A Golden Villain: Looking back on Lee’s Scaramanga

In many ways, he was the man with the golden touch. A new two-hour documentary from the UK’s Sky Arts channel on Sir Christopher Lee, broadcast on 24th October, helps to remind us that The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) is celebrating its 50th birthday this year, and what better excuse do we have than to look back on Lee’s superb portrayal of his classic Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga?

Sir Christopher (1922-2015), immortalised in iconic films ranging from Dracula and The Wicker Man through to James Bond and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, died nine years ago at the age of 93 after a long and distinguished career.

But, in a sense, he’s still very much with us and is certainly part of film history as well as wider popular culture. And for Bond fans, he was very much part of the Bond universe as he was a cousin of Bond author Ian Fleming, and also played the role of the devious assassin Francisco Scaramanga in the late Roger Moore’s second adventure as 007.

Sir Christopher, who served in the Special Forces in World War Two and was also an accomplished opera singer, was knighted for his services to drama and charity in 2009, and was also awarded a BAFTA Fellowship for his services to film and entertainment in 2011. His career in movies spanned seven decades, bringing him international recognition and legions of loyal fans.

When Lee passed away, Sir Roger Moore, who played 007 opposite Sir Christopher in Golden Gun, was among those who led the many tributes, which came from across a broad spectrum of the movie, musical, and entertainment worlds, and even included the UK’s Prime Minister at the time.

In Praise of Lee

First of all, let’s revisit his long career. Sir Christopher was born in Belgravia in London in 1922, the son of a British military father and an Italian aristocratic mother. After the break-up of his parents marriage, he spent some of his childhood in Switzerland along with his mother. When they returned to England, he was educated at Wellington College in Berkshire, and seemed destined to enter diplomatic service. However, when his education ended abruptly at 17, he ended up with a low-paid job as a City clerk instead. In World War Two, he served as an Intelligence Officer with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in north Africa and Italy and, towards the end of the War, he was seconded for a while to a unit which investigated war crimes.

After the war, with his distinctive height (6ft 4in) and excellent baritone voice, he was encouraged by one of his Italian relatives to think about working in the film industry. While his parents believed his looks were not quite right for a screen career, Lee ended up with a seven-year contract with the Rank Organisation. Ironically, director Terence Young (who went on to direct three Bond movies in the 1960s) gave Lee his first chance to display his talents on screen in Corridor of Mirrors (1948). Over the next ten or so years, he took roles in a variety of mainly low-budget British films. He worked hard, and by the later 1950s already had 50 film appearances on his C.V. In 1957, he made his big ‘break-through’, when he was signed by Hammer Films, which was embarking on a series of movies based on the classic gothic horror novels.

His first appearance for Hammer saw him as the ‘Creature’ in The Curse of Frankenstein, opposite Peter Cushing, who became a close friend. He never looked back: a year later came Dracula, which also starred Cushing as van Helsing. Lee, who actually spoke very little in the movie, still managed to convey tremendous screen presence as the evil vampire and, in many ways, dominated the story. It was the making of Lee, and there followed a series of Hammer horror roles, including six more outings as the evil vampiric Count. Similarly, during the 1960s, Lee took the title role of Fu Manchu, the Chinese master-criminal originally thought up by English author Sax Rohmer, in a series of five movies. Ironically, some commentators have suggested that Sax Rohmer’s villain, created just prior to the First World War and who appeared in 14 novels over the following forty years, was possibly an influence on Ian Fleming’s creation of the villain Dr. Julius No.

In 1973, Lee took a role in the relatively low-budget horror film The Wicker Man, which he often referred to as his best performance on screen. The movie has become something of a cult classic over the years. This also leads us to his involvement with 007 just a year later.

Pure Gold: Lee, Fleming and Bond

Increasingly determined to take his screen career in new directions, in 1974 Lee took the role of Francisco ‘Pistols’ Scaramanga, the main villain in Ian Fleming’s last full novel The Man With The Golden Gun, which was published posthumously in 1965. It was, in a sense, second time lucky for Lee when it came to the world of James Bond. Lee, who was a (step) second cousin of Bond creator Ian Fleming, had been a regular golf partner with the 007 author. Fleming had once told Lee that he had Lee in mind when he created the role of Dr. Julius No for his sixth Bond novel, and he said he was going to suggest Lee for the role of Julius No in the movie version (a part taken in the end, of course, by Joseph Wiseman).

In fact, in many ways, Lee had unique and invaluable insights into Fleming’s literary activities. Speaking at length for an interview with Starlog magazine in the early 1980s, for example, Lee explained: ‘I was happy to act in one of the Bond films because Ian Fleming was my cousin. There’s nothing I don’t know about James Bond. I probably know more about that character than any man alive. I spent many, many hours talking to Ian about his books about what he meant when he wrote certain things’. He continued: ‘The character of Dr. No was written with me in mind, or so Ian told me. He wanted me to play the part in that first of the filmed adventures. By the time Ian got around to suggesting me for the movie, the producers had cast another actor. It was just one of those things. Joseph Wiseman did a very nice job as Dr. No. He’s a fine actor. However, his Dr. No is very unlike the character in the book. Even my Scaramanga was different from the novel’s – thank heavens. In the book, the character is just a thug with no redeeming features whatsoever. He’s a rather brutal, animalistic killer who kills because he enjoys it. He owns a golden gun but nothing as elaborate as the one I possessed in the film’.

Lee argued: ‘My Scaramanga is a cultured man. He wasn’t a brute. He wasn’t a thug. He had a great sense of humour. He behaved like a schoolboy with a new toy when Bond landed on the island. He’s extremely intelligent and all the more dangerous for it There are many different sides to the character which are present in the film but not in the book’. He added: ‘I really try to imbue my characters with different levels of nuances’.

The Man Who Had Some Fun

In many ways, the casting of Lee as Scaramanga in 1974 was an inspired piece of casting. Critics of the movie, while less enthusiastic about the film as a whole, still heaped praise on Lee’s performance, and Lee had clearly relished the role. Lee said later that Scaramanga was a ‘marvellous part’, and added: ‘I had great fun making it’.

In one interview, given to The Times newspaper, Lee explained how, with the aid and support of director Guy Hamilton, his role as Scaramanga had been further developed: ‘When I first read the script I visualised Scaramanga as a straight-down-the-middle heavy’. He noted that Scaramanga was not one of Fleming’s most impressive murderers: ‘Ian was already ill when he wrote Golden Gun and I think he knew that the wells of his imagination were beginning to run a bit dry. So Guy and I, after a lot of talk, decided to make Scaramanga a little bit like Bond himself, a counter-Bond if you like, instead of the murderous, unappetising thug of the novel’.

In another interview, Lee once explained: ‘I saw Scaramanga not as a madman or a cold character but as a very human person – and a very inhuman person in many ways’. Lee very much wanted to portray the golden gunned assassin as much more than the straightforward hardman that Fleming had originally described in his last novel: instead, Lee wanted to convey a man who was a complex combination of the lethal and the charming, a sophisticated killer who was highly paid and who, like Bond, enjoyed the best things in life.

This certainly came across on the screen, and Lee’s Scaramanga remains something of a favourite villain among fans of the Roger Moore James Bond films and, indeed, aficionados of the 007 franchise more generally. Lee was able to give Scaramanga both charisma and menace, a man who was going to give Bond a very hard time.

Lee’s scenes with Roger Moore, especially on the island when he shows Bond his new solar-powered laser weapon and, later, over the dinner table, were arguably some of the best in the movie, and Lee seemed to draw out the very best in his co-star. It was Lee and Roger Moore at the height of their acting powers.

Even though conditions were often unbearably hot during the location shooting on Khao Phing Kan, the island in Thailand which doubled up as Scaramanga’s secret hi-tech lair, the two actors were still able to maintain a close friendship (they had known each other for years). It was also evident to both Moore and the film crew that Lee was always the consummate professional when it came to acting.

Lee also took Roger’s famous jokes on set all in good heart. At one point, when Roger realised the cave they were going to use on the island was full of bats, he sought out Lee to tell him: ‘Master, they are yours to command!’ Lee appreciated the joke. In fact, Lee could be just as humorous: when they first entered the mouth of the cave on the island (which was replicated back at Pinewood), the mass of bats flew towards them. Apparently without flinching, Lee held up his hand towards the bats and said in his deep operatic voice ‘Not now, Stanislav’. As Roger recalled in his book Bond on Bond (2012), he used to tease Lee mercilessly about his former role as Dracula and, just before director Guy Hamilton called ‘action’, Roger would lean over to Lee and say, ‘Go on, Chris, make your eyes go red!’

Perhaps the last word should go to Lee again, from his Starlog interview: ‘I try to describe acting as a combination of the three ‘D’s and the three ‘I’s. Discipline, dedication, devotion. Imagination, instinct, intelligence. Even if all my films haven’t pleased everybody, I would like people to realize that I’ve always given each film my all. I like to think I’ve shown integrity and dedication in every one of my roles. I always do my best and, you know, I really love what I do’.

Did You Know?

In 2007 newpaper reports in the UK carried news that had it emerged that there was a real-life model for Ian Fleming’s ‘Pistols’ Scaramanga, the three nippled anti-hero in The Man With The Golden Gun – a quiet and unassuming country vicar to whom Fleming had taken a dislike! Fleming and George Scaramanga, the scion of a wealthy landowning family from Sussex, were fellow pupils at Eton in the 1920s but fell out badly, Dave Scaramanga, the latter’s grandson, revealed. To gain revenge on his grandfather, Fleming stole his name and set in stone forever as one of the great hate figures of popular fiction: ‘My grandfather died 14 or 15 years ago so I never really had time to ask him why he and Fleming hated each other’, said Dave Scaramanga. ‘We have always talked about it in the family and my father would always watch the Bond films. It’s still pretty cool to share a name with a Bond villain, whatever the reason behind it’.