Mirren moans about Brit typecasting, and Lee moans about someone dragging up Dracula again (probably)

Dame Helen Mirren has moaned about Brit actors being typecast as evildoers in Hollywood films in an interview on the Independent website. About 10 years too late to point that one out, love, but well done anyway.
Of more interest to us is the Indy's pinpointing of the exact moment when us Brits came to signify all that is evil in film. To whit:

Its consolidation, though, is likely to date from the maniacal laughs of Christopher Lee in the Hammer Horror films of the 1950s and 1960s. From then on, baddies have been almost uniformly Brits.

More recently, Christopher Lee portrayed the evil wizard Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Though the action takes place in Middle Earth, the accent is unmistakeably Thames Estuary.

Now, forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember Lee "laughing maniacally" in any films of the 50s and 60s. He was more prone to gurning disagreeably, or staring surreptitiously, surely?

Good excuse to use the above picture though, ain't it? I could have gone for a pic of her milfing it up in a pink bikini, or getting a good seeing-to in The Cook The Thief His Wife And Her Lover (review to come soon) but I'm better than that...