Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a true original, 26 Oct 2000
By A Customer
So many autobiographies are stories just not worth telling but this... Christopher Lee's fascinating and often bizarre life makes a brilliant tale in its own right whether you are a fan or not. What an incredible bloke - how many of us can say that we were born the son of an Italian aristocrat, that our father and stepfather were both compulsive gamblers while our mother was a society beauty, that we were introduced to Rasputin's assassins as children, that we fell from privilege to poverty in the blink of an eye, and that we number such an astonishing array of people from cardinals to boxers among our friends? I've rarely read a biography that has endeared someone to me so much, so take a look yourself, get beneath the villainous exterior, and discover a wonderful self-deprecating sense of humour, honesty, and a great sense of the ridiculous.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a pearl from one of the cinema's finest journeymen, 1 Feb 2000
It's hard to describe what a wonderful story Lee's entire life makes. In these days when movie stars are bred out of cheesy sitcoms or marketed by agencies looking for the right package, Lee's story reminds us why the best actors and the best stars are the ones who happened along out of life's trials and tribulations. Just home from the war in which he served with distinction, Lee took the advice of his uncle, the Italian ambassador in London, to try his hand at acting. He little knew how much hard work it would be, slogging his way for years through movies as stand-ins, stunt doubles, etc., before Hammer discovered him. Perhaps the most poignant thing about this memoir is its author's forthright admission that he started out in the acting business "with no innate talent" but found over the years how good he could become by studying and studying the craft. The humor with which he recalls his films and the friends he met working in them ("But just think of the appalling people you'll meet!" his mother warned) is priceless. As a writer and producer, I can't help but appreciate the influence his films had on me in school and in my work. I recommend this book even for cinema buffs who don't like the films that made Lee famous. Should be required reading for every film-acting class in the country.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Witty and often startling biography., 14 May 1999
By A Customer
When I was nine years old, my father, a newspaper editor in Boston, brought home a couple of 16mm films for the weekend. He had become friendly with a film-rental proprietor and there being no business on the weekends in those days, she let him take whatever he wanted as long as it was back by Monday morning. He in turn got her great tickets to Fenway Park. I didn't know it then, but it was the beginning of several years of great film watching in our family, and the technological convenience of video since that time has not surpassed the experience of watching a wide film screen in your own living room. That first weekend, the two films were Gunga Din, the classic with Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr--and the Skull, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The latter film caught my imagination. And on the next weekend, my father brought home The Devil Rides Out and Dracula Prince of Darkness. It took me a while at that tender age, so caught up in the gothic horror, to realize that the actor who played the fiendish non-speaking Count in one film, was the elegant and sophisticated Duc de Richlieu in the other. Over the years since then I have always enjoyed catching Christopher Lee in his various performances, and it was a treat, through Amazon UK, to be able to get his autobiography--and find out what an adventurous and humorous life he has led. He recounts his years in the R.A.F. with humor and dignity. It makes his subsequent struggles in the world of British entertainment all the more poignant, particularly in these days when the entire business has become so corrupted by huge conglomerates and agencies. Having become a writer of novels and screenplays myself, I can attest personally to that. An entertaining read for anyone interested in the evolution of cinema and television since WWII. JF
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