As a boy he met the assassins of Rasputin. In his twenties he hunted Nazi war criminals across post-war Europe. In his nineties he became the oldest performer to score a top 20 Billboard hit, with a heavy metal Christmas song. This episode explores Christopher Lee, born in London in 1922 to an Italian countess and step-cousin of Ian Fleming, whose family fortune vanished to a stepfather's gambling debts, sending him to work as a shipping clerk before the Second World War.

We follow his volunteering for the Finnish army, RAF flight training ended by a failed optic nerve, intelligence work in North Africa and Italy, service with the Central Registry of War Criminals, the lunch that pointed him to acting, the decade of uncredited roles after being told he was too tall, Hammer's Frankenstein creature and ten Dracula films, the emotional blackma ...