Lee Van Cleef, the perfect villain of cinema: "Being born with bad eyes is the best thing that has happened to me in my life"

Born a century ago, he was 'discovered' by Sergio Leone at the age of 40 and his contribution to spaghetti western was fundamental to the success of the genr 

El Debate

ByBelén Ester

1/9/2025

There have been few actors more charismatic and who more identified with the paradigm of the perfect villain: tall, herculean, of few words, intense gaze and dressed in black, the presence of Lee Van Cleef in a film was that of the very image of death.

His name was Clarence LeRoy Van Cleef Jr and he was of Dutch descent. The son of a concert pianist and a pharmacist, his careful education and his subsequent time in the Navy, did not manage to dispel his interest in the theater, which had always attracted him. After serving in World War II, he debuted in New Jersey theaters until a talent scout saw in his demeanor and the cut of his gaze the perfect image of the western villain, a fashionable genre in the late 40s and early 50s. Not surprisingly, his debut in Hollywood is through the front door with Fred Zinnemann in one of the most applauded westerns in the history of cinema, Alone in the Face of Danger (1952) where he gives life to one of the dangerous members of the gang of assassins. In 1984, Van Cleef himself would tell on the Jonny Carson show how he came to that project: "Stanley Kramer called me to work on Alone in the Face of Danger, but he told me I had to fix my nose. And I told him that my nose was my hallmark. They called me 'Sexy Nose' on set... So I told him what I could do with his suggestion... But the next day he called me to play one of the bad guys."

However, during the next ten years, his time in Hollywood was modest and of few words, full of B movies and television serials, from The Lone Ranger to Cimarron City, when John Ford included him in the casting of the also masterpiece The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance (1962) where he gives life, of course, one of the henchmen of the villain of the title.

However, his film and television days seemed to have come to an end, as he could barely support himself with what he earned from those minor roles. Luck smiled on him when Henry Fonda, first, and Lee Marvin, later, rejected the role of Colonel Corbett in the second film by an Italian film director who had made a western that had caught the public's attention in 1964 called A Fistful of Dollars. Sergio Leone had seen Van Cleef in the series Rawhide from which he had taken its protagonist, Clint Eastwood, and the temperance and appearance of the actor had caught his attention. So, desperate in the face of the lack of a villain for Death Had a Price, he contacts him who listens, suspiciously, to the offer. He was fed up with bad papers. But the check for 17,000 dollars that Leone puts on the table makes him quickly leave New York, where he lived as a painter, and settles in Europe.

[Gina Lollobrigida and Lee Van Cleef, during the filming of "The Man from Rio Malo"]

From that moment on, Lee Van Cleef would work tirelessly on one hit after another of that new genre that was being born, the spaghetti western: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966), The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1966), Day of Anger (Tonino Valerii, 1967), Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967), Beyond the Law (Giorgio Stegani, 1968), Great Duel at Dawn (Giancarlo Santi) Take a Hard Ride,(1975), God's Gun (Gianfranco Parolini, 1976) or the indispensable Sabata and Return of Sabata 1870 by Gianfranco Parolini from 1969 and 1971, respectively, where he gives life to the iconic gunslinger Sabata.

From the mid-70s, when the Italian genre began its slow agony, he would still make some significant films always linked to thriller or action such as Target: Kill, Bloody Vengeance or The Return of Chris Gretchco, although his works in the 90s were more anecdotal. All in all, he participated in the paradigmatic 1997: Rescue in New York, raising the passions of his fans who never stopped following his work.

Married three times and father of four children, Lee Van Cleef never retired from cinema and died of a heart attack as soon as he finished filming his last film, Chameleon, released after his death in December 1989, at the age of 64.

Grateful for the life he had had to live, he never gave much importance to the fact of always playing the bad guy, in fact, he was especially stimulated by these characters. About this he would say: "Being born with bad eyes is the best thing that has happened to me in my life. The bad guys have always been my style... I look bad without even trying. The public naturally hates me on screen. And you can do a lot more with a villain role."

The truth is that few actors like him managed to make the blood of the audience freeze as soon as they appeared on screen and that those fantastic villains are at the top of the history of cinema.