Nowadays, most people know Christopher Lee as Saruman the White or Count Dooku. He was awesome as Saruman, but since I generally prefer to pretend that the Star Wars prequel trilogy never happened, I shall withhold opinion on Count Dooku. He’s also one-third of the triumvirate of what I call the awesome old horror actors, the others being Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. (He’s also the only one of the three to live to see the new millennium.)
As this infographic shows, Christopher Lee’s badassery runs deep (h/t Marc):
To this, I would add Lee’s involvement in the Winter War, when the Soviet Union thought it’d be a good idea to invade Finland in November 1939 (i.e. the dead of winter, which is pretty much where the Finns live full- time.) The Soviets captured the territory they wanted, but that’s about the only thing that went well for them.
Lee volunteered to jump into some very serious shit:
Shit got real in 1939 when Christopher Lee quit his day job, caught a boat to Finland, and decided to enlist in the Finnish Army to help them fight off the Soviet invasion of Finland. Lee got geared up to kick some commie asses up and down the frozen wastes of mid-Winter Finland, but didn’t see much action, returning home in 1940 to deal with a much bigger and more England-centric problem: Nazis.
He “didn’t see much action,” but the key point is that he showed up for that fight voluntarily. Plus, he followed it up with even more badassery:
Christopher Lee enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1940, where he worked as an intelligence officer specializing in cracking German ciphers and skulls and any other Nazi bullshit he came in contact with. In North Africa he was attached to the Long Range Desert Patrol, the forerunner of the SAS, where he would jump in a badass fucking four-wheel-drive jeep with a gigantic machine gun mounted in the back, drive hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, survive the scorching heat of the Sahara Desert, then sneak-attack Luftwaffe airfields by rolling up on them at sixty miles an hour with his .50-caliber machine guns blazing out curtains of white-hot Nazi-smiting justice, planting dynamite on their airplanes, then peeling ass out of there leaving nothing but bullet-riddled corpses and gigantic explosions in his wake. After working with the LRDP, Lee was assigned to the Special Operations Executive – better known as Winston Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – a group that did shit like lead a twelve-man assault that destroyed the German top secret nuclear weapons development facility in Norway and assist brave Eastern European partisans and rebels sabotage Nazi supply lines to prevent them from bringing reinforcements up to fight the Soviets. His service records are sealed and Lee doesn’t talk much about his service (when pressed on the subject, he reportedly asks his interviewer, “Can you keep a secret?”. When they excitedly say yes, he leans in close and says, “So can I.”), but we do know that by the time he retired as a Flight Lieutenant in 1945 he’d been personally decorated for battlefield bravery by the Czech, Yugoslavian, English, and Polish governments and was good friends with Josip Broz Tito, so draw your own conclusions.
Technically yes, Tito was a communist, but he didn’t exactly get along with the Soviets, so that’s okay.
