I clubbed with sex!/I broke them up like meringues."

Although Lee feels ambivalent about all those vampires, mummies and monsters, audiences, critics and potential employers will always place more value on this part of his back catalogue.

I'm sure of this: Peter Jackson didn't cast him in Lord of the Rings as rogue wizard Sarunam because he admired his performance in Police Academy 7. Or even Jinnah, for that matter.

- INDEPENDENT