Born in London's Belgravia district on May 27, 1922, Christopher Frank Carandini Lee came by his aristocratic bearing honestly. His father, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Trollope Lee, a burly sportsman, was an officer in the British Army who had served with distinction in the Boer War. Lee's mother, Estelle Carandini di Sarzano Lee, was an Italian contessa whose royal lineage stretched back to Charlemagne. The Lees' second child, preceded five years earlier by sister Xandra, baby Christopher's arrival was considered a not-so-welcome surprise to his parents. As Lee jokingly writes in his 1977 autobiography, Tall, Dark, and Gruesome, "I was 'a mistake.' My mother often told me so. In her late 80s, she was still firm in her original opinion."

Just after his fourth birthday, Lee's father suddenly left his mother after 16 years of marriage. The couple would divorce two years later. The Contessa, with children in tow, moved to the Swiss village of Wengen where young Christopher was enrolled in Miss Fisher's Academy in nearby Territet. A rambunctious child, six-year-old Lee was initially no fan of the school. "I expressed my opinion of the place by running away, once a week," Lee writes, "I was always tracked down. . . and severely punished. This had no effect whatever, and I repeated the performance with great regularity." Nevertheless, Lee credited Miss Fisher's with introducing him to the stage and his first villainous role as Rumpelstiltskin in a school play.

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