10 War Movie Actors Who Were Actually There

2. Christopher Lee

Bitter Victory Christopher Lee
Columbia Pictures

The most obligatory behind-the-scenes trivia with Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy is that Viggo Mortensen broke his foot when he kicked that Orc helmet in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second most obligatory bit of trivia is that Saruman actor Christopher Lee quite threateningly refused direction from Peter Jackson during the character's death scene in Return of the King, which involved the wizard being stabbed from behind by Wormtongue. "Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when someone is stabbed in the back?" Lee recalled saying to Jackson, "Because I do."

Lee apparently went on to discuss, in Jackson's own words, "a very clandestine part of World War II", intimating his own firsthand experiences of the conflict and what people sound like when they're stabbed - which it stands to reason the British actor had a great deal of familiarity with. Lee served in RAF Intelligence throughout the Second World War, taking part in the North African, Sicilian and Italian campaigns while also being attached to the SAS. As if these exploits weren't extraordinary enough, Lee - after also having conducted espionage missions in Europe - helped hunt down Nazi war criminals after the war's conclusion, completing his military service in 1946.

Apart from taking on the iconic roles of Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and Dracula in the Hammer Horror films, some of Lee's earliest acting assignments were WWII pictures - some of which depicted British Special Forces operations not unlike the ones he may have partaken in himself. Of these, arguably the most famous is The Cockleshell Heroes, based on the daring commando raid that took place in 1942. The superior film, though, is Nicholas Ray's Bitter Victory, another genre effort that dealt with commando subject matter - this time with Richard Burton in the lead, and North Africa the setting.

Lee only had supporting roles in the above films, but it's still fascinating to see him show up in material that hit so close to his wartime record.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.