Lee Van Cleef was born on 9 January 1925.

He fascinates me. In the 1950s, he was like a lot of actors. He made a meager living playing bad guys in westerns. And then Sergio Leone cast him in For a Few Dollars More. And then, after only 13 years, he was an overnight star!

He was 27 years old before he to his first film acting gig, High Noon. Producers wanted him for the part that Lloyd Bridges eventually took. But they wanted him to get a nose job. He refused and got the much smaller part you see in the film.

This was certainly a mistake in the short term. Hollywood instantly typecast him as a bad guy. And he worked a lot throughout the 1950s. But in the early 1960s, he was mostly confined to TV — normally as a guest star. You probably remember him on My Mother the Car. (That was a joke. But he’s actually quite funny in the episode!)

Leone had apparently seen him in High Noon and thought he had a great face. Van Cleff always exuded intelligence on the screen. Leone’s idea was the use it in a role with more depth. In For a Few Dollars More, that meant making him a Good Guy — better than Eastwood’s mercenary character.

But Cleef didn’t have to be a Good Guy. Leone then cast him as one of the most evil characters in all of cinema in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Regardless, his career took off at this point. He worked mostly for Italian productions. But he had top billing in most of these. The days of character acting were over. He was a star — at least in Europe. But he was also a much bigger deal in the US than he ever had been.

I prefer Lee Van Cleef in Good Guy roles. For a long time, For a Few Dollars More was my favorite Leone film. (It could be again with some editing!) So let’s watch one of my favorite films featuring him, Death Rides a Horse.

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Lee Van Cleef in Death Rides a Horse via Wikimedia. It is in the public domain.