LEE STILL SCARING UP WORK

By David Colton

From USA Today, 08.06.1999

"I am, it seems, the only one left," says Christopher Lee, who at 77 is the film world's last living horror legend.

Lee, who's in Russell Mulcahy's Tale of the Mummy, out on home video this week, appears in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, opening in October. (Burton made a similar homage when he cast Vincent Price in 1990's Edward Scissorhands.) Lee's revised autobiography, "Christopher Lee: Tall, Dark and Gruesome," has just been released in the USA.

All are reasons for Lee to make his first convention appearance in a decade at the Midnight Marquee Monster Rally, today through Sunday at the Crystal City Hyatt in Arlington, Va.

At 6-foot-4 and with slicked-back gray-and-white hair, he'll be hard to miss. "He has such a commanding presence, he has that voice and an overwhelming sense of character," says Mark Miller, a Lee biographer. "It's quite easy to see why he was cast as Frankenstein, the Mummy and, of course, Dracula."

"Inevitably, people talk about the last horror icon and so on," Lee says. "It's very gratifying, but that doesn't mean those are the only roles I have done."

Lee's filmography stands at close to 200 films in a 52-year career. "I must confess that there have been quite a few films I've regretted, although in every case there was something about the project that was attractive."

Lee, who lives in London with his wife, Gitte, is eager to find U.S. distribution for Jinnah, a controversial 1998 film in which he stars as Pakistan's founder. "It's very important to me that this come out -- in the theaters, on TV, as a video. It's the best performance I've ever given."

As for the horror lineage, someone else may be out there, he says, but "I have not yet seen my successor."

Lee adds, "I remember what Boris Karloff said to me, something Lon Chaney had told him: Find something other actors will not do, and if you do it, you will never be forgotten."