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:

John Stewart: [just prior to a shootout] Make your first shot count, Drucker!
Al Drucker: [with confidence] I always do.


[Mortimer has just recovered the watch from Indio, which contains a picture of the woman that Indio raped]
Monco: There seems to be a family resemblance.
Col. Douglas Mortimer: Naturally, between brother and sister.


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]


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Lee Van Cleef Facts
During one summer in the early 1950s he was a camp counselor in NYC for Marc Furstenberg.

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

He had almost given up his acting career in the mid-'60s and turned to painting when he was cast by Sergio Leone in For a Few Dollars More (1965). It made him a superstar in Europe and restarted his career in the US, making him again a recognizable and bankable name.

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