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According to Christopher Lee, The Mummy was a grueling film experience
Screams, stunts, and scars: Christopher Lee’s Hammer years were horror for the actor, too!
Christopher Lee: Bona Fide screen legend
Depending on when you were born, you might know Christopher Lee from any number of famous film roles. Younger folks might recognize him from his five collaborations with Tim Burton, which saw Lee starring in movies like Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Alice in Wonderland.
Or, if you're a fan of sags that took place a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, you might know Lee as Count Dooku in the three Star Wars prequels. If that trilogy isn't you're thing, maybe you'd know him as Saruman in either The Lord of the Rings films or their follow-ups, The Hobbit trilogy. He was even in a James Bond movie, starring as Francisco Scaramanga in the movie The Man with the Golden Gun.
An icon of Hammer Horror
Prior to all of those movies, though, Lee was already a horror movie superstar thanks to the time he spent making movies with the British studio Hammer Productions.
He rose to spooky prominence with 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein, in which he played Frankenstein's monster alongside Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein. The pairing was so successful that the duo was onscreen again the following year in Dracula, with Lee as the titular vampire battling Peter Cushing's Doctor Van Helsing.
Following the decades-old Universal Studios template of adapting monster stories for box office blockbusters, Hammer followed Frankenstein and Dracula with The Mummy in 1959, again starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Each of Hammer's three big monster movies saw multiple sequels, with some faring better than others.
bandage-wrapped "Feat"
Each of these roles was a challenge, with extensive makeup separating the parts from other roles Lee would take on. In a 1974 interview with Nightmare Magazine, Lee was asked about which of his roles was the hardest.
"The Mummy was the most physically difficult, because of the enormous feats of strength that I had to do," he said.
"In The Mummy, someone thoughtfully locked and bolted the door I had to come through when I strangled Raymond Huntley... and so I smashed right through it and dislocated my shoulder. Some of the window was made of real glass."
Kharis, you've got to carry that weight
Barrelling through doors wasn't the only tough day of filming for Lee, though. The story also called for him to lift a co-worker over and over again, because that's what mummies do!
"Later, I was carrying Yvonne Furneax down the road some 83 yards at night, and I pulled every muscle in my neck and shoulders... which should perhaps indicate to some of your readers that filming isn’t quite so simple or luxurious as the public occasionally seems to think!"
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