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:

Monco: Tell me, Colonel... Were you ever young?
Col. Douglas Mortimer: Yup. And just as reckless as you. Then one day, something happened. It made life very precious to me.
Monco: What's that? Or is the question indiscreet?
Col. Douglas Mortimer: No. The question isn't indiscreet. But the answer could be.


Frank Talby: Fourth lesson: punches are like bullets. If you don't make the first ones count, Scotty, you might just be finished.


Frank Talby: Fifth lesson: if you wound a man, you better kill him. Because sooner or later he's gonna kill you.


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Lee Van Cleef Facts
Producer Stuart Cohen recently revealed that Van Cleef was considered for the role of Garry in John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), since Carpenter had recently worked with him on Escape from New York (1981).

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.

He was missing the last joint of his middle finger, a disfigurement prominently featured in the climactic gunfight of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). He actually lost it while building a playhouse for his daughter, although there were rumors that it happened in a road accident or a bar fight.

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