Christopher Lee and M.R.James
Christopher Lee playing M.R. James
Apparently Christopher Lee, the high priest of horror cinema, is also a fan of ghost stories. Not only did he play M.R. James in a BBC adaptation of four of the stories, but he also actually met James. He was examined by him whilst he was a scholar studying at Cambridge.
I gleaned this snippet from the dust jacket blurb to The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories, a collection of the winners of a ghost story competition run by The Times in 1974 (which also interestingly contains the first work by Julian Barnes published in a book), for which Lee was one of the judges. I can’t find any other references to the event, and Lee’s biographies on the net don’t mention that he was at Cambridge at any point, but it’s a nice image!
