A FOREWORD BY DAME HARRIET WALTER, D.B.E. We Knew Him as Tio If the phrase "star quality" had b

A FOREWORD BY DAME HARRIET WALTER, D.B.E.


We Knew Him as Tio

If the phrase "star quality" had been known to me as a child in the 1950s I would most definitely have applied it to my uncle Christopher Lee, and not because of anything to do with his actual film stardom. For me his star quality existed off screen. I was forbidden to witness his professional stardom by the X rating attached to all his films, although in my early teens, with the collusion of my otherwise law-abiding grandmother, I did sneak in to the Notting Hill Coronet to see Dracula; Prince of Darkness wearing my older sister's high heels and a padded bra. Long before that he had impressed me as the romantic, roving uncle, who would fly in on occasional visits from faraway places. His presence always created excitement. The pulse of the entire family seemed to quicken, and life became more vivid at the sound of his voice when he entered the room. We were a captive audience for his exotic anecdotes and brilliant imitations, necessarily looking up to his 6'4" standing figure from our quickly improvised circle of armchairs or cushions on the floor.

My own passion for acting took hold at the age of nine, which may have been partly inspired by one or two visits to the Hammer Film Studios at Brae, where I was let loose on the sets of Pirates of Blood River but I remember it as a quite independent thought more to do with my crush on Hayley Mills than my uncle's influence. However by the time I was heading for Drama School I was very ready to attend a rather serious private audience with Tio (as we always called him) in which he tried to put me off the acting profession, painting a direful picture of its pitfalls even though he seemed to me to have avoided them quite successfully himself. I acknowledged his superior wisdom, thanked him and went right on and became an actor anyway.

Christopher was full of surprises. His looks could famously terrify, but he was a gentle and, I think, rather insecure man. He took himself seriously but was extremely funny. He could seem a bit uncoordinated but he was an excellent sportsman and did most of his own stunts. His school memories were more about sport than academe, but as an adult he was an eternal autodidact with a prodigious memory. There was very little he didn't know about opera and his own rich baritone voice could have led to a singing career if he had been able to afford the training. In his book Tall Dark and Gruesome he wrote eloquently about this and about his early life, the immediate family he grew up with, his days at Wellington College and how, like most young men of his generation, his youth was violently interrupted by the war.

He enlisted in the RAF but when he blacked out at a certain altitude he was forced to abandon that path. Instead he became an Intelligence Officer, in which role his un-English looks, his fluency in five languages and his bravery made him excellent material. To the day he died he never disclosed any details of the things he saw or the secrets he had kept, but I know they would have fed into his acting when he played out adventures in a safer form. The war strengthened his private inner core and his patriotism. His father and grandfather were military men and Christopher was deeply proud of his own wartime medals on sale at this auction.

Shortly after the war ended, de-mobbed and directionless, he had a chance meeting that set the course for the rest of his life. The Italian ambassador to the Court of St James who happened to be his cousin, suggested to him that with his looks and his voice he might think of becoming an actor. Some introductions were made and things took off from there, by no means instantly but fairly soon. The acting world must have seemed pretty trivial to him in those immediate years after the war, being put through various hoops at the Rank Charm School, but he emerged more than game to