Christopher Lee in Clone Wars

Actor Christopher Lee will reprise his role as the villainous Sith Lord Count Dooku in the Lucasfilm/Warner Bros. animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

"Mr. Lee has recorded the voice of Count Dooku for this movie a couple of months ago," according to an administrator on the actor's website. "It was however, the first time he had to lip synch to a character because they had produced the animation before recording his voice."

He joins returning actors Samuel L. Jackson (Mace Windu), Anthony Daniels (C3PO) and Matthew Wood (General Grievous) as one of the few actors reprising their roles in the new movie.

The flick explores the time period between 2002's Attack of the Clones and 2005's Revenge of the Sith, in which Lee's character literally lost his head.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars will have a limited theatrical release beginning August 15th.

Christopher Lee: From Count Dracula to Count Dooku

Christopher Lee has specialized in playing villains for nearly all of his 60-year career. He first shot to fame when he acted in cheaply made, live-action horror films like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), and 1959's The Hound of the Baskervilles for the Hammer Film Studios.

He was often paired against his good friend and fellow actor Peter Cushing, who eventually played Grand Moff Tarkin in 1977's Star Wars: A New Hope. Lee, with his 6'5" height and menacing features, would always play the villain while Cushing would portray the hero. Lee also worked with fellow Hammer veteran David Prowse, who later portrayed Darth Vader in Star Wars.

Lee worked with Hammer Productions until the early 1970's, portraying Count Dracula in countless films for the company. After leaving Hammer, he continued getting cast as villains, notably portraying Rochefort in 1973's The Three Musketeers, and Francisco Scaramanga in the 1974 James Bond flick The Man With the Golden Gun (he was also a frequent golfing pal with Bond author Ian Fleming).

He worked continually throughout the intervening years, mixing mostly villainous roles with the occasional hero (he played Sherlock Holmes in the 1991 television movie Incident at Victoria Falls).

However, Lee's career received a boost when he played villains (natch) in two high-profile movie trilogies, portraying Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith and the turncoat wizard Saruman the White in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Lee estimates that he has acted in nearly 230 films.

Fun Fact: Christopher Lee is related to the aristocratic Italian Carandini family through his mother's side, and therefore is a distant descendent of King Charlemagne.

Christopher Lee in Star Wars

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