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:

Teresa: [Showing off the earings she wants him to buy as 'souvenirs'] Tony, you're not even looking at how pretty they are and only 11 American dollars!
Tony Romano: [Looking at her knowingly] Everything around here's 11 bucks!
Teresa: Tony, you like?
Tony Romano: Charge it with the rest.
Teresa: [Happily] Gracias, Tony!
Tony Romano: [Knowingly] See ya later!


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


[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.


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Lee Van Cleef Facts
According to the book "Weird NJ" (Sceurman, Mark and Mark Moran, Barnes and Noble Books, 2004 ISBN 0-7607-3979-X) he was a descendant of the Morris County Van Cleefs who were infamous in the area for their strange living and "procreational" efforts. In fact, one trait that Lee had was that he had one green eye and one blue eye. According to the book, "this telltale characteristic was corrected in the movies with colored contact lenses".

One episode of his short-lived TV series, "The Master" (1984), was titled "The Good, The Bad and the Priceless".

He had three children from his first marriage: Deborah, Alan and David.

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