11:35am Friday 4th July 2008
By Paul Welsh
A surprise guest was honoured at last week's film night, but PAUL WELSH warns don't say something stupid like fangs for the memories'... whoops.
Well, another Elstree film evening has come and gone. And this year, for the first time since 1989, it was conducted at Elstree Studios where it all began in 1984.
The event, held on Saturday, is always a bit of an adventure to host as it is unrehearsed and unscripted, but this year we also had a new format and venue.
However, we had an appreciative audience and the time just flashed by. As ever, the music was provided by the excellent BBC Elstree Concert Band and there were a number of celebrity guests representing several decades of film production.
One challenge was to arrange a plaque unveiling for a surprise guest who told me only days before that he was coming.
Consequently we restructured the second half to honour 86-year-old veteran star Christopher Lee, who younger readers know from Lord Of The Rings and the new Star Wars movies, and older readers remember from the Fifties and Sixties Hammer horror movies.
Christopher has clocked up more film credits than any other living actor in a 62-year career, several of which were made in Borehamwood.
He recalled in his acceptance speech how one of his fingers was permanently damaged by Errol Flynn in a screen duel at Elstree Studios and how Gary Cooper once visited his film set at the same studio.
One tends to avoid the subject of Dracula, which brought Christopher stardom in the Fifties but became a burden when it threatened to type cast him as he had done Bela Lugosi 20 years earlier.
However, I took the risk of inviting his co-stars from the Sixties film Dracula Prince Of Darkness, Barbara Shelley and Francis Matthews, to be the surprise guest unveilers. In fact the last time Christopher played the evil count was at Elstree in the Seventies.
Although he has worked at five of the six studios here since the Fifties, he has also enjoyed a successful career in Hollywood and Europe.
I cannot imagine anyone today clocking up so many screen credits in such a wide variety of roles.
He is still working so hard it took me two years to pin him down, but the audience certainly enjoyed his surprise appearance.
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