Christopher Lee names the greatest performance of his career: “That’s the best thing I’ve ever done”
With almost 300 credits to his name, Christopher Lee was spoilt for choice when casting his eye far and wide over his filmography to name one performance he viewed as the best he’d ever given.
The legendary actor’s career was remarkable both on-camera and away from it, with the star becoming a defining icon of horror and fantasy, lending his sonorous tones and imposing screen presence to a cavalcade of classics that spanned decades and ran the gamut of genres.
The most iconic association of Lee’s professional life was the one between the actor and the filmmaking house of horror, Hammer, not least because he played Dracula seven times. It’s not easy to stand out when Bram Stoker’s creation is one of the two most heavily-adapted fictional characters in history alongside Sherlock Holmes, but he’s right up there with Bela Lugosi as one of the most definitive visions of the monstrous villain.
He also played Frankenstein’s Monster and The Mummy for Hammer, not to mention his ominous turn in folk horror favourite The Wicker Man, his stint as a James Bond villain in The Man with the Golden Gun, the five films he made with Tim Burton, his collaborations with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, or his contributions to The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars franchises.
However, Lee’s pick for the pinnacle of his acting exploits was little seen and yet highly controversial, with the towering star playing Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, in 1998’s straight-to-video biographical drama, Jinnah. Oddly enough, the controversy had nothing to do with the nationality of the character the Chelsea-born thespian was playing.
Instead, it was because he was best known for playing a vampire. Many were outraged that a star famed for their horror films was playing a figure like Jinnah, with Lee spending the entire duration of the shoot surrounded by armed bodyguards after he was subjected to death threats and calls for him to be either arrested or deported.
It couldn’t have been easy to remain focused with all that external noise, but he was confident he managed to pull it off. “That’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” he told Total Film of Jinnah. “And the greatest responsibility I’ve ever had as an actor because quite a few of his relatives came to watch, and they were wonderfully supportive.”
The movie screened at a number of festivals around the world, but it was never granted a theatrical release. Instead, it was restricted almost entirely to DVD, robbing a much larger audience of the opportunity to see Lee at the top of his game. Genre fare may have made him an indelible icon of cinema, but it was titles like Jinnah that underlined how he managed to stay there for so long.
