Earliest Memory of Mr. Lee

[Colin Bushby]

 I came accross a photo of Mr. Lee last night while looking for something to draw and it was the one where he was driving a car and a "hand" was on the back of the seat, I`ve tried to remember the film but not sure, I think it was a quartet of stories like "Dr Terrors".
 Anyway, it reminded me that this was what introduced me to Mr. Lee, it`s the first film I saw him in that I can remember.
 It brought back a lot of memories of watching the "late night chiller" on Fridays when I was younger. Every Friday I would wait for it to start at 11pm and on before that was sportsnight, which at the time I hated, it seemed to be the longest half hour of the day waiting for it to finnish, and when the music came on at the end of the programme I was all excited because I knew what was on next, so I`ll always associate that music with those late night movies which introduced me to Mr. Lee.
  What is your earliest memory of seeing Mr. Lee?

Colin

[Charles Prepolec]

Colin,
You are right it was the charming Amicus flick Doctor Terror's House of Horrors. The segment you referenced is entitled "The Disembodied Hand" and featured Mr. Lee as the pompous art critic Fanklyn Marsh. The hand in question belonging to Michael Gough. The other segments were called "Werewolf", "Creeping Vine", "Voodoo" and "Vampire". Zero points to Amicus for such creative naming of the segments! [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Peter Cushing appeared as the titular character who boards a train and tells the fortunes of the other passengers, who were Mr. Lee, Neil McCallum, Roy Castle and I think, Alan Freeman. A fun film and a great early memory of Mr. Lee!

For me, I think seeing The Three Musketeers in the cinema was really the first time I registered Mr. Lee as an actor rather than as strictly a character in a film. That film, combined with The Man with the Golden Gun are pretty much my earliest memories of seeing Mr. Lee.

A couple years later, I think, I first registered Peter Cushing in At the Earth's Core during it's cinema run. At the time, my cousin would indulge me and take me to see a whole slew of Arkoff type pictures every Saturday afternoon. Oddly, the cinema...called The Tivoli...showed nothing but porn films all week long, but every Saturday afternoon they showed kiddie matinees.

Thanks for reminding me of those fun-filled innocent days of moviegoing...not to mention the hurling of flattened popcorn boxes during the intermissions! Funny the associations one has stored away.

It had to be one of the Dracula films with Peter Cushing playing with Mr. Lee. I remember being frustrated that the newspaper's TV section simply listed both their names, without saying which was Dracula. It occurs to me now that Christopher Lee probably got top billing, as the title character, but I didn't know that as a kid, so the two names just swam together in my head for a long time.

[Maria Silbermann]

I believe it was 1974, I saw a publicity still of him holding binoculars (probably a still from The Man With the Golden Gun, when he watches Bond enter Chu Fat's garden wearing the artificial "superfluous third nipple").  Something about his bemused expression caught my attention, and I began looking for examples of his work.  I think I remember Golden Gun, or Three Musketeers as being the first films that I saw.

[Wendy Wood]

My first memories were the Hammer pictures of the 50s and 60s.

[Greg Harris]

Fu Manchu! the episode where there was a flood or something like that! After I sore CL in this (he was allways advertised as the man with many faces) I allways recognised his name when it was mentioned!

[Alfonso Casal]

For the longest time I always thought my first Christopher Lee film was DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE, which was my first ever in-the-theater movie.  But I now realize that I saw HORROR HOTEL (where the witches go up in flames) on a creature feature program while but a wee lad.  A very wee lad, in fact!