Richard Jaeckel

Jaeckel died in 1997 after a three year battle with melanoma cancer at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. Lee's great grandparents formed Australia's first opera company, performing before miners in towns in the outback. Ben Edwards on the series Baywatch. Lee will reprise his Star Wars role as Count Dooku in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. In his later years, Jaeckel was known to TV audiences as Lt. Lee was a natural choice for the Lord of the Rings movies, where he plays the role of Saruman, as he makes it a habit of reading the novel at least once a year. The highlight of Jaeckel's career was in 1971, when he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Sometimes a Great Notion. Also, he narrated the Dark Secret EP by Italian power metal band, Rhapsody.

Jaeckel's other films include The Gunfighter, Come Back, Little Sheba, 3:10 to Yuma, Town Without Pity, The Dirty Dozen, Chisum Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Grizzly, Twilight's Last Gleaming, The Dark Cold River, Starman, Black Moon Rising and The Delta Force 2. Lee appeared on the cover of the Wings album Band on the Run along with other people, including Clement Freud. He served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1949, then starred in two of the most remembered war films of 1949, Battleground and Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne. Lee would eventually play another Bond villain, Francisco Scaramanga, in The Man with the Golden Gun. A casting director audtioned him for a key role in the 1943 film Guadalcanal Diary, Jaeckel won the role and settled into a lengthy career in supporting parts. Julius No. Jaeckel got his start in the business at the age of 17 while working as a mailboy at 20th Century Fox studios in Hollywood. Author Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, is his cousin and wanted Lee to play the first James Bond film villain, Dr.

A short, but tough guy, he played a variety of characters in his 50 years in movies and television and became one of Hollywood's best known character actors. This calculation uses a modification of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. Jaeckel was born in Long Beach, New York. As an indication to his profligacy and longevity, Lee has, according to the Oracle of Bacon at Virginia (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/oracle/), an average Bacon number of 2.684104 (as of December 2003), making him second on the list of most suitable centres of the Hollywood universe. Richard Hanley Jaeckel (October 10, 1926 - June 14, 1997) was an American actor. He appeared as Flay in the BBC television miniseries Gormenghast, based on Mervyn Peake's novels. Lee has played roles in over 220 films since 1948, and has had many notable television roles.

From then on, Lee was periodically featured in numerous horror roles for various studios. That led to his first Dracula film, Horror of Dracula, in 1958. His first film for Hammer, made in 1957 with Peter Cushing, was Curse of Frankenstein, in which he played, "The Creature". Throughout the next decade, Lee made nearly 30 films, playing mostly stock action characters.

He made his film debut in Terrence Long's Gothic Romance, Corridor of Mirrors, in 1948. He was educated at Wellington College, he volunteered to fight for the Finnish forces during the Winter War against the Soviet Union in 1939, then served in the Royal Air Force and intelligence during World War II. Lee is now over 80 years old, and still appearing in films such as The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. He is viewed by many as the quintessential film villain. Other notable films include The Wicker Man and The Man with the Golden Gun.

Lee became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a string of Hammer Horror films. He should not be confused with Christopher Lee, historian. Christopher Frank Carandini Lee (born May 27, 1922 in London) is a prolific British actor known for his versatility and film longevity.