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You're spot on there, Fred. Mr Lee certainly felt a great deal of loyalty to his friends at Hammer, many of whom relied on him as the one big house "star" (although of course they used actors of the calibre of Oliver Reed, Peter Cushing etc. a lot) to pull in the American market.
I agree that it's good he did make the later Dracula pics: even something as broadly silly and anachronistic as AD1972 is worth seeing because of Lee's (and Cushing's) presence in it. What is a shame is that he never got to play the "real" - as in Stoker's - Dracula. I remember that he was incredibly well informed about the book, and talked at length about all the differences between it and the films he, and indeed everybody else, made. Even Coppola's recent Bram Stoker's Dracula was nothing like the novel. Sadly now I don't think the novel will ever be filmed "straight". We have all grown accustomed to the "Hollywood/Hammer" version of Dracula, and would not accept the character as originally portrayed by Stoker: to take one small example, Stoker's Dracula wasn't "melted" by sunlight (although he couldn't change his shape or move about much during the day); I expect we have regular Hammer scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster to thank for that little piece of vampire mythology!
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