Great movies, but the most amazing thing to me was Sir Christopher Lee at age 80 playing Saruman. He originally wanted to be Gandolf, but the producers had already approached Ian McKellen (59 at the time) for that, and after all, who best to play the big bad guy but the Brit who put Dracula and other stylish, suave horror characters on the movie map in the fifties and sixties?
By the way, Lee, born in 1922 and died at age 93 in 2015 after an incredible 70-year acting career, was the only participant in the project to have actually MET Tolkien, who passed in 1973 at 81, before several of the other stars of the films were even glimmers in the eyes of their parents. They met at a pub in Oxford by chance!
As film writer Scott Weinberg said, "Do you have kids? They know who Christopher Lee is. Are your grandparents still around? So do they. That's amazing. Such a cool guy too."
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