Sir Christopher Lee documentary to tell untold story of actor's life

The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee features interviews with friends, family members and famous directors.

Jon Spira, from Headington, Oxford, had access to Lee’s scrapbooks and 100 interviews from the British Film Institute’s library.

The filmmaker tells the BBC the actor’s life was an “incredible story” waiting to be told.

Lee starred in more than 250 films across eight decades, including the Hammer Horror, James Bond, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars franchises.

But as Spira’s film explains, he had a military career during World War Two still shrouded in mystery, and helped track down Nazi war criminals.

“Because he could speak fluently a range of different languages he got pulled into the secret service doing missions of which the facts have never fully come out,” Spira explains.

"His cousin was Ian Fleming and a lot of people think the character of James Bond was based on him.

"He certainly didn’t do anything to disavow people of that.

“You could almost do this as two films. That’s why we called it The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, because his life is one story and his career is another.”

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The documentary also takes some flights of fantasy.

It is narrated by a string puppet of Christopher Lee made by the team behind Wes Anderson’s animated movies, and voiced by Peter Serafinowicz.

A stop-motion sequence is directed by Sandman illustrator Dave McKean.

Spira is crowdfunding for its Blu-ray release because he believes less effort has been made with physical media of late.

He said: “There’s a whole market of people who are being forgotten that really love film, want to own it, and maybe don’t trust that these things will always be streaming.”

He has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise £40,000 “to do something really special” for collectors.

Kickstarter