From Dracula to Saruman (seen pictured here), British actor Christopher Lee played many memorable villains during his long career as an actor.
HOLLYWOOD stars tend to live glamour-filled lives that can get action-packed once the cameras start rolling, but it has been claimed that some like the late British actor Christopher Lee experienced off-screen adventures that would rival some of the best blockbusters.
Over the years, it has been alleged that Lee – who famously starred as Saruman in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and as Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels – participated in secret operations in World War 2, the kind we'd call special forces operations today.
Is this true?
Verdict:
TRUE
Yes, this is in fact true as Lee was attached with several units tasked with performing secret operations behind enemy lines during World War 2 and in its immediate aftermath.
As was written in an article by the British Forces Broadcasting Service in an article in conjunction with Lee's death in 2015, it says Lee's service began in 1940 where he worked cracking German coded messages as an intelligence officer with the United Kingdom's Royal Air Force (RAF).
The official media arm of the British armed forces then added that Lee went on to work in North Africa with the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) – a precursor to the Special Air Service or SAS.
That said, Lee has remained silent on whatever work he did with the LRDG or the SAS and on this note, Forces excerpted what Lee has said on the topic when pressed by the media.
"I was attached to the SAS from time to time but we are forbidden – former, present, or future – to discuss any specific operations. Let's just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read into that what they like," said Lee.
His last posting prior to leaving the RAF in 1946 as a Flight Lieutenant was to help the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects hunt down Nazi war criminals.
On this, Lee said that he was handed dossiers of what these suspects had done and added that "we were told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could and hand them over to the appropriate authority."
And as an interesting final note, his experiences played into his performance as Saruman – with Jackson going on record saying that Lee corrected him in an actor-to-director capacity on the sound a person would make should they be stabbed in the back.
Jackson recounted this in a making-of documentary, saying that he had spoken to Lee about the sound he wanted him to make when Brad Dourif's Grima Wormtongue came up behind Saruman to stab him in the back.
"Of course, it was my job as director to talk to Christopher Lee and explain to him what I wanted. I started to go into this long explanation about what sort of sound he should make when he got stabbed," said Jackson.
Lee then cuts in to say that instead of a scream, it is more of a shocked, sudden gasp because the breath is driven out of the body.
"He proceeded to sort of talk about some very clandestine part of WW2," added Jackson.
So there you have it; on-screen and off-screen, the late Christopher Lee had quite the life.
References:
1. https://www.forces.net/services/army/sas-gurkhas-story-sir-christopher-lee
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCvPOPe-TlA&t=3s
