Christopher Lee Was a Real-Life Nazi Hunter

Most people know Christopher Lee as cinema's greatest villain - Dracula, Saruman, Count Dooku, Scaramanga. What almost nobody knew for decades was that the roles were not entirely fictional. Lee had lived it.

The Intelligence Officer Nobody Asked About

During World War II, Lee served in the Royal Air Force as an intelligence officer, attached at various points to Britain's Special Operations Executive - Churchill's clandestine sabotage and espionage organisation. He flew missions across North Africa and Italy, survived a bombed airfield and an aircraft crash near Monte Cassino, and was commissioned as a flight lieutenant. He was fluent in French, Italian, and German, with working knowledge of Spanish and Russian - a rare asset in wartime intelligence work.

The Nazi-Hunting Assignment

For the final months of the war, Lee was seconded to the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects - the Allied unit responsible for locating, identifying, and handing over Nazi war crimes suspects for prosecution at Nuremberg. His own description of the work was deliberate and unembellished: "We were given dossiers of what they'd done and told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could, and hand them over to the appropriate authority." He visited concentration camps after their liberation. He was bound by the Official Secrets Act and said almost nothing specific about it for the rest of his life. "Let's just say I was in Special Forces," he told one interviewer. "And leave it at that."

The Scene Peter Jackson Did Not Direct

During production of The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson instructed Lee on how Saruman should react to being stabbed in the back. Lee stopped him. "Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody's stabbed in the back? Because I do." He explained that the breath is driven out of the body - no scream, just a gasp. Jackson confirmed on his DVD commentary that Lee then began to describe one of his wartime experiences before stopping himself. Jackson said he was afraid to ask further. He let Lee perform the scene exactly as Lee chose.

The Career After the War

Lee went into acting and found himself cast repeatedly as the villain. He played Dracula nine times for Hammer Horror, Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, Saruman in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Count Dooku across the Star Wars prequels. He appeared in over 200 films. At 88, he released a symphonic heavy-metal album about Charlemagne - the oldest heavy-metal performer in history. He was knighted in 2009 and died in 2015 at 93, still working. The man who had spent a lifetime scaring audiences had spent the war doing something far harder to talk about.