Warner Bros. Discovery may have announced its new deal to make “multiple” films based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s groundbreaking Lord of the Rings books but they won’t ever be able to find an actor who had the deep connection to the books and their author that Christopher Lee did. The film legend who starred as the evil wizard Saruman in the original film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson was perhaps the ultimate Tolkien fan of all time.
Lee has been a Tolkien fan since 1954 when the author first released The Fellowship of the Rings and reread the trilogy every year until his death in 2015. That alone would probably have made him the biggest fan on the set of the original films but Lee possessed an even greater claim to the title. He was the only member of the cast and crew to have met Tolkien himself in person.
According to the Tolkien Society, Lee ran into Professor Tolkien in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford shortly before the author’s death. “We were sitting there talking and drinking beer, and someone said, ‘Oh, look who walked in,‘” Lee recounted. “It was Professor Tolkien, and I nearly fell off my chair.“
“I still think The Lord of the Rings is the greatest literary achievement in my lifetime,” Lee stated in the interview. “Like so many other people, I couldn’t wait for the second, and then the third book. Nothing like it had ever been written,” adding that “if they ever were made [into movies], I dreamed that I would be in them. It just goes to show you, that sometimes dreams do come true.”
I also love the fun fact that Christopher Lee was the only member of the LOTR cast to actually meet Tolkien pic.twitter.com/4RdpfHmdXc
— maria garcia (@tulipsmg) February 22, 2023
Lee’s own storied life may have made him the perfect casting for Saruman, who before his downfall was regarded as the wisest man in Middle-earth. The dashing actor served in the RAF during World War II and later took on intelligence missions when an eye injury rendered him incapable of flying. It is rumored that Lee, who crossed paths with fellow military intelligence agent Ian Fleming, was one of the inspirations for Fleming’s James Bond.
Lee would go on to have a long and storied career as an actor and, by the end of his life, had played such iconic literary figures as Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and Frankenstein’s monster and had appeared in some of the greatest film franchises of all time, including Star Wars and (ironically playing a villain) the James Bond films.
It’s safe to say though that his most fulfilling literary role was that of Saruman. Later in the interview, he described Tolkien’s works as “the peak of literary invention of all time. Nothing like it has ever existed, and probably never will.”