Christopher Lee was the tallest actor I ever knew.

He was also, by far, the most literate. When we first met, in a Los Angeles studio where he was recording his lines as King Haggard in The Last Unicorn, he had just recorded Haggard’s speech about his first sight of unicorns, and I mentioned that it was probably my favorite speech in the book. He immediately wanted to know, “Well, did I do it properly? We can always redo it right here.” Of course, he’d handled the lines perfectly—but writers, and writers’ opinions about their work, mattered intensely to Christopher.

That same afternoon, we discovered that between the two of us we could call to mind just about all the lines of G.K. Chesterton’s poem, “The Rolling English Road.” We also discovered a mutual need to hit the men’s room, and my son Dan—in his mid-teens at the time—still has a very clear memory of Christopher simultaneously peeing while declaiming, in That Voice, which no one could ever keep from imitating after 15 minutes with him:

Before the Roman came to Rye, or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambled round the shire, And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire...

I leave it to the reader to imagine That Voice in the tiled acoustics of a Hollywood bathroom.

We met a second time in Munich, where The Last Unicorn was being dubbed into German. Most of my memories of that time, and of Chris Lee, have to do with books and authors. He had known both J.R.R. Tolkien and a writer who mattered more to me, T.H. White. We had a long ongoing argument in Munich about a chapter of The Sword in the Stone that appears in the English edition of the book, but not in the American one. He turned out to be right. He usually was.

He never failed to mention The Last Unicorn as one of his very favorite books, and as one of the movies he was most proud of having made. Indeed, he left me whopperjawed—as Mark Twain would have put it—when we were being interviewed together on Austrian television, and he announced, “Oh, yes, I simply couldn’t resist a chance to play King Haggard one more time, even in another language. “After all—“ and he looked straight into the camera—“it’s the closest they’ll ever let me get to playing King Lear.” The camera swung toward me to catch my stunned reaction, and Chris looked across the studio at me, and winked.

But my most vivid memory, chilling as it remains to this day, has to do with the day that I and Michael Chase Walker—associate producer of The Last Unicorn, and the one who really got the film made in the first place—somehow found our way out to Dachau. I can’t now recall how we managed it, considering that neither one of us spoke German, and that you had to take both a subway and a bus to get there from the hotel where the crew were staying. But we got there somehow, and spent a good half of the day roaming with other tourists around a legendary concentration camp, peering blindly into the huge crematoriums, but staring with equal horror and fascination at the endless rows of filing cabinets containing every record of every human being who was ever imprisoned, starved, gassed, or simply worked to death in this place. Michael and I grew quieter and quieter that afternoon; until, by the time we started back to Munich we weren’t speaking at all. I think we both felt that we might never say anything in words again.