An actor whose characters had ennobled deathlessness

Christopher Lee.

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.

Lee was the son of a lieutenant- colonel in the King's Royal Rifle Corps and an Italian contessa. After fighting in World War II, he returned to England to pursue a career as an actor, and was given a seven-year contract with Rank. After that, he scrabbled around for work, his height a disadvantage until he was cast as the creature in the 1957 Hammer production The Curse of Frankenstein (Peter Cushing played the doctor).

The following year he was cast as the Count in Terence Fisher's Dracula, with Cushing as Van Helsing, and the future of his career snapped into place.

Over the next decade, he played a Mummy, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, Dracula and other vampires, and assorted wicked earls and barons, all for Hammer. Then, in 1968, in Fisher's The Devil Rides Out, he bucked the trend and played the hero: the dashing Duc de Richleau, a dapper initiate in the ways of the occult who disrupts the activities of a Satanic cult.

In the early 1970s, with Hammer's powers fading, Lee's graveyard shift came to an end, and he branched out. He was deliciously precise as Mycroft Holmes in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), and unforgettable as Lord Summerisle, the gallant intercessor between man and nature in Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973).

And, as Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), he was Roger Moore's equal and opposite in every respect. "Face it," wrote the critic David Thompson, "he could just as easily have been Bond."

His wickedness, however, was timeless. As the white wizard Saruman, his presence hung over Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03) like a volcanic pall.

You sense George Lucas cast him as the fallen Jedi Master Count Dooku in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in the hope that he'd provide exactly the same instant gravitas, and Lee couldn't help but graciously oblige.