CHRISTOPHER Lee worked in more than 200 films, including huge box-office hits like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Star Wars instalments. So, why did he consider his role in Jinnah as Jinnah his favourite, given that the biopic could not rake in enough money or get critical acclaim as much as, let’s say, Gandhi did? Lee, who passed away on June 7 aged 93, in an interview once said, “It was certainly the most important role I have ever played because the responsibility on my shoulders was immense.”
He always weighed his words before uttering them; therefore the word responsibility is key here, so is the word shoulders, because it puts a distinguished film critic’s opinion into perspective that Lee was an actor of “muscular intelligence”. He knew his responsibilities as a performer, as someone whose duty it was to reflect life through (his) art.
To shoot Jinnah, directed by Jamil Dehalvi, Lee landed in Karachi in the late 1990s. It did not take him long to realise what he was in for. There were things outside of his acting domain that he needed to withstand. He witnessed all the hoopla surrounding him, a Brit who shot to fame by playing Count Dracula on celluloid, being cast in the role of the founder of the nation Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Some of the newspapers (in those days television news channels hadn’t burgeoned into the kind of media juggernauts that we these days see on a daily basis) ran a nasty campaign against him for unjustly getting the part that should’ve been, in their view, played by a Pakistani. There were even reports that Lee received death threats during the course of the film. But it did not deter him one bit.
He was an accomplished artist, and was in Pakistan to play one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century, someone he admired. He knew it wouldn’t be a walk in the park. The Pakistani media was hostile, Pakistani film buffs boisterous. So concentration was of the utmost importance. And concentrate he did.
