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Christopher Lee

Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee (27 May 1922 – 7 June 2015) was an English actor, singer, and military officer. In a career spanning more than sixty years, Lee became known as an actor with a deep and commanding voice who often portrayed villains in horror and franchise films. Lee was knighted for services to drama and charity in 2009, received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2011, and received the BFI Fellowship in 2013.

Lee gained fame for portraying Count Dracula in seven Hammer Horror films. His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Count Dooku in three Star Wars films (2002–2008), and Saruman in both The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and The Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014). He frequently appeared opposite his friend Peter Cushing in horror films, and late in his career had roles in five Tim Burton films, including Sleepy Hollow (1999), Corpse Bride (2005), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Alice in Wonderland (2010), and Dark Shadows (2012). Lee's other notable roles include The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), A Tale of Two Cities (1958), The Wicker Man (1973), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), Jinnah (1998), Glorious 39 (2009), and Hugo (2011).

Before his acting career, Lee served in the Royal Air Force as an intelligence officer, attached to the No. 260 Squadron RAF during World War II as a liaison officer for the Special Operations Executive. He retired from the RAF in 1946 with the rank of flight lieutenant. Lee also sang, recorded opera and musical pieces between 1986 and 1998, and worked with several heavy metal bands; he appeared on the albums Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross (2010) and Charlemagne: The Omens of Death (2013).

Early life
Lee was born on 27 May 1922 in Belgravia, London, the son of Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Trollope Lee (1879–1941) of the 60th King's Royal Rifle Corps, and his wife, Countess Estelle Marie (née Carandini di Sarzano; 1889–1981). Lee's father fought in the Boer War and First World War, and his mother was an Edwardian beauty who was painted by Sir John Lavery, Oswald Birley, and Olive Snell, and sculpted by Clare Sheridan. Lee's maternal great-grandfather, Jerome Carandini, the Marquis of Sarzano, was an Italian political refugee; his wife, Lee's great-grandmother, was English-born opera singer Marie Carandini (née Burgess). He had an elder sister, Xandra Carandini Lee (1917–2002).

Lee's parents separated when he was four and divorced two years later. During this time, his mother took his sister and him to Wengen in Switzerland. After enrolling in Miss Fisher's Academy in Territet, he played his first role, as Rumpelstiltskin. They then returned to London, where Lee attended Wagner's private school in Queen's Gate, and his mother married Harcourt George St-Croix Rose, a banker and uncle of Ian Fleming. Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, thus became Lee's step-cousin. The family moved to Fulham, living next door to the actor Eric Maturin. One night, he was introduced to Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the assassins of Grigori Rasputin, whom Lee was to play many years later.

When Lee was nine, he was sent to Summer Fields School, a preparatory school in Oxford, some of whose pupils later attended Eton. He continued acting in school plays, though "the laurels deservedly went to Patrick Macnee." Lee applied for a scholarship to Eton, where his interview was in the presence of the ghost story author M.R. James. His poor maths skills meant that he was placed eleventh, and thus missed out on being a King's Scholar by one place. His step-father was not prepared to pay the higher fees that being an Oppidan Scholar meant, so instead he attended Wellington College, where he won scholarships in the classics, studying Ancient Greek and Latin. Aside from a "tiny part" in a school play, he did not act while at Wellington. He was a "passable" racquets player and fencer and a competent cricketer but did not do well at the other sports played: hockey, football, rugby and boxing. He disliked the parades and weapons training and would always "play dead" as soon as possible during mock battles. Lee was frequently beaten at school, including once at Wellington for "being beaten too often," though he accepted them as "logical and therefore acceptable" punishments for knowingly breaking the rules. At age 17, and with one year left at Wellington, the summer term of 1939 was his last. His step-father had gone bankrupt, owing £25,000.

His mother separated from Rose, and Lee had to get a job, his sister already working as a secretary for the Church of England Pensions Board. With most employers on or preparing to go on summer holidays, there were no immediate opportunities for Lee, who was sent to the French Riviera, where his sister was on holiday with friends. On his way there he stopped briefly in Paris, where he stayed with the journalist Webb Miller, a friend of Rose, and witnessed Eugen Weidmann's execution by guillotine – the last public execution performed in France. Arriving in Menton, he stayed with the Russian Mazirov family, living among exiled princely families. It was arranged that he should remain in Menton after his sister had returned home, but with Europe on the brink of war, he returned to London instead. He worked as an office clerk for United States Lines, taking care of the mail and running errands.

Military service
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Lee had enrolled in a military academy and volunteered to fight for the Finnish Army against the Soviet Union during the Winter War. He and other British volunteers were kept away from the actual fighting, but they were issued with winter gear and were posted on guard duty a safe distance from the border. After two weeks in Finland, they returned home. In a later interview, Lee said he knew how to shoot but not how to ski and that he probably would not be alive if he had been allowed to go to the front line. Lee returned to work at United States Lines and found his work more satisfying, feeling that he was contributing. In early 1940, he joined Beecham's, at first as an office clerk, then as a switchboard operator. When Beecham's moved out of London, he joined the Home Guard. In the winter, his father fell ill with bilateral pneumonia and died on 12 March 1941. Realising that he had no inclination to follow his father into the Army, Lee decided to join up while he still had some choice of service, and volunteered for the Royal Air Force.

Lee reported to RAF Uxbridge for training and was then posted to the Initial Training Wing at Paignton. After he had passed his exams in Liverpool, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan meant that he travelled on the Reina del Pacifico to South Africa, then to his posting at Hillside, at Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia. Training with de Havilland Tiger Moths, Lee was having his penultimate training session before his first solo flight, when he suffered from headaches and blurred vision. The medical officer hesitantly diagnosed a failure of his optic nerve, and he was told he would never be allowed to fly again. Lee was devastated, and the death of a fellow trainee from his former school, Summer Fields, only made him more despondent. His appeals were fruitless, and he was left with nothing to do. He was moved around to different flying stations before being posted to Southern Rhodesia's capital, Salisbury, in December 1941. He then visited the Mazowe Dam, Marandellas, the Wankie Game Reserve and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. Thinking he should "do something constructive for my keep", he applied to join RAF Intelligence. His superiors praised his initiative, and he was seconded into the British South Africa Police and was posted as a warder at Salisbury Prison. He was then promoted to leading aircraftman. Leaving South Africa, he sailed from Durban to Suez on the Nieuw Amsterdam.

After "killing time" at RAF Kasfareet near the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal Zone in 1942, he resumed intelligence work in the city of Ismaïlia. He was then attached to No. 205 Group RAF before being commissioned at the end of January 1943, and attached to No. 260 Squadron RAF as an intelligence officer. As the North African Campaign progressed, the squadron "leapfrogged" between Egyptian airstrips, from RAF El Daba to Maaten Bagush and on to Mersa Matruh; they lent air support to the ground forces and bombed strategic targets. Lee, "broadly speaking, was expected to know everything." The Allied advance continued into Libya, through Tobruk and Benghazi to the Marble Arch and then through El Agheila, Khoms and Tripoli, with the squadron averaging five missions a day. As the advance continued into Tunisia, with the Axis forces digging themselves in at the Mareth Line, Lee was almost killed when the squadron's airfield was bombed. After breaking through the Mareth Line, the squadron made their final base in Kairouan; following the Axis surrender in North Africa in May 1943, the squadron moved to Zuwarah in Libya in preparation for the Allied invasion of Sicily. They then moved to Malta, and, after its capture by the British Eighth Army, the Sicilian town of Pachino, before making a permanent base in Agnone Bagni. At the end of July 1943, Lee received his second promotion of the year, this time to flying officer. After the Sicilian campaign was over, Lee came down with malaria for the sixth time in under a year, and was flown to a hospital in Carthage for treatment. When he returned, the squadron was restless, frustrated with a lack of news about the Eastern Front and the Soviet Union in general, and with no mail from home or alcohol. Unrest spread and threatened to turn into mutiny. Lee, by now an expert on Russia, talked them into resuming their duties, which much impressed his commanding officer.

After the Allied invasion of Italy, the squadron was based in Foggia and Termoli during the winter of 1943, where Lee was then seconded to the Army during an officers' swap scheme. During most of the Battle of Monte Cassino he was attached to the Gurkhas of the 8th Indian Infantry Division. While spending some time on leave in Naples, Lee climbed Mount Vesuvius, which erupted three days later. During the final assault on Monte Cassino, the squadron was based in San Angelo, and Lee was nearly killed when one of the planes crashed on takeoff, and he tripped over one of its live bombs. After the battle, the squadron moved to airfields just outside Rome, and Lee visited the city, where he met his mother's cousin, Nicolò Carandini, who had fought in the Italian resistance movement. In November 1944, Lee was promoted to flight lieutenant and left the squadron in Iesi to take up a posting at Air Force HQ. Lee took part in forward planning and liaison, in preparation for a potential assault into the rumoured German Alpine Fortress. After the war ended, Lee was invited to go hunting near Vienna and was then billeted in Pörtschach am Wörthersee. For the final few months of his service, Lee, who spoke fluent French, Italian and German, among other languages, was seconded to the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Here, he was tasked with helping to track down Nazi war criminals. Of his time with the organisation, Lee said: "We were given dossiers of what they'd done and told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could and hand them over to the appropriate authority". He completed his service with the RAF in 1946 with the rank of flight lieutenant.

Lee said that during the war he was attached to special forces, but declined to give details. Lee's stepfather served as a captain in the Intelligence Corps, but it is unlikely he had any influence over Lee's military career. Lee saw his stepfather for the last time on a bus in London in 1940, after he was divorced from Lee's mother, and Lee did not speak to him.

1947–1957: Career beginnings
Returning to London in 1946, Lee was offered his old job back at Beecham's with a significant raise, but he turned them down as "I couldn't think myself back into the office frame of mind." The Armed Forces were sending veterans with an education in the Classics to teach at universities, but Lee felt his Latin was too rusty and didn't care for the strict curfews. During lunch with his cousin Nicolò Carandini, now the Italian Ambassador to Britain, Lee was detailing his war wounds when Carandini said, "Why don't you become an actor, Christopher?" Lee liked the idea, and after assuaging his mother's protests by pointing to the successful Carandini performers in Australia (which included his great-grandmother Marie Carandini, who had been an opera singer), he met Nicolò's friend Filippo Del Giudice, a lawyer-turned-film producer and head of Two Cities Films, part of the Rank Organisation. Lee recalled that Giudice "looked me up and down" and "concluded that I was just what the industry had been looking for." He was sent to see Josef Somlo for a contract:

"Initially, I was told [by Somlo] I was too tall to be an actor. That's a quite fatuous remark to make. It's like saying you're too short to play the piano. I thought, 'Right, I'll show you...' At the beginning I didn't know anything about the technique of working in front of a camera, but during those 10 years, I did the one thing that's so vitally important today – I watched, I listened and I learned. So when the time came I was ready... Oddly enough, to play a character who said nothing [The Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein]."

Somlo sent him to see Rank's David Henley and Olive Dodds, who signed him on a seven-year contract. Like other students at Rank's "Charm School," Lee had difficulty finding work. He finally made his film début in 1948, in Terence Young's Gothic romance Corridor of Mirrors. He played Charles; the director got around his height by placing him at a table in a nightclub alongside Lois Maxwell, Mavis Villiers, Hugh Latimer and John Penrose. Lee had a single line, "a satirical shaft meant to qualify the lead's bravura."

In this early period, he made an uncredited appearance in Laurence Olivier's film version of Hamlet (1948), as a spear carrier (his later co-star and close friend Peter Cushing played Osric). A few years later, he appeared in Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. (1951) as a Spanish captain. He was cast when the director asked him if he could speak Spanish and fence, which he was able to do. Lee appeared uncredited in the American epic Quo Vadis (1951), which was shot in Rome, playing a chariot driver and was injured when he was thrown from it at one point during the shoot.

He recalled that his breakthrough came in 1952, when Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. began making films at the British National Studios. He said in 2006, "I was cast in various roles in 16 of them and even appeared with Buster Keaton and it proved an excellent training ground." The same year, he appeared in John Huston's Oscar-nominated Moulin Rouge. Throughout the next decade, he made nearly 30 films, including The Cockleshell Heroes, playing mostly stock action characters.

1957–1976: Work with Hammer

Lee's first film for Hammer was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), in which he played Frankenstein's monster, with Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein. It was the first film to co-star Lee and Cushing, who ultimately appeared together in over twenty films and became close friends. When he arrived at a casting session for the film, "they asked me if I wanted the part, I said yes and that was that." A little later, Lee co-starred with Boris Karloff in the film Corridors of Blood (1958). Lee had previously appeared with Karloff in 1955 in the "At Night, All Cats are Grey" episode of the British television series Colonel March of Scotland Yard. Karloff and Lee were London neighbours for a time in the mid-1960s.

Lee's own appearance as Frankenstein's monster led to his first appearance as the Transylvanian vampire Count Dracula in the film Dracula (1958, known as Horror of Dracula in the US). The film saw Lee's "triumphant debut" fix the image of the fanged vampire in popular culture, according to writer Kevin Jackson. Dracula has been ranked among the best British films. Lee introduced a dark, brooding sexuality to the character, with Tim Stanley stating, "Lee's sensuality was subversive in that it hinted that women might quite like having their neck chewed on by a stud." The film magazine Empire ranked Lee's portrayal as Dracula the 7th Greatest Horror Movie Character of All Time. CNN listed the performance third in their top 10 British villains, noting his "chilling, sonorous tone." Lee accepted a similar role in an Italian-French horror picture called Uncle Was a Vampire (1959). The same year he starred as Kharis in the Hammer Horror film The Mummy.

Lee returned to the role of Dracula in Hammer's Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1965). Lee's role has no lines, he merely hisses his way through the film. Stories vary as to the reason for this: Lee states he refused to speak the poor dialogue he was given, but screenwriter Jimmy Sangster claims that the script did not contain any lines for the character. This film set the standard for most of the Dracula sequels in the sense that half the film's running time was spent on telling the story of Dracula's resurrection and the character's appearances were brief. Lee went on record to state that he was virtually "blackmailed" by Hammer into starring in the subsequent films; unable or unwilling to pay him his going rate, they would resort to reminding him of how many people he would put out of work if he did not take part:

"The process went like this: The telephone would ring and my agent would say, 'Jimmy Carreras [President of Hammer Films] has been on the phone, they've got another Dracula for you.' And I would say, 'Forget it! I don't want to do another one.' I'd get a call from Jimmy Carreras, in a state of hysteria. 'What's all this about?!' 'Jim, I don't want to do it, and I don't have to do it.' 'No, you have to do it!' And I said, 'Why?' He replied, 'Because I've already sold it to the American distributor with you playing the part. Think of all the people you know so well, that you will put out of work!' Emotional blackmail. That's the only reason I did them."

His roles in the films Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969), and Scars of Dracula (1970) all gave the Count very little to do. Lee said in an interview in 2005, "all they do is write a story and try and fit the character in somewhere, which is very clear when you see the films. They gave me nothing to do! I pleaded with Hammer to let me use some of the lines that Bram Stoker had written. Occasionally, I sneaked one in." He starred in two further Dracula films for Hammer in the early 1970s, both of which attempted to bring the character into the modern-day era. These were not commercially successful: Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973). The latter film was tentatively titled Dracula Is Dead... and Well and Living in London, a parody of the stage and film musical revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, but Lee was not amused. Speaking at a press conference in 1973 to announce the film, Lee said, "I'm doing it under protest. I think it is fatuous. I can think of twenty adjectives – fatuous, pointless, absurd. It's not a comedy, but it's got a comic title. I don't see the point." The Satanic Rites of Dracula was the last Dracula film in which Lee played the Dracula role, as he felt he had played the part too many times and that the films had deteriorated in quality.

In all, Lee played Dracula ten times: seven films for Hammer Productions, once for Jesús Franco's Count Dracula (1970), uncredited in Jerry Lewis's One More Time (1970) and Édouard Molinaro's Dracula and Son (1976) (he also played an unnamed but Dracula-like vampire in The Magic Christian [1969]). Lee portrayed Rasputin in Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1966) and Sir Henry Baskerville (to Cushing's Sherlock Holmes) in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959). Lee later played Holmes himself in 1962's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, and returned to Holmes films with Billy Wilder's British-made The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), in which he plays Sherlock's smarter brother, Mycroft. Lee considers this film to be the reason he stopped being typecast: "I've never been typecast since. Sure, I've played plenty of heavies, but as Anthony Hopkins says, "I don't play villains, I play people."" Lee played a leading role in the German film The Puzzle of the Red Orchid (1962), speaking German, which he had learned during his education in Switzerland. He auditioned for a part in the film The Longest Day (1962), but was turned down because he did not "look like a military man." Some film books incorrectly credit him with a role in the film, something he had to correct for the rest of his life.

Lee's friend the author Dennis Wheatley was responsible for bringing the occult to him. The company made two films from Wheatley's novels, both starring Lee. The New York Times described Lee's performance in the first, The Devil Rides Out (1967), as "suave dignity". However, the second film, To the Devil a Daughter (1976), was troubled by production difficulties and was disowned by its author. Although financially successful, it was Hammer's last horror film. Critic Leonard Maltin described it as "well-made but lacking punch".

 Other roles: The Wicker Man and James Bond

Like Cushing, Lee also appeared in horror films for other companies from 1957 to 1977. These included the Dr. Fu Manchu series of films made between 1965 and 1969 (beginning with The Face of Fu Manchu) in which he starred as the villain in yellowface make-up; I, Monster (1971), an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with the main characters' names changed to Dr. Charles Marlowe and Mr. Edward Blake; The Creeping Flesh (1972); and his personal favourite, which he considered his best film, The Wicker Man (1973), in which he played Lord Summerisle. Lee wanted to break free of his image as Dracula and take on more interesting acting roles. He met with screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, and they agreed to work together. Film director Robin Hardy and British Lion head Peter Snell became involved in the project. Shaffer had a series of conversations with Hardy, and the two decided that it would be fun to make a horror film centring on "old religion," in sharp contrast to the popular Hammer films of the day. Shaffer read the David Pinner novel Ritual, in which a devout Christian policeman is called to investigate what appears to be the ritual murder of a young girl in a rural village, and decided that it would serve well as the source material for the project. Shaffer and Lee paid Pinner £15,000 for the rights to the novel, and Schaffer set to work on the screenplay. However, he soon decided that a direct adaptation would not work well, and began to craft a new story, using only the novel's basic outline. Lee was so keen to get the film made, and the budget was so small, that he gave his services for free. He later called the film the best he had ever made.

Lee appeared as the on-screen narrator in Jess Franco's Eugenie (1970) as a favour to producer Harry Alan Towers, unaware that it was softcore pornography, as the sex scenes were shot separately.

"I had no idea that was what it was when I agreed to the role. I was told it was about the Marquis de Sade. I flew out to Spain for one day's work playing the part of a narrator. I had to wear a crimson dinner jacket. There were lots of people behind me. They all had their clothes on. There didn't seem to be anything peculiar or strange. A friend said: 'Do you know you are in a film in Old Compton Street?' In those days that was where the mackintosh brigade watched their films. 'Very funny,' I said. So I crept along there heavily disguised in dark glasses and scarf, and found the cinema and there was my name. I was furious! There was a huge row. When I had left Spain that day everyone behind me had taken their clothes off!"

In addition to making films in the United Kingdom, Lee made films in mainland Europe: he appeared in two German films, Count Dracula (1970), where he again played the vampire count, and The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967). Other films in Europe he made include Castle of the Living Dead (1964) and Horror Express (1972). Lee was a producer of the horror film Nothing But the Night (1972), in which he starred. It was the first and last film he produced, as he did not enjoy the process.

Lee appeared as the Comte de Rochefort in Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers (1973). He injured his left knee during filming, something he still felt many years later. After the mid-1970s, Lee eschewed horror roles almost entirely. Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond spy novels and Lee's step-cousin, had offered him the role of the titular antagonist in the first Eon-produced Bond film Dr. No (1962). Lee enthusiastically accepted, but by the time Fleming told the producers, they had already chosen Joseph Wiseman for the role. Lee finally got to play a James Bond villain in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), in which he was cast as the assassin Francisco Scaramanga. Lee said of his performance, "In Fleming's novel he's just a West Indian thug, but in the film he's charming, elegant, amusing, lethal... I played him like the dark side of Bond."

Because of his filming schedule in Bangkok, film director Ken Russell was unable to sign Lee to play the Specialist in Tommy (1975). That role was eventually given to Jack Nicholson. In an AMC documentary on Halloween (1978), John Carpenter states that he offered the role of Samuel Loomis to Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, before Donald Pleasence took the role. Years later, Lee told Carpenter that the biggest regret of his career was not taking the role of Dr. Loomis.

1977–1999: Move to Hollywood
In 1977, Lee left the UK for the US, concerned at being typecast in horror films, as had happened to his close friends Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. His first American appearance was in the disaster film Airport '77 (1977). In 1978, Lee surprised many people with his willingness to go along with a joke, appearing as guest host on NBC's Saturday Night Live. Steven Spielberg, who was in the audience for that show, cast him in 1941 (1979). Meanwhile, Lee co-starred with Bette Davis in the Disney film Return from Witch Mountain (1978). He turned down the role of Dr. Barry Rumack (finally played by Leslie Nielsen) in the disaster spoof Airplane! (1980), a decision he later called "a big mistake."

Lee played the mad scientist Dr. Catheter in Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). In a nod to his role as Dracula in Hammer Films, as the Bat Gremlin transforms, Dr. Catheter experiences deja-vu – the audience hears Dracula music. Lee made his last appearances as Sherlock Holmes in the television films Incident at Victoria Falls (1991) and Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1992).

Lee and Peter Cushing appeared together in more than a dozen feature films together for Hammer Films, Amicus Productions, and other companies, as well as in Hamlet (1948) and Moulin Rouge (1952), albeit in separate scenes. They featured, too, in separate instalments of the Star Wars films: Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in the original film, and Lee decades later as Count Dooku. The last project which united them in person was a documentary, Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1994), which they jointly narrated, two months before Cushing's death.

Lee considered his best performance to be in this period, when he played Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the biopic Jinnah (1998).

2000–2009: Resurgence in franchise films

Lee had many television roles. These included the role Flay in the BBC television miniseries Gormenghast (2000) based on Mervyn Peake's novels. He also appeared as Lucas de Beaumanoir, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, in the BBC/A&E co-production of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1997).

Lee portrayed Saruman in Peter Jackson's fantasy action epic The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. In the commentary, he stated that he had for decades dreamt of playing Gandalf. He conceded that he was now too old, and that his physical limitations prevented him from being considered; Ian McKellen, who was in his early-60s, was cast in the role alongside Lee, in his mid-70s. The role of Saruman, unlike that of Gandalf, required no horse riding and far less fighting. Lee had met J. R. R. Tolkien once, which made him the only person involved in Peter Jackson's films to have done so. He made a habit of reading the novels at least once a year. In addition, he performed for The Tolkien Ensemble's album At Dawn in Rivendell in 2003. Lee's appearance in the final film in the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, was cut from the theatrical release, but the scene was reinstated in the extended edition. The Lord of the Rings marked the beginning of a major career revival that continued with the role of the villainous Count Dooku in the George Lucas directed Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005). Lee acted opposite Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, and Natalie Portman and did most of the swordplay himself, though a stunt double was required for the long shots with more vigorous footwork.

In 2005, Lee played Dr. Wonka, father of Willy Wonka, in Tim Burton's film adaptation of the Roald Dahl children's classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He also voiced Pastor Galswells in the animated film Corpse Bride. In 2007, Lee collaborated with Burton again on Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, playing the spirit of Sweeney Todd's victims, called the Gentleman Ghost, alongside Anthony Head, with both singing "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd," its reprises and the Epilogue. These songs were recorded, but eventually cut since Burton felt that the songs were too theatrical for the film. Lee's appearance was completely cut from the film, but Head still had an uncredited one-line cameo. Also in 2007 he played the First High Councillor in The Golden Compass. In late November 2009, Lee narrated the Science Fiction Festival in Trieste, Italy. Also in 2009, Lee starred in Stephen Poliakoff's British period drama Glorious 39, Academy Award-nominated director Danis Tanović's war film Triage, and Duncan Ward's comedy Boogie Woogie.

During this time Lee provided voices for numerous films and video games. He spoke fluent English, Italian, French, Spanish, and German, and was moderately proficient in Swedish, Russian, and Greek. He was the original voice of Thor in the German dubs of the Danish 1986 animated film Valhalla, and of King Haggard in both the English and German dubs of the 1982 animated adaptation of The Last Unicorn. He provided all the voices for the English dub of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953). He voiced Death in the animated versions of Terry Pratchett's Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters, and reprised the role in the Sky1 live action adaptation The Colour of Magic, taking over from the late Ian Richardson. He provided the voice for the role of Ansem the Wise/DiZ in video games including Kingdom Hearts II.

Lee reprised his role as Saruman in the video game The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth. He narrated and sang for the Danish musical group The Tolkien Ensemble's 2003 studio album At Dawn in Rivendell, taking the role of Treebeard, King Théoden and others in the readings or singing of their respective poems or songs. In 2007, he voiced the transcript of The Children of Húrin by J. R. R. Tolkien for the audiobook version of the novel. In 2005, Lee provided the voice of Pastor Galswells in The Corpse Bride, co-directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson. He served as the narrator on The Nightmare Before Christmas poem, also written by Tim Burton as well. Lee reprised his role as Count Dooku in the animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008).

Some thirty years after playing Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, Lee provided the voice of Scaramanga in the video game GoldenEye: Rogue Agent. In 2013, Lee voiced The Earl of Earl's Court in the BBC Radio 4 radio play Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Lee recorded special dialogue, in addition to serving as the Narrator, for the Lego The Hobbit video game released in April 2014; at 91 years and 316 days old he appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest video game narrator.

2010–2015: Later roles

In 2004, Lee lamented that Hollywood scripts were mainly spin-offs, as people were afraid of taking financial risks, commenting that he was mostly being offered spin-offs of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. In 2010, he marked his fourth collaboration with Tim Burton by voicing the Jabberwock in Burton's adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic book Alice in Wonderland, alongside Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway. Lee respected Depp as "a fellow survivor", describing him as "inventive and [having] enormous versatility". In 2010, Lee received the Steiger Award (Germany) and, in February 2011, Lee was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship.

In 2011, he appeared in a Hammer film, The Resident, for the first time in 35 years. The film was directed by Antti Jokinen, and Lee gave a "superbly sinister" performance alongside Hilary Swank and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. While filming scenes for the film in New Mexico in early 2009, Lee injured his back when he tripped over power cables on set. Lee appears as the unnamed "Old Gentleman" who acts as Lachlan's mentor in a flashback. Also in 2011, Lee appeared in the critically acclaimed Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese.

Lee reprised the role of Saruman for the prequel film The Hobbit. He said he would have liked to have shown Saruman's corruption by Sauron, but was too old to travel to New Zealand, so the production was adjusted to allow him to participate from London. In 2012, Lee marked his fifth and final collaboration with Tim Burton, by appearing in Burton's film adaptation of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, in the small role of a New England fishing captain.

In an interview in August 2013, Lee said that he was "saddened" to hear his friend Johnny Depp was considering retiring from acting, observing that he himself had no intention of doing that: "There are frustrations – people who lie to you, people who don't know what they are doing, films that don't turn out the way you had wanted them to – so, yes, I do understand [why Depp would consider retiring]. I always ask myself, 'Well, what else could I do?' Making films has never just been a job to me, it's my life. I have some interests outside of acting – I sing and I've written books, for instance – but acting is what keeps me going, it's what I do, it gives life purpose... I'm realistic about the amount of work I can get at my age, but I take what I can, even voice-overs and narration."

Lee narrated the feature-length documentary Necessary Evil: Super-Villains of DC Comics, which was released on 25 October 2013. In 2014, he appeared in an episode of the BBC documentary series Timeshift called How to Be Sherlock Holmes: The Many Faces of a Master Detective. Lee and others who had played Sherlock Holmes discussed the character and the various interpretations of him. He appeared in a web exclusive, reading an excerpt from the Sherlock Holmes short story The Final Problem.

A month before his death, Lee had signed to star with an ensemble cast in the Danish film The 11th. One of his final performances was the independent Angels in Notting Hill directed by Michael Pakleppa, a fantasy film about an angel trapped in London who falls in love with a human being. Lee played The Boss / Mr. President and the film premiered in the Regent Street Cinema, London on 29 October 2016.

Music career

With his operatic bass voice, Lee sang on The Wicker Man soundtrack, performing Paul Giovanni's composition, "The Tinker of Rye." He sang the closing credits song of the 1994 horror film Funny Man. In 1977, he appeared on Peter Knight and Bob Johnson's (from Steeleye Span) concept album The King of Elfland's Daughter.

Lee's first contact with heavy metal music came by singing a duet with Fabio Lione, lead vocalist of the Italian symphonic power metal band Rhapsody of Fire on the single "The Magic of the Wizard's Dream" from their 2004 album Symphony of Enchanted Lands II – The Dark Secret, although he only performs backing vocals on the album version. Later he appeared as a narrator and backing vocalist on the band's four albums Symphony of Enchanted Lands II – The Dark Secret, Triumph or Agony, The Frozen Tears of Angels, and From Chaos to Eternity, as well as on the EP The Cold Embrace of Fear – A Dark Romantic Symphony, portraying the Wizard King. He worked with Manowar while they were recording a new version of their first album, Battle Hymns. The original voice was Orson Welles's (long dead at the time of the re-recording).

With the song "Jingle Hell," Lee entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart at No. 22, thus becoming the second oldest living performer to ever enter the music charts, at 91 years and 6 months. After media attention, the song rose to No. 18. as Lee became the oldest person to have a top 20 hit.

Lee released a third EP of covers in May 2014, called Metal Knight, to celebrate his 92nd birthday; in addition to a cover of "My Way," it contains "The Toreador March," inspired by the opera Carmen, and the songs "The Impossible Dream" and "I, Don Quixote" from the Don Quixote musical Man of La Mancha. Lee was inspired to record the latter songs because, "as far as I am concerned, Don Quixote is the most metal fictional character that I know." His fourth EP and third annual Christmas release came in December 2014, as he put out "Darkest Carols, Faithful Sing," a playful take on "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." He explained: "It's light-hearted, joyful and fun... At my age, the most important thing for me is to keep active by doing things that I truly enjoy. I do not know how long I am going to be around, so every day is a celebration, and I want to share it with my fans."

Lee is featured in the symphonic metal album Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross in 2010, after having worked with several metal bands since 2005. The heavy metal follow-up Charlemagne: The Omens of Death was released in 2013 on Lee's 91st birthday. He was honoured with the "Spirit of Hammer" award at the 2010 Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards ceremony. On the self-titled debut album by Hollywood Vampires, a supergroup consisting of Johnny Depp, Alice Cooper and Joe Perry, Lee is featured as a narrator in the track "The Last Vampire." Recorded shortly before his death, this marks Lee's final appearance on a musical record. In 2019, Rhapsody of Fire included a posthumous narration on their new album, The Eighth Mountain, in which Lee narrated the concept story of the band's Nephilim Empire Saga.

Family and relationships

The Carandinis, Lee's maternal ancestors, were given the right to bear the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In the late 1950s, Lee was engaged to Countess Henriette Ewa Agnes von Rosen, whom he had met at a nightclub in Stockholm. Her father, Count Fritz von Rosen, proved demanding, getting them to delay the wedding for a year, asking his London-based friends to interview Lee, hiring private detectives to investigate him, and asking Lee to provide him with references, which Lee obtained from Douglas Fairbanks Jr., John Boulting, and Joe Jackson. Lee found the meeting of her extended family to be like something from a surrealist Luis Buñuel film, and thought they were "killing me with cream." Finally, Lee had to have the permission of the King of Sweden to marry. Lee had met him some years before while filming Tales of Hans Anderson, where he received his blessing. However, shortly before the wedding, Lee ended the engagement. He was concerned that his financial insecurity in his chosen profession meant that she "deserved better" than being "pitched into the dishevelled world of an actor." She understood, and they called the wedding off.

Lee was introduced to Danish painter and former model Birgit "Gitte" Krøncke by a Danish friend in 1960. They were engaged soon after, and married on 17 March 1961. They had a daughter, Christina Erika Carandini Lee (b. 1963). Lee was the uncle of the British actress Harriet Walter. Both Lee and his daughter Christina provided spoken vocals on Rhapsody of Fire's album From Chaos to Eternity. Lee relocated to Los Angeles in the 1970s after becoming disillusioned with film roles he was being offered in Britain at the time and stated that in Hollywood "I was no longer a horror star. I was an actor." He subsequently moved back to England and lived with his family in Cadogan Square in west London until his death.

Physical characteristics and beliefs
Lee was known for his imposing height of 6 ft. On BBC Radio's Test Match Special "View from the Boundary" interview with Brian Johnston on 20 June 1987, Lee described himself as being 6 ft tall. Lee and his wife Birgit were listed among the fifty best-dressed over 50s by The Guardian in March 2013.

Lee was an Anglo-Catholic Christian. After the Second World War, he was an altar server at St Stephen's Church in South Kensington, London, during T. S. Eliot's period as a parishioner there. Politically, Lee supported the Conservative Party. Regarding Islam, he stated that Islamic terrorism "is not the true Islam."

Lee had an interest in the occult, to which he was introduced by Dennis Wheatley. It was once erroneously reported Lee had a library of occult literature that amounted to 20,000 books. However, during a talk at University College Dublin Lee confirmed he did not have such a collection and said "Somebody wrote that I had 20,000 books. I don't—I'd have to live in a bath!" He furthermore cautioned the audience against involving themselves in occult practices, claiming "I have met people who claim to be Satanists, who claim to be involved with black magic, who claimed that they not only knew a lot about it. But as I said, I certainly have not been involved and I warn all of you: never, never, never. You will not only lose your mind: you lose your soul."

Lee expressed his belief that women should hold power as they had the power "in the head and the heart, and what they do".

Death
Lee died at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on 7 June 2015 after being admitted for respiratory problems and heart failure, shortly after celebrating his 93rd birthday. His wife delayed the public announcement until 11 June, informing his family of the death before releasing the news to the press.

Following Lee's death, fans, friends, actors, directors and others involved in the film industry publicly gave their personal tributes. Then-Prime Minister David Cameron praised Lee as a "titan of the golden age of cinema." He was honoured by the academy at the 88th Academy Awards on 28 February 2016 in the annual in Memoriam section.

Honours and legacy
Lee was the subject of the BBC's This Is Your Life in 1974, where he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews. In 1994, for his influence on the horror genre, he received the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1997, he was appointed a Commander of the Venerable Order of Saint John. On 16 June 2001, as part of that year's Queen's Birthday Honours, Lee was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire "for services to Drama." He was made a Knight Bachelor "For services to Drama and to Charity" on 13 June as part of the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2009. The French government made him a Commander of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011.

Lee was named 2005's "most marketable star in the world" in a USA Today newspaper poll, after three of the films he appeared in grossed US$640 million. In 2010, he was identified as the IMDb member with the greatest closeness centrality, implying he was the best-connected person in the business.

In 2008, Lee in his role as Count Dracula featured on a commemorative UK postage stamp issued by the Royal Mail to mark 50 years since the release of Dracula (1958) by Hammer Films. In 2010, Lee received the Spirit of Hammer award at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards, for his contribution to the metal genre. In 2011, Lee was awarded a BAFTA Fellowship; he received a BFI Fellowship in 2013.

In 2011, accompanied by his wife Birgit, and on the 164th anniversary of the birth of Bram Stoker, Lee was honoured with a tribute by University College Dublin, and described his honorary life membership of the UCD Law Society as "in some ways as special as the Oscars." He was awarded the Bram Stoker Gold Medal by the Trinity College Philosophical Society, of which Stoker had been president, and a copy of Collected Ghost Stories of MR James by Trinity College's School of English.

Books
Note: Lee was 'ghost-editor' on the above series, which was edited by the anthologist Michel Parry.
 * Christopher Lee's X Certificate, London: Star Books, 1975. Hardcover reprint, Christopher Lee's 'X' Certificate edited by Christopher Lee and Michel Parry, London: W. H. Allen, 1976. US retitled reprint in paperback as From the Archives of Evil, New York: Warner Books, 1976.
 * Christopher Lee's Archives of Evil, London: Mayflower paperback, 1975. Hardcover reprint as Archives of Evil presented by Christopher Lee and Michel Parry. London: W. H. Allen, 1977. US retitled reprint in paperback as From the Archives of Evil 2, New York: Warner Books, 1976.
 * Christopher Lee's Omnibus of Evil, London: Mayflower paperback, 1975; reprint 1980). Retitled hardcover reprint as The Great Villains: An Omnibus of Evil, presented by Christopher Lee and Michel Parry. London: W. H. Allen, 1978.

 * Tall, Dark and Gruesome. (autobiography). London: W. H. Allen, 1977. Expanded retitled edition as Lord of Misrule: The Autobiography of Christopher Lee. London: Orion Books, 2003, with an introduction by Peter Jackson.

Audiobooks

 * William Peter Blatty: The Exorcist (abridged)
 * Agatha Christie: The Hound of Death and Other Stories (unabridged)
 * Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventure of the Lion's Mane and Other Stories (unabridged short stories)
 * Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire and Other Stories (unabridged short stories)
 * Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (unabridged short stories)
 * Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Valley of Fear (abridged)
 * James Herbert: The Fog (abridged)
 * Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (abridged)
 * Gaston Leroux: The Phantom of the Opera (abridged)
 * Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe (abridged)
 * Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (abridged)
 * Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (abridged)
 * Bram Stoker: Dracula (abridged)
 * J. R. R. Tolkien: The Children of Húrin (unabridged)
 * Dennis Wheatley: The Devil Rides Out (unabridged)
 * Dennis Wheatley: Strange Conflict (unabridged)

Albums

 * Christopher Lee Sings Devils, Rogues & Other Villains (1998)
 * Revelation (2006)
 * Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross (2010)
 * Charlemagne: The Omens of Death (2013)

EPs

 * A Heavy Metal Christmas (2012)
 * A Heavy Metal Christmas Too (2013)
 * Metal Knight (2014)

Singles

 * "Let Legend Mark Me as the King" (2012)
 * "The Ultimate Sacrifice" (2012)
 * "Jingle Hell" (2013): number 18 on the  Billboard Hot 100, making Lee the oldest person to have a top 20 hit.
 * "Darkest Carols, Faithful Sing" (2014)

Rhapsody of Fire guest appearances

 * Symphony of Enchanted Lands II – The Dark Secret (2004), as narrator
 * Triumph or Agony (2006), as narrator and Lothen
 * The Frozen Tears of Angels (2010), as narrator and Lothen
 * The Cold Embrace of Fear – A Dark Romantic Symphony (2010), as the Wizard King
 * From Chaos to Eternity (2011), as the Wizard King
 * The Eighth Mountain (2019), as narrator (Posthumous release)

Other guest appearances

 * The Avengers episode "Never, never say die" (1967)
 * The Wicker Man soundtrack (1973)
 * Hammer Presents "Dracula" With Christopher Lee (EMI NTS 186 UK/Capitol ST-11340 USA, 1974)
 * Space: 1999 episode "Earthbound" (1975)
 * The Soldier's Tale by Stravinsky, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Lionel Friend (Nimbus, 1986)
 * Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev, with the English String Orchestra conducted by Yehudi Menuhin (Nimbus, 1989)
 * Annie Get Your Gun (1995)
 * The Rocky Horror Show (1995)
 * The King and I (1998)
 * Musicality of Lerner and Loewe (2002)
 * At Dawn in Rivendell (2003), The Tolkien Ensemble
 * Leaving Rivendell (2005), The Tolkien Ensemble
 * Edgar Allan Poe Projekt – Visionen (2006), recites the poem "The Raven" and sings the song "Elenore"
 * Battle Hymns MMXI (2010), Manowar album
 * Fearless (2013)
 * Hollywood Vampires (2015)

title: Christopher Lee


text:
Lord Protector

Lord Protector (plural: Lords Protector) was a title that has been used in British constitutional law for the head of state. It was also a particular title for the British heads of state in respect to the established church. It was sometimes used to refer to holders of other temporary posts; for example, a regent acting for the absent monarch.

Feudal royal regent
The title of "The Lord Protector" was originally used by royal princes or other nobles exercising a role as protector and defender of the realm, while also sitting (typically as chairman) of a regency council, governing for a monarch who was unable to do so (on account of minority, absence from the realm on Crusade, madness, etc.).

Notable cases in England: and in Scotland:
 * John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, were (5 December 1422 – 6 November 1429) jointly Lords Protector for Henry VI (1421–1471);
 * Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, was three times (3 April 1454 – February 1455; 19 November 1455 – 25 February 1456; and 31 October – 30 December 1460) Lord Protector for Henry VI;
 * Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was "Lord Protector of the Realm" (10 May 1483 – 26 June 1483) during the nominal reign of Edward V (one of the Princes in the Tower) before being offered the throne as Richard III;
 * Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was Lord Protector (4 February 1547 – 11 October 1549) during the early years of the reign of the young Edward VI;
 * John Stewart, Duke of Albany, was "Governor and Protector of the Realm" (12 July 1515 – 16 November 1524) for James V of Scotland (1512–1542);
 * James Hamilton, Duke of Châtellerault, was "Governor and Protector of the Kingdom" (3 January 1543 – 12 April 1554) for Mary, Queen of Scots.

Cromwellian Commonwealth
The Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland was the title of the head of state and head of government during the Commonwealth (often called the Interregnum), following the first period when a Council of State held executive power. The title was held by Oliver Cromwell (December 1653 – September 1658) and subsequently his son and designated successor Richard Cromwell (September 1658 – May 1659) during what is now known as The Protectorate.

The 1653 Instrument of Government (republican constitution) stated: "Oliver Cromwell, Captain-General of the forces of England, Scotland and Ireland, shall be, and is hereby declared to be, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging, for his life."

The replacement constitution of 1657, the Humble Petition and Advice, gave "His Highness the Lord Protector" the power to nominate his successor. Cromwell chose his eldest surviving son, the politically inexperienced Richard. That was a nonrepresentative and de facto dynastic mode of succession, with royal connotations in both styles awarded (even a double invocation 16 December 1653 – 3 September 1658 "By the Grace of God and Republic Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland") and many other monarchic prerogatives, such as that of awarding knighthoods.

Richard Cromwell, who succeeded after his father's death in September 1658, held the position for only eight months before he resigned in May 1659. He was followed by the second period of Commonwealth rule until the Restoration of the exiled heir to the Stuart throne, Charles II, in May 1660.

Post-Cromwell
Since the Restoration the title has not been used in either of the above manners. George, Prince of Wales, appointed to the regency in 1811, was referred to as "His Royal Highness the Prince Regent". George exercised the powers of the monarchy, just as Lords Protector had, but the title's republican associations had rendered it distasteful.

Protector of the church
'Lord Protector' has also been used as a rendering of the Latin Advocatus in the sense of a temporal Lord (such as a Monarch) who acted as the protector of the mainly secular interests of a part of the church; compare the French title of vidame.

In fiction
In the novel The Last Man by Mary Shelley, Britain becomes a republic with its elected head of state styled as Lord Protector. The title is held by Lord Raymond, and Ryland. In 1987 television series The New Statesman finale episode "The Irresistible Rise of Alan B'Stard", after B'Stard's New Patriotic Party wins a landslide majority in a special general election called over British membership of the European Economic Community but with himself not having contested a seat, he briefly considered adopting the title of Lord Protector before being permitted to serve as an extra-parliamentary Prime Minister. In the 2020 film Wolfwalkers, the Lord Protector serves as its primary antagonist.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Lord Protector


text:
Talk:July 4

Juanita Nielsen
1975 Australia: Kings Cross, Sydney, newspaper proprietor Juanita Neilsen, who had been campaigning against urban developers, entered a nightclub and was never seen again. Her killers have never been found. http://www.milesago.com/Features/nielsen.htm

Armstrong
I was trying to think of a way of saying that Louis Armstrong was not born on July 4, 1900, which was a date invented for publicity purposes. He was born a year and a month later. Normally, we wouldn't note the days people were not born because it would pretty much clog up every entry, but Louis was famous for having been "born" on that day. The biographical entry mentions the discrepancy. Ortolan88

Removal of British Channel swimming event
After discussion with the user who posted this (88.110.146.18), I am removing this entry from events: The reason is that it does not meet Notability on a global scale over time, the criteria that has been established for listing events on Wikicalendar pages. Mr. Walliams, though he may be a notable person, is not the first or the fastest man to swim the channel, nor the first to raise money. It was certaininly a notable accomplishment for him, which should be detailed on his page, but not here. If anyone has any comments, feel free to discuss them here. Fabricationary 23:33, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
 * 2006 - The British comedian David Walliams swims the English Channel between England and France in 10 hours and 30 minutes for the charity Sport Relief (part of Comic Relief). It is believed to be in the top 50 quickest times swimming the Channel.
 * But that proposed guideline has no weight. There is no evidence it has consensus - you are the only editor. It is clearly still in the formative stages - there are still lots of meta-questions embedded in the guidelines. Even the main WikiProject it is meant to apply to is in serious breach of the proposed guidelines. Using this proposal as a reason to quash one particular entry is inappropriate. Gwernol 09:00, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
 * True, I contributed to that proposal, but so did many others. It was formed because many requested such guidelines on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Days of the year.  Currently, many editors (in fact, the majority of editors that frequent the Wikicalendar project) follow the guidelines because they are common sense.  Since it has been posted, there have been no serious criticisms.  Given your comments to me now and those in the past, I feel your motives are rooted from unfounded dislike of my editing rather than rationality.  If anyone has any genuine problems with the proposal, please feel free to discuss them on the proposal's talk page.  Fabricationary 14:40, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Top 10 Events That Occurred On The 4th Of July
I came across Top 10 Events That Occurred On The 4th Of July which seemed like a good source as its is from a notable site and written by a professor. --24.112.187.219 (talk) 17:22, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Birth and death entries
Continuing the ongoing effort to reduce the size of the Births and Deaths sections to make them manageable, I've removed some celebrities with few or no articles in other wikipedias, moving the entries to the appropriate Year in Topic article if they were not already present. This is in accordance with the guidelines.Deb (talk) 11:50, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Hello, Malia Obama was born in July 4th. I don't know if she is famous enough, but she could be considered for July 4th births.2601:285:200:5156:ED41:5E1B:389C:DF92 (talk) 14:51, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

External links modified (January 2018)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on July 4. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://archive.is/20121208143733/http://www1.sympatico.ca/cgi-bin/on_this_day?mth=Jul&day=04 to http://www1.sympatico.ca/cgi-bin/on_this_day?mth=Jul&day=04

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Alternate version of Samoan date shift
The Samoan Islands change the International Date Line, causing Monday (July 4) to occur twice, resulting in a year with 367 days. Joofjoof (talk) 05:38, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:July 4


text:
Optical illusion

In visual perception, an optical illusion (also called a visual illusion ) is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide variety; their categorization is difficult because the underlying cause is often not clear but a classification proposed by Richard Gregory is useful as an orientation. According to that, there are three main classes: physical, physiological, and cognitive illusions, and in each class there are four kinds: Ambiguities, distortions, paradoxes, and fictions. A classical example for a physical distortion would be the apparent bending of a stick half immerged in water; an example for a physiological paradox is the motion aftereffect (where, despite movement, position remains unchanged). An example for a physiological fiction is an afterimage. Three typical cognitive distortions are the Ponzo, Poggendorff, and Müller-Lyer illusion. Physical illusions are caused by the physical environment, e.g. by the optical properties of water. Physiological illusions arise in the eye or the visual pathway, e.g. from the effects of excessive stimulation of a specific receptor type. Cognitive visual illusions are the result of unconscious inferences and are perhaps those most widely known.

Pathological visual illusions arise from pathological changes in the physiological visual perception mechanisms causing the aforementioned types of illusions; they are discussed e.g. under visual hallucinations.

Optical illusions, as well as multi-sensory illusions involving visual perception, can also be used in the monitoring and rehabilitation of some psychological disorders, including phantom limb syndrome and schizophrenia.

Physical visual illusions
A familiar phenomenon and example for a physical visual illusion is when mountains appear to be much nearer in clear weather with low humidity (Foehn) than they are. This is because haze is a cue for depth perception, signalling the distance of far-away objects (Aerial perspective).

The classical example of a physical illusion is when a stick that is half immersed in water appears bent. This phenomenon was discussed by Ptolemy (c. 150) and was often a prototypical example for an illusion.

Physiological visual illusions
Physiological illusions, such as the afterimages following bright lights, or adapting stimuli of excessively longer alternating patterns (contingent perceptual aftereffect), are presumed to be the effects on the eyes or brain of excessive stimulation or interaction with contextual or competing stimuli of a specific type—brightness, color, position, tile, size, movement, etc. The theory is that a stimulus follows its individual dedicated neural path in the early stages of visual processing and that intense or repetitive activity in that or interaction with active adjoining channels causes a physiological imbalance that alters perception.

The Hermann grid illusion and Mach bands are two illusions that are often explained using a biological approach. Lateral inhibition, where in receptive fields of the retina receptor signals from light and dark areas compete with one another, has been used to explain why we see bands of increased brightness at the edge of a color difference when viewing Mach bands. Once a receptor is active, it inhibits adjacent receptors. This inhibition creates contrast, highlighting edges. In the Hermann grid illusion, the gray spots that appear at the intersections at peripheral locations are often explained to occur because of lateral inhibition by the surround in larger receptive fields. However, lateral inhibition as an explanation of the Hermann grid illusion has been disproved. More recent empirical approaches to optical illusions have had some success in explaining optical phenomena with which theories based on lateral inhibition have struggled.

Cognitive illusions
Cognitive illusions are assumed to arise by interaction with assumptions about the world, leading to "unconscious inferences", an idea first suggested in the 19th century by the German physicist and physician Hermann Helmholtz. Cognitive illusions are commonly divided into ambiguous illusions, distorting illusions, paradox illusions, or fiction illusions.
 * Ambiguous illusions are pictures or objects that elicit a perceptual "switch" between the alternative interpretations. The Necker cube is a well-known example; other instances are the Rubin vase and the "squircle", based on Kokichi Sugihara's ambiguous cylinder illusion.
 * Distorting or geometrical-optical illusions are characterized by distortions of size, length, position or curvature. A striking example is the Café wall illusion. Other examples are the famous Müller-Lyer illusion and Ponzo illusion.
 * Paradox illusions (or impossible object illusions) are generated by objects that are paradoxical or impossible, such as the Penrose triangle or impossible staircase seen, for example, in M. C. Escher's Ascending and Descending and Waterfall. The triangle is an illusion dependent on a cognitive misunderstanding that adjacent edges must join.
 * Fictions are when a figure is perceived even though it is not in the stimulus, like with the Kanizsa triangle, using illusory contours.

Perceptual organization

To make sense of the world it is necessary to organize incoming sensations into information which is meaningful. Gestalt psychologists believe one way this is done is by perceiving individual sensory stimuli as a meaningful whole. Gestalt organization can be used to explain many illusions including the rabbit–duck illusion where the image as a whole switches back and forth from being a duck then being a rabbit and why in the figure–ground illusion the figure and ground are reversible.

In addition, gestalt theory can be used to explain the illusory contours in the Kanizsa's triangle. A floating white triangle, which does not exist, is seen. The brain has a need to see familiar simple objects and has a tendency to create a "whole" image from individual elements. Gestalt means "form" or "shape" in German. However, another explanation of the Kanizsa's triangle is based in evolutionary psychology and the fact that in order to survive it was important to see form and edges. The use of perceptual organization to create meaning out of stimuli is the principle behind other well-known illusions including impossible objects. The brain makes sense of shapes and symbols putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle, formulating that which is not there to that which is believable.

The gestalt principles of perception govern the way different objects are grouped. Good form is where the perceptual system tries to fill in the blanks in order to see simple objects rather than complex objects. Continuity is where the perceptual system tries to disambiguate which segments fit together into continuous lines. Proximity is where objects that are close together are associated. Similarity is where objects that are similar are seen as associated. Some of these elements have been successfully incorporated into quantitative models involving optimal estimation or Bayesian inference.

The double-anchoring theory, a popular but recent theory of lightness illusions, states that any region belongs to one or more frameworks, created by gestalt grouping principles, and within each frame is independently anchored to both the highest luminance and the surround luminance. A spot's lightness is determined by the average of the values computed in each framework.

Depth and motion perception
Illusions can be based on an individual's ability to see in three dimensions even though the image hitting the retina is only two dimensional. The Ponzo illusion is an example of an illusion which uses monocular cues of depth perception to fool the eye. But even with two-dimensional images, the brain exaggerates vertical distances when compared with horizontal distances, as in the vertical–horizontal illusion where the two lines are exactly the same length.

In the Ponzo illusion the converging parallel lines tell the brain that the image higher in the visual field is farther away, therefore, the brain perceives the image to be larger, although the two images hitting the retina are the same size. The optical illusion seen in a diorama/false perspective also exploits assumptions based on monocular cues of depth perception. The M.C. Escher painting Waterfall exploits rules of depth and proximity and our understanding of the physical world to create an illusion. Like depth perception, motion perception is responsible for a number of sensory illusions. Film animation is based on the illusion that the brain perceives a series of slightly varied images produced in rapid succession as a moving picture. Likewise, when we are moving, as we would be while riding in a vehicle, stable surrounding objects may appear to move. We may also perceive a large object, like an airplane, to move more slowly than smaller objects, like a car, although the larger object is actually moving faster. The phi phenomenon is yet another example of how the brain perceives motion, which is most often created by blinking lights in close succession.

The ambiguity of direction of motion due to lack of visual references for depth is shown in the spinning dancer illusion. The spinning dancer appears to be moving clockwise or counterclockwise depending on spontaneous activity in the brain where perception is subjective. Recent studies show on the fMRI that there are spontaneous fluctuations in cortical activity while watching this illusion, particularly the parietal lobe because it is involved in perceiving movement.

Color and brightness constancies
Perceptual constancies are sources of illusions. Color constancy and brightness constancy are responsible for the fact that a familiar object will appear the same color regardless of the amount of light or color of light reflecting from it. An illusion of color difference or luminosity difference can be created when the luminosity or color of the area surrounding an unfamiliar object is changed. The luminosity of the object will appear brighter against a black field (that reflects less light) than against a white field, even though the object itself did not change in luminosity. Similarly, the eye will compensate for color contrast depending on the color cast of the surrounding area.

In addition to the gestalt principles of perception, water-color illusions contribute to the formation of optical illusions. Water-color illusions consist of object-hole effects and coloration. Object-hole effects occur when boundaries are prominent where there is a figure and background with a hole that is 3D volumetric in appearance. Coloration consists of an assimilation of color radiating from a thin-colored edge lining a darker chromatic contour. The water-color illusion describes how the human mind perceives the wholeness of an object such as top-down processing. Thus, contextual factors play into perceiving the brightness of an object.

Object
Just as it perceives color and brightness constancies, the brain has the ability to understand familiar objects as having a consistent shape or size. For example, a door is perceived as a rectangle regardless of how the image may change on the retina as the door is opened and closed. Unfamiliar objects, however, do not always follow the rules of shape constancy and may change when the perspective is changed. The Shepard tables illusion is an example of an illusion based on distortions in shape constancy.

Future perception
Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York has a more imaginative take on optical illusions, saying that they are due to a neural lag which most humans experience while awake. When light hits the retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world. Scientists have known of the lag, yet they have debated how humans compensate, with some proposing that our motor system somehow modifies our movements to offset the delay.

Changizi asserts that the human visual system has evolved to compensate for neural delays by generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. This foresight enables humans to react to events in the present, enabling humans to perform reflexive acts like catching a fly ball and to maneuver smoothly through a crowd. In an interview with ABC Changizi said, "Illusions occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions don't match reality." For example, an illusion called the Hering illusion looks like bicycle spokes around a central point, with vertical lines on either side of this central, so-called vanishing point. The illusion tricks us into thinking we are looking at a perspective picture, and thus according to Changizi, switches on our future-seeing abilities. Since we are not actually moving and the figure is static, we misperceive the straight lines as curved ones. Changizi said: "Evolution has seen to it that geometric drawings like this elicit in us premonitions of the near future. The converging lines toward a vanishing point (the spokes) are cues that trick our brains into thinking we are moving forward—as we would in the real world, where the door frame (a pair of vertical lines) seems to bow out as we move through it—and we try to perceive what that world will look like in the next instant."

Pathological visual illusions (distortions)
A pathological visual illusion is a distortion of a real external stimulus and is often diffuse and persistent. Pathological visual illusions usually occur throughout the visual field, suggesting global excitability or sensitivity alterations. Alternatively visual hallucination is the perception of an external visual stimulus where none exists. Visual hallucinations are often from focal dysfunction and are usually transient.

Types of visual illusions include oscillopsia, halos around objects, illusory palinopsia (visual trailing, light streaking, prolonged indistinct afterimages), akinetopsia, visual snow, micropsia, macropsia, teleopsia, pelopsia, metamorphopsia, dyschromatopsia, intense glare, blue field entoptic phenomenon, and purkinje trees.

These symptoms may indicate an underlying disease state and necessitate seeing a medical practitioner. Etiologies associated with pathological visual illusions include multiple types of ocular disease, migraines, hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, head trauma, and prescription drugs. If a medical work-up does not reveal a cause of the pathological visual illusions, the idiopathic visual disturbances could be analogous to the altered excitability state seen in visual aura with no migraine headache. If the visual illusions are diffuse and persistent, they often affect the patient's quality of life. These symptoms are often refractory to treatment and may be caused by any of the aforementioned etiologies, but are often idiopathic. There is no standard treatment for these visual disturbances.

The rubber hand illusion (RHI)
The rubber hand illusion (RHI), a multi-sensory illusion involving both visual perception and touch, has been used to study how phantom limb syndrome affects amputees over time. Amputees with the syndrome actually responded to RHI more strongly than controls, an effect that was often consistent for both the sides of the intact and the amputated arm. However, in some studies, amputees actually had stronger responses to RHI on their intact arm, and more recent amputees responded to the illusion better than amputees who had been missing an arm for years or more. Researchers believe this is a sign that the body schema, or an individual's sense of their own body and its parts, progressively adapts to the post-amputation state. Essentially, the amputees were learning to no longer respond to sensations near what had once been their arm. As a result, many have suggested the use of RHI as a tool for monitoring an amputee's progress in reducing their phantom limb sensations and adjusting to the new state of their body.

Other research used RHI in the rehabilitation of amputees with prosthetic limbs. After prolonged exposure to RHI, the amputees gradually stopped feeling a dissociation between the prosthetic (which resembled the rubber hand) and the rest of their body. This was thought to be because they adjusted to responding to and moving a limb that did not feel as connected to the rest of their body or senses.

RHI may also be used to diagnose certain disorders related to impaired proprioception or impaired sense of touch in non-amputees.

Illusions and schizophrenia
Schizophrenia, a mental disorder often marked by hallucinations, also decreases a person's ability to perceive high-order optical illusions. This is because schizophrenia impairs one's capacity to perform top-down processing and a higher-level integration of visual information beyond the primary visual cortex, V1. Understanding how this specifically occurs in the brain may help in understanding how visual distortions, beyond imaginary hallucinations, affect schizophrenic patients. Additionally, evaluating the differences between how schizophrenic patients and unaffected individuals see illusions may enable researchers to better identify where specific illusions are processed in the visual streams. One study on schizophrenic patients found that they were extremely unlikely to be fooled by a three dimensional optical illusion, the hollow face illusion, unlike neurotypical volunteers. Based on fMRI data, researchers concluded that this resulted from a disconnection between their systems for bottom-up processing of visual cues and top-down interpretations of those cues in the parietal cortex. In another study on the motion-induced blindness (MIB) illusion (pictured right), schizophrenic patients continued to perceive stationary visual targets even when observing distracting motion stimuli, unlike neurotypical controls, who experienced motion induced blindness. The schizophrenic test subjects demonstrated impaired cognitive organization, meaning they were less able to coordinate their processing of motion cues and stationary image cues.

In art
Artists who have worked with optical illusions include M. C. Escher, Bridget Riley, Salvador Dalí, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Patrick Bokanowski, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Oscar Reutersvärd, Victor Vasarely and Charles Allan Gilbert. Contemporary artists who have experimented with illusions include Jonty Hurwitz, Sandro del Prete, Octavio Ocampo, Dick Termes, Shigeo Fukuda, Patrick Hughes, István Orosz, Rob Gonsalves, Gianni A. Sarcone, Ben Heine and Akiyoshi Kitaoka. Optical illusion is also used in film by the technique of forced perspective.

Op art is a style of art that uses optical illusions to create an impression of movement, or hidden images and patterns. Trompe-l'œil uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that depicted objects exist in three dimensions.

Tourists attractions employing large-scale illusory art allowing visitors to photograph themselves in fantastic scenes have opened in several Asian countries, such as the Trickeye Museum and Hong Kong 3D Museum.

Cognitive processes hypothesis
The hypothesis claims that visual illusions occur because the neural circuitry in our visual system evolves, by neural learning, to a system that makes very efficient interpretations of usual 3D scenes based in the emergence of simplified models in our brain that speed up the interpretation process but give rise to optical illusions in unusual situations. In this sense, the cognitive processes hypothesis can be considered a framework for an understanding of optical illusions as the signature of the empirical statistical way vision has evolved to solve the inverse problem.

Research indicates that 3D vision capabilities emerge and are learned jointly with the planning of movements. That is, as depth cues are better perceived, individuals can develop more efficient patterns of movement and interaction within the 3D environment around them. After a long process of learning, an internal representation of the world emerges that is well-adjusted to the perceived data coming from closer objects. The representation of distant objects near the horizon is less "adequate". In fact, it is not only the Moon that seems larger when we perceive it near the horizon. In a photo of a distant scene, all distant objects are perceived as smaller than when we observe them directly using our vision.

title: Optical illusion


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Monospaced font

A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spacings have different widths. Monospaced fonts are customary on typewriters and for typesetting computer code.

Monospaced fonts were widely used in early computers and computer terminals, which often had extremely limited graphical capabilities. Hardware implementation was simplified by using a text mode where the screen layout was addressed as a regular grid of tiles, each of which could be set to display a character by indexing into the hardware's character map. Some systems allowed colored text to be displayed by varying the foreground and background color for each tile. Other effects included reverse video and blinking text. Nevertheless, these early systems were typically limited to a single console font.

Even though computers can now display a wide variety of fonts, the majority of IDEs and software text editors employ a monospaced font as the default typeface. This increases the readability of source code, which is often heavily reliant on distinctions involving individual symbols, and makes differences between letters more unambiguous in situations like password entry boxes where typing mistakes are unacceptable. Monospaced fonts are also used in terminal emulation and for laying out tabulated data in plain text documents. In technical manuals and resources for programming languages, a monospaced font is often used to distinguish code from natural-language text. Monospaced fonts are also used by disassembler output, causing the information to align in vertical columns.

Optical character recognition has better accuracy with monospaced fonts. Examples are OCR-A and OCR-B.

The term modern is sometimes used as a synonym for monospace generic font family. The term modern can be used for a fixed-pitch generic font family name, which is used in OpenDocument format (ISO/IEC 26300:2006) and Rich Text Format.

Examples of monospaced fonts include Courier, Lucida Console, Menlo, Monaco, Consolas, Inconsolata and Source Code Pro.

Use in art
Multiple art forms have developed within computers' and typewriters' monospaced typographic settings in which the nth character of every line align vertically with each other. (Such a group of characters is sometimes called a column.) A proportional and monospaced font's reproduction of an element of ANSI art, line drawing, is illustrated below.

The failure of a proportional font to reproduce the desired boxes above motivates monospaced fonts' use in the creation and viewing of ASCII and ANSI art. Some poetry composed monospaced on typewriters or computers also depends on the vertical alignment of character columns. E. E. Cummings' poetry is often set in monospaced type for this reason. Some classic video games (e.g. Rogue and NetHack) and those imitating their style (e.g. Dwarf Fortress) use a monospaced grid of characters to render their state for the player. Quiz Show (1976) is believed to be the first video game to use 8×8 monospaced "arcade font", which got widely adopted by computer games of the time.

Tabular figures
Many fonts that generally are not monospaced have numerals that are known as tabular figures. As tabular spacing makes all numbers with the same number of digits the same width, it is used for typesetting documents such as price lists, stock listings and sums in mathematics textbooks, all of which require columns of numbers to line up on top of each other for easier comparison. Tabular spacing is also a common feature of simple printing devices such as cash registers and date-stamps. Fonts intended for professional use in documents such as business reports may also make the bold numbers take up the same width as the numbers in regular style; the consistency between styles is called "duplexing".

The alternative to tabular spacing is proportional spacing, which places the numbers closely together, reducing empty space in a document, and is thought to allow the numbers to blend into the text more effectively. With modern fonts using the TrueType or OpenType formats, it is possible to include both proportional and tabular figures in the same font file, and choose between them using font options settings in applications such as word processors or web browsers.

Other uses
In biochemistry, monospaced fonts are preferred for displaying nucleic acid and protein sequences, as they ensure that the representation of every nucleotide or amino acid occupies the same amount of space. Alignment of the letters makes it easier to compare different sequences visually.

Both screenplays and stage play scripts frequently use monospaced fonts, to make it easier to judge the time a script will last for from the number of pages. The industry standard is 12 point Courier. A tradition holds that, on this format, one page of script will take one minute of screen or stage time.

Monospaced fonts are frequently used in tablature music for guitar and bass guitar. Each line in a tabulature represents a guitar string, which requires that chords played across multiple strings be tabbed in vertical sequence, a feat accomplished only with the predictability of fixed width.

title: Monospaced font


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Charles Rolls

Charles Stewart Rolls (27 August 1877 – 12 July 1910) was a British motoring and aviation pioneer. With Henry Royce, he co-founded the Rolls-Royce car manufacturing firm. He was the first Briton to be killed in an aeronautical accident with a powered aircraft, when the tail of his Wright Flyer broke off during a flying display in Bournemouth. He was aged 32.

Early life
Rolls was born in Berkeley Square, London, third son of the 1st Baron Llangattock of the Rolls family and Lady Llangattock. Despite his London birth, he retained a strong family connection with his ancestral home of The Hendre, near Monmouth, Wales. After attending Mortimer Vicarage Preparatory School in Berkshire, he was educated at Eton College where his developing interest in engines earned him the nickname "dirty Rolls".

In 1894, he attended a private crammer in Cambridge which helped him gain entry to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1895, where he studied mechanical and applied science. In 1896, at the age of 18, he travelled to Paris to buy his first car, a Peugeot Phaeton, and joined the Automobile Club of France. His Peugeot is believed to have been the first car based in Cambridge, and one of the first three cars owned in Wales. An early motoring enthusiast, he joined the Self-Propelled Traffic Association, which campaigned against the restrictions imposed on motor vehicles by the Locomotive Acts, and became a founder member of the Automobile Club of Great Britain, with which the Association merged in 1897.

Rolls was a keen cyclist and spent time at Cambridge bicycle racing. In 1896, he won a Half Blue and the following year became captain of the Cambridge University Bicycle Club.

Rolls graduated from Cambridge in 1898 and began working on the steam yacht Santa Maria followed by a position at the London and North Western Railway in Crewe. However, his talents lay more in salesmanship and motoring pioneering than practical engineering; in January 1903, with the help of £6,600 provided by his father, he started one of Britain's first car dealerships, C. S. Rolls & Co. based in Lillie Hall, Fulham, to import and sell French Peugeot and Belgian Minerva vehicles.

Partnership with Royce
Rolls was introduced to Henry Royce by a friend at the Royal Automobile Club, Henry Edmunds, who was also a director of Royce Ltd. Edmunds showed him Royce's car and arranged the historic meeting between Rolls and Royce at the Midland Hotel, Manchester, on 4 May 1904. In spite of his preference for three or four cylinder cars, Rolls was impressed with the two-cylinder Royce 10 and in a subsequent agreement of 23 December 1904 agreed to take all the cars Royce could make. These would be of two, three, four and six cylinders and would be badged as Rolls-Royces.

The first Rolls-Royce car, the Rolls-Royce 10 hp, was unveiled at the Paris Salon in December 1904, although in the early advertising it was the name of Rolls that was emphasised over that of Royce. In 1906 Rolls and Royce formalised their partnership by creating Rolls-Royce Limited, with Rolls appointed Technical Managing Director on a salary of £750 per annum plus 4% of the profits in excess of £10,000. Rolls provided the financial backing and business acumen to complement Royce's technical expertise. In 1907 Rolls-Royce Limited bought out C. S. Rolls & Co.

Rolls put much effort into publicising the quietness and smoothness of the Rolls-Royce, and at the end of 1906 travelled to the US to promote the new cars. The company was winning awards for the quality and reliability of its cars by 1907. But by 1909 Rolls' interest in the business was waning, and at the end of the year he resigned as Technical managing director and became a non-executive director.

Pioneer aviator
Rolls was a pioneer aviator and initially, balloonist, making over 170 balloon ascents. In 1903 he won the Gordon Bennett Gold Medal for the longest single flight time.

By 1907 Rolls' interest turned increasingly to flying and he tried to persuade Royce to design an aero engine. He became the second Briton to go up in an aeroplane. Piloted by Wilbur Wright their flight on 8 October 1908 from Camp d'Auvours, eleven kilometres east of Le Mans, lasted four minutes and twenty seconds. He bought one of six Wright Flyer aircraft built by Short Brothers under licence from the Wright Brothers and from early October 1909 made more than 200 flights. Founder in 1901 with Frank Hedges Butler of the ballooning club that became the Royal Aero Club in March 1910 he was the second person they licensed to fly an aeroplane.

Rolls became the first man to make a non-stop double crossing of the English Channel by plane, taking 95 minutes on 2 June 1910. For this feat, which included the first eastbound aerial crossing of the English Channel, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Aero Club. There is a statue in Monmouth to commemorate the flight and another, by Kathleen Scott, in Dover.

Death
On 12 July 1910, at the age of 32, Rolls was killed in an air crash at Hengistbury Airfield, Southbourne, Bournemouth when the tail of his Wright Flyer broke off during a flying display. He was the first Briton to be killed in an aeronautical accident with a powered aircraft, and the eleventh person internationally. His was also the first powered aviation fatality in the United Kingdom.

His grave lies at the churchyard of St Cadoc's Church, Llangattock-Vibon-Avel, where many of the Rolls family lie buried in various family tombs. His grave is just below Llangattock Manor and bears the inscription:

"'Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.'"

A statue in his memory, in which he is seen holding a biplane model, was erected in Agincourt Square, Monmouth. A further memorial to him was unveiled in 1981 in the bottom playing field of St Peter's Catholic School, Bournemouth, which was developed on the site of Hengistbury Airfield. There is a stained-glass window in All Saints' Church, Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey, dedicated jointly to Rolls and to fellow pioneer aviator Cecil Grace.

A memorial to Charles Rolls was dedicated 12 July 2022, at Hengistbury Head, Southbourne, Dorset, between the car park and the Hiker cafe.

This was the same day, date and time as it was in 1910 at the time of his crash at Southbourne, Hampshire [as it was at the time] when the tail came off of his Wright Flyer during a flying display on the airfield at what is now St Peters School.

Cultural depictions

 * Actor Robert Powell portrays Rolls in the 1972–1973 miniseries The Edwardians.

title: Charles Rolls