One of the hardest working movie actors ever, with well over 150 feature films to his credit, British-born Van Helsing paid his dues for ten years working in various "spear carrier" roles for directors like Laurence Olivier ("Hamlet" 1948), Raoul Walsh ("Captain Horatio Hornblower" 1950) and John Huston ("Moulin Rouge" 1952) before finding his niche as the sinister star of countless horror films (often with Peter Cushing), most notably the productions of Hammer Films. Dubbed 'The Crown Prince of Terror' for his many ghoulish turns, Lee made his big breakthrough as The Creature opposite Cushing's Baron Frankenstein in Terence Fisher's "The Curse of Frankenstein" (1957) for Hammer, and the trio of director and co-stars reteamed for three more memorable Hammer pictures, "Horror of Dracula" (1958), "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "The Mummy" (both 1959).

Lee's "Tall, Dark and Gruesome" persona (Lee's own words, from the title of his autobiography) served him particularly well in his most frequent screen role, Dracula, which he essayed three times to Cushing's Van Helsing and ten times in all, but he played Fu Manchu in five movies, as well as numerous portrayals of Sherlock Holmes for both film and TV. In fact, his first foray into the Holmes genre was as Sir Henry Baskerville opposite Cushing's Holmes in "The Hound of the Baskervilles", and he played Holmes' brother Mycroft in Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (1970), making him the only actor ever to play both brothers. In addition, one of his finest (and somewhat overlooked) characterizations was the menacing Comte de Rochefort in the Richard Lester "Musketeer" movies ("The Three Musketeers" 1974, "The Four Musketeers" 1975 and "The Return of the Musketeers" 1989).

Lee was outstanding as the sadistic St. Evermonde (the same role once assumed by Basil Rathbone) in the 1958 version of "A Tale of Two Cities", starring Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton, and marvelously over-the-top in the title role of "Rasputin--the Mad Monk" (1966). He portrayed James Bond's adversary, the assassin Scaramanga, in "The Man With the Golden Gun" (1974) and created one of Disney's best villains in years, the mad scientist Victor in "Return From Witch Mountain" (1979). Lee branched into comedy for Steven Spielberg's "1941" (1979) and again as a gay biker in the feature "Serial" (1980), returning to the rogue's gallery as Chuck Norris' nemesis in "An Eye for an Eye" (1981). His last film with Cushing was "The House of Long Shadows" (1982), but the duo had a curtain call a decade later when John Landis integrated footage from "Horror of Dracula" into his "Innocent Blood" (1992), giving the pair a final turn together. He then acted for Landis in "The Stupids" (1996).

Some of Lee's best work in the 80s and 90s has been for the small screen in miniseries like "The Far Pavilions" (HBO, 1984), "Shaka Zulu" (syndicated, 1986) and "Around the World in 80 Days" (NBC, 1989). He underwent a two-hour make-up transformation for his part as Blind Pew in Fraser Heston's adaptation of "Treasure Island" (TNT, 1990), a project that reunited him with the director's father Charlton, who had played Richelieu to Lee's Rochefort in the first two Lester movies and Marc Antony in a 1970 version of "Julius Caesar" with Lee as Artemidorus. He showcased his facility for languages in the USA Network movie "Alistair MacLean's Death Train" (1993), speaking in both Russian and English for his role as disaffected Soviet General Konstantin Benin. He also portrayed Pharaoh to Ben Kingsley's Moses for the TNT miniseries "Moses" (1996) and appeared as Tiresias in "The Odyssey" (1997), an NBC miniseries.

Going strong in his seventies and eighties, Lee continued to appear in a variety of roles. He earned stellar notices portraying the founder of modern Pakistan in the 1998 biopic "Jinnah" and then graced the screen as one of the burgermeisters in Tim Burton's ode to Hammer films "Sleepy Hollow" (1999). As the new millennium dawned, Lee was busy filming his role as the villainous wizard Sarumen in "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001) and its sequels in Peter Jackson's epic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkein's novel. The actor then added another nefarious character to his gallery joining yet another popular fantasy franchise, cast as Count Dooku in "Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones" (2002).