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Lord of the Rings star Christopher Lee has been awarded a prestigious BFI Fellowship. The presentation will be made on 19 October at Banqueting House, Whitehall, during the London film festival, the BFI's premier event.

The BFI Fellowship is an award given "to individuals in recognition of their outstanding contribution to film or television".

2012's honorees were actor Helena Bonham Carter and director Tim Burton. In 2011, writer-director David Cronenberg and actor-director Ralph Fiennes were recipients.

In a statement, Lee said: "It is a great privilege to be included amongst such a distinguished group of predecessors who have received this award from the BFI."

Although he secured his first film role in 1948, Lee, 91, will always be associated with the string of gothic-horror roles he undertook for Hammer Films, including The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) in which he played The Monster, and the title role in Dracula (1958). He would play Count Dracula six more times for Hammer, ending with The Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1973.

As well as roles in other horror films, such as The Devil Rides Out and The Wicker Man (currently on re-release in a restored version), Lee also took the opportunity to play more mainstream roles, including the Comte de Rocheforte in The Three Musketeers (1973) and the Bond villain Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).

A move to Hollywood in the late 70s was not a fruitful period, but Lee's steady cult celebrity resulted in a wave of attention from big budget film-makers in the 2000s, including being cast as Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and as Count Dooku in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005).

Lee was knighted in 2009.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/f...ellowship.html

http://news.sky.com/story/1151587/si...ive-bfi-honour