Fingolfin’s Findings LXXVII: Christopher Lee on meeting the Professor

A lot has been made out of the fact that Sir Christopher Lee was the only cast member on the first film trilogy who had met J.R.R. Tolkien himself. Let us figure out what’s what on this one…

And it is, indeed true, as can be seen in this interview with legendary UK television and radio host, Terry Wogan (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

It happened on Wogan: Now and Then (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) (2006) and its very first episode.¹

A similar though slightly different version can be found with TORn (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) (2001).

I was up in Oxford meeting some friends, and we were in the Randolph Hotel. And someone said, “What are you doing here, this is all rather correct and proper. Lets go to a pub.” This was a way long time ago. Forty-five plus years ago. And we went to this pub, it’s now world famous, but I can’t remember the name of it. I can’t honestly remember. We were sitting there talking and drinking beer or something, and someone said, “Oh, look who walked in,” it was Professor Tolkien and I nearly fell off my chair. I didn’t even know he was alive. He was a benign looking man, smoking a pipe, walking in… an English countryman with earth under his feet. And he was a genius, a man of incredible intellectual knowledge. And he knew somebody in our group. He (the man in the group) said, “Oh Professor, Professor,” and he came over. And each one of us, well I knelt of course, each one of us said, “How do you do?” And I just said “Ho… How… How…” I just couldn’t belive it. But I’ll never forget it.

It feels a little odd that he would not remember the Eagle & Child in this but then this was a press junket. On those occasions the actors are shown around dozens of spaces to even more journalists and this may take hours and is very exhausting.

In an interview with the Independent (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) (2003) he said this:

I did meet him, very briefly, in the Fifties. It was in a pub that he used to go to in Oxford, called the Eagle and Child. I was there having a beer and I was completely overcome when he walked in. I had already started reading the books and thought, "This man has created a unique form of literature - one of the great works of all time." While I was filming The Lord of the Rings, I thought about what he would have thought all the time, and hope he would have approved. I'm still an enormous fan - I read The Lord of the Rings every year.

FUN FACT I I have heard this fan anecdote several times and it has been corrobated by the lady in question at the time - Christopher Lee took out the single volumes of The Lord of the Rings out at his local library the moment they came in after publication. The lady in question was the librarian working at Lee’s local library and she is/ was a member of the Tolkien Society. I heard this story, therefore, on a number of occasions with Oxonmoot. [If any members of the TS read this I would love to get a better source for this, thank you!]

So, yes, he was a life-long fan and reader (he knew Allatar & Palando!), particularly of the Lord of the Rings. It is mentioned in the documentary The Lifes and Deaths of Christopher Lee he read LotR every year - and particularly when undergoing heart surgery in 1990. The night before he died he watched the film in the hospital, having hoped to return home the next day.

FUN FACT II The fan theory that Tolkien and Lee had exchanged letters so many times that the Professor gave him his blessing to play Gandalf is an invention by none other than John Rhys-Davies (Gimli in the film trilogy) who mentioned this in the cast commentary to The Fellowship of the Ring (somewhere around the 45-46 mins mark (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).)

FUN FACT III In the 2024 documentary The Lifes and Deaths of Christopher Lee (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) it was mentioned Lee watched the films the night before he died, having hoped to return home the next day.

FUN FACT IV I had three opportunities to meet Lee in person (twice with the Tolkien Ensemble, once close to my apartment in Cologne - Italian metal band Rhapsody (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) were doing a video (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) with him²) but missed out on the latter and turned down the offers on the former as I did not want to take this away from other people. Silly me. 🧐

FUN FACT V Sir Ian McKellen confirmed that Sir Christopher Lee thought he should have played Gandalf himself in the legendary One Zoom to Rule Them All.

Please note One of the funniest shows with Lee included Vincent Price as well as Peter Cushing (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). Do have a look at him with two of his best friends and legends in their own right.

Addendum, Jan 2026

When I shared this post to the Tolkien Society Facebook group (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) in September 2025 someone quickly spoke up and argued that there is another actor who had the pleasure of meeting the Professor: Martyn Sanderson (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

Sanderson is a man of great renown for the theatre in New Zealand and is known to Tolkien film fans as the gate keeper in Bree that gets ridden over by the Nazgûl - in this case you can truly say he went out with a bang. 😄

Having said this, I tried contacting some of the people I know in New Zealand but as this is a very specific field the venn diagram of people I know (in film) who also have close connections to theatre (in Wellington) is slim to none. Bruce Hopkins had heard of him but never met him and he could not answer my question, to give you one name.

I seriously doubt that Sanderson - who was at University of Oxford during Tolkien’s time - had met him. According to only ONE source, in this case RNZ (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)…

In 1956, he took up a scholarship at Britain's Oxford University, where he was taught Middle English by J R R Tolkein.

J.S. Ryan put together a list of Tolkien’s formal teaching (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and you can find several of the ‘regular’ Middle English texts being taught by him - but not Middle English as such, of course, as him holding a prestigious chair would have seen that task given to any assistant tutor/ lecturer in his department. At least, that is my perception.

I will keep you in the know whether this rumour holds true - but given the fact that so much was made out of Only Lee ever met the Professor of all the cast it sounds incredibly odd to ignore someone who was supposedly taught by him personally.

Fingolfin's Findings: The Quick Access List

Normally, FFs are limited to the subscribers here at Steady.

However, given the interest in the most excellent Sir Christopher Lee I wanted to make this public - and there are two others you can have a look at:

Fingolfin’s Findings LXIII: Wulff & Morgenthaler run Uruk in Middle-earth (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

Fingolfin’s Findings LXXIII: Merton College’s memories of J.R.R. Tolkien (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

The Quick Access is the list of titles done so far - 77 in all.

Do subscribe to the free, weekly, all things Tolkienian newsletter, the Roving Ranger.

1. See also this IMDB entry (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). ↩

2. Cologne magazine (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

   ↩