Lee Van Cleef Overview:

Character actor, Lee Van Cleef, was born Clarence Leroy Van Cleef Jr. on Jan 9, 1925 in Somerville, NJ. Van Cleef died at the age of 64 on Dec 16, 1989 in Oxnard, CA and was laid to rest in Forest Lawn (Hollywood Hills) Cemetery in Los Angeles, CA.

MINI BIO:

Lean, dark-haired, narrow-eyed American actor, almost entirely confined to westerns. After he switched to acting instead of taking over his father's accountancy business, he spent more than a decade in films as ugly villains (with the occasional American Indian thrown in) with itchy trigger fingers. Then he lost his hair, grew a mustache and, recovered from a severe car crash in 1959, pleasantly surprised his fans by becoming a star of spaghetti westerns in the wake of Clint Eastwood. Died from a heart attack.

(Source: available at Amazon Quinlan's Film Character Actors: an Illustrated Directory).

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Lee Van Cleef Quotes:

Sabata: I'm on the right side.
Banjo: Which side is that?
Sabata: Not the side against the law.


Fat Jones: [In the bunkhouse: Steve is moving in] Say, friend... You don't just happen to have one of them new mail order catalogues?
Steve Miller: No, I ain't.
Fat Jones: Feller told me they had pictures in them this year - women in corsets.
Wrangler in bunkhouse: Fats, you got a dirty mind. That's why you'll never amount to nothin'.
Fat Jones: I ain't seen a woman - outside 'o Jocasta - in eight months. And you ain't gettin' no prettier.
[Other wrangler gives him the finger]


Killer: I hope he's dead, the bastard!
Frank Talby: You're going to hell, Turner. Find out down there!


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Lee Van Cleef Facts
According to the book "Weird NJ" (Sceurman, Mark and Mark Moran, Barnes and Noble Books, 2004 ISBN 0-7607-3979-X) he was a descendant of the Morris County Van Cleefs who were infamous in the area for their strange living and "procreational" efforts. In fact, one trait that Lee had was that he had one green eye and one blue eye. According to the book, "this telltale characteristic was corrected in the movies with colored contact lenses".

He was involved in a car accident in 1959 in which he lost his left kneecap. Doctors told him he would never be able to ride a horse again because of the injury. Within six months he was back in the saddle.

Interviewed in "Bad at the Bijou" by William R. Horner (McFarland, 1982).

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