What Was Christopher Lee’s Net Worth?
Sir Christopher Lee was an English actor and singer who had a net worth of $25 million at the time of his death in 2015. Christopher Lee was probably best known for playing a number of villains in many popular and profitable films. Notable roles include Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Count Dooku in the last two films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
He was knighted for services to theater and charity in 2009, received a BAFTA Fellowship in 2011 and received a BFI Fellowship in 2013.
He considered his best performance to be that of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the biographical film, Jinnah, and his best film was the British horror film, The Wicker Man.
Early life and military service
Christopher Lee was born in 1922 in London, England to Countess Estelle Marie and Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Trollope Lee, a World War I veteran. She was of English and Italian descent and had a sister named Xandra. When Lee was four, his parents separated. His mother later took him and his sister to live in Wengen, Switzerland. He later went to Miss Fisher’s Academy, and then returned to London, where he attended Wagner’s private school in Queen’s Gate. Meanwhile, my mother remarried to Harcourt George St-Croix Rose, the uncle of the author Ian Fleming. At the age of nine, Lee attended Summer Fields School, a preparatory school in Oxford. As a young adult, he enrolled at Wellington College, where he won scholarships in classics. However, he left a year later after his stepfather went bankrupt. Following him, he was sent to the French Riviera, where he stayed among the exiled princely families. Back in London, he worked as a clerk for United States Lines.
At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Lee enrolled in a military academy and volunteered to fight for the Finnish army against the USSR. However, he and other British volunteers were kept out of the fighting. Lee thus returned to the service of United States Lines, and then joined Beecham’s as an office clerk and switchboard operator. After his father’s death in 1941, Lee volunteered for the Royal Air Force. As an intelligence officer he was attached to 260 Squadron RAF. In 1946, he retired from service with the rank of flight lieutenant.
The beginning of the acting career
After being turned down by film producer Josef Somlo, Lee signed a seven-year contract with the Rank Organization. In 1947, he made his film debut in the gothic novel Corridor of Mirrors. Lee mostly played supporting and background characters in his early acting years. He had an uncredited appearance in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948 and played a Spanish captain in 1951’s Captain Horatio Hornblower RN. Another uncredited role came in the historical epic Quo Vadis, in which he played a driver . by carriage. A more important role came in 1952 when Lee portrayed the French painter Georges Seurat in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge.
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Hammer Horror Movies
In the late 1950s, Lee became famous for starring in horror films made by Hammer Film Productions. Her first film for the studio was 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein, in which she played Frankenstein’s monster opposite actor Peter Cushing. The two actors appeared in more than 20 films. Then in 1958, Lee starred opposite Boris Karloff in Corridors of Blood. In the same year, he made his first appearance as Count Dracula in Terence Fisher’s critically acclaimed Dracula. In 1965, Lee returned as Dracula in “Dracula: Prince of Darkness”; he went on to play the role of the Count in such Hammer films as ‘Dracula Has Risen from the Grave’, ‘Taste the Blood of Dracula’, ‘Scars of Dracula’, ‘Dracula AD 1972’ and ‘
Beyond Dracula, Lee starred in Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out and To the Devil a Daughter, both based on Dennis Wheatley’s novels. The latter was Hammer’s last horror film, marking the end of Lee’s association with the studio.
Notable roles in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s
Lee’s other notable film roles included Rasputin, who he played in 1966’s Rasputin, the Mad Monk, and Sir Henry Baskerville, who he played in The Hound of the Baskervilles. He also played Sherlock Holmes in 1962’s Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace. He later appeared in yellowface as the villain in the Fu Manchu film series. In the 70s, Lee played Jekyll and Hyde in I, Monster; Lord Summerisle in “The Wicker Man”; the Comte de Rochefort in “The Three Musketeers”; and assassin Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun.
After moving to Hollywood, Lee appeared in the disaster film “Airport ’77”. He later starred in films such as ‘Return from Witch Mountain’, ‘The Return of Captain Invincible’ and ‘Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf’. In the early 1990s, Lee reprized the role of Sherlock Holmes in “Incident at Victoria Falls” and “Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady.” Later in the decade, he played the role of the founder of Pakistan in the film ‘Jinnah’.
“The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars”
Lee had two of his most iconic film roles in the 2000s. In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he played the villainous Saruman the White. Another major villain character appeared in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, where he played Count Dooku. Lee reprized the role in “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” in 2005. He also reprized his role as Saruman for the “Hobbit” films in the 2010s.
Later roles
Late in his career, Lee starred in a wide variety of films, including The Golden Compass, Boogie Woogie, Triage, Season of the Witch, Hugo, Night Train to Lisbon, and The girl from Nagasaki.” Notably, he starred in several films directed by Tim Burton, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Corpse Bride,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “Dark Shadows.”
Musical career
Thanks to his operatic bass voice, Lee had a successful career in music. He sang on the soundtrack of “The Wicker Man” and performed the closing track for the horror film “Funny Man”. The Italian later appeared as a vocalist on albums by the symphonic power metal band Rhapsody of Fire. In 2010, Lee released his own symphonic metal album, “Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross”. It was followed in 2013 by “Charlemagne: The Omens of Death”. To celebrate his 92nd birthday in 2014, Lee released a covers EP called “Metal Knight”.
Personal life
In the late 1950s, Lee became engaged to Henriette von Rosen. However, not long before the wedding, Lee called off the engagement due to financial insecurities. Later, in 1961, Lee married the Danish painter and former model Birgit Kroncke; they had a daughter named Christina two years later.
In 2015, Lee was admitted to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for respiratory problems and heart failure. He died at the beginning of June, at the age of 93.
