Remembering Christopher Lee’s influential role in Pakistan

British actor Christopher Lee, who died this week at the age of 93, frightened generations of kids and adults as Dracula.

Lee also played a Bond film villian and even an evil wizard in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

But one role you may not know is Lee's cinematic turn as Muhammed Ali Jinnah — the founder of modern Pakistan.

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"Jinnah" was released in 1998, but production of the film took place in Pakistan two years earlier.

Pakistani writer Bina Shah was part of the production "very informally," she says, as sort of an assistant to the producers. And, she says, while she didn't work with Lee directly she did get to meet him.

Shah recalls her first brush with Lee in, of all places, the elevator of the hotel where he was staying.

According to Shah, she noticed an extremely tall man in the elevator, wearing a baseball cap pulled very low over his face — Christopher Lee.

"That was the first time I ever laid eyes on him," she says. "I did meet him a couple of times through the course of production."

Lee was a British actor known for horror films, and suddenly he was playing the founder of modern Pakistan. And that really struck Shah.

"It spoke to his versatility as an actor and his talent," she says. "When he got into costume, he put on the famous Jinnah cap — he was Jinnah. There was no question that you would look at him … this was Jinnah. He came to life for us, it was superb."

Though, "Jinnah" may not have been the film Pakistanis were expecting. Shah says Pakistanis were expecting an answer to Richard Attenborough's epic film “Gandhi”.

Instead, Shah suggests “Jinnah” was a very "avant guard film — it was almost an art film. So people were a little thrown off guard by that. But whoever saw the movie thought that Christopher Lee had done an excellent job."

It's hard to say how many people really saw the movie because it wasn’t properly released in Pakistan. But, it does get played on television every August 14, Pakistan's independence day. And recently the director of the film, Jamil Dehlavi, released a remastered version so a new generation will get a chance to appreciate Christopher Lee’s talents.