Only one person on the Lord of the Rings film set ever met J.R.R. Tolkien in real life -- and that was Christopher Lee, who played corrupt wizard Saruman.
The talented British actor, who died Sunday at the age of 93, met the Lord of the Rings author decades ago. In a 2010 interview with Cinefantastique, Lee described meeting Tolkien "quite by chance."
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"I met him with a group of other people in a pub in Oxford he used to go to, The Eagle and Child," he said. "I was very much in awe of him, as you can imagine, so I just said, 'How do you do?'"
Lee was a massive fan of the Lord of the Rings series, calling it the "greatest literary achievement in my lifetime." He was as dedicated as they come, having read the trilogy's first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, when it first came out in 1954. Naturally, Lee was determined to be a part of any future film adaptation.
In the mid-1950s, Lee was a young actor with numerous film titles under his belt, although he was still a ways off from his breakout roles in horror movies.
Ever the strategist, Lee began purposefully auditioning for wizard roles in TV and film in the late '90s. By then, he was too old to play main characters like Frodo and Sam, so he needed to get some wizarding experience under his belt to potentially play a role like Gandalf or Saruman. By 1997, he landed the role of wizard Olwyn in the TV series The New Adventures of Robin Hood.
"The only reason I did that was to show anyone who was watching that I could play a wizard, and that I would be ideal casting for The Lord of the Rings," Lee explained.
Then the time came to convince Jackson. Lee took a rather direct approach, but as it turned out, he didn't need to at all:
I sent him a picture of myself all made-up in the wizard’s role, but it was more in the nature of a joke, really. 'This is what I look like as a wizard, don’t forget this when you cast the movie.' It wasn’t me putting myself forward at all, because I think Peter had already made up his mind. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway, that he never thought of anybody else for Saruman, except for me, so it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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