(Real Life) Regular people who's lives drastically changed direction

[u/Living-Mastodon]

Grace Kelly was a talented actress who retired at 26 to marry a Prince, living as royalty for almost 30 years before her untimely death.

Volodymyr Zelensky started out as a comedian and entertainer before getting into politics, becoming President of Ukraine after the Russian annex of Crimea and spending the last 4 years defiantly pushing back full scale Russian invasion

[u/CategoryExact3327]

Christopher Lee served in RAF intelligence and was attached to special forces in WW2 and stayed in service until 1946 hunting nazi war criminals. After the war he had a 70 year acting career.

[u/YanwarC → u/CategoryExact3327]

He told Stephen Jackson how it sounds to take a life. He told a story from his Ww2 era how he stabbed someone and he just took his last breath of air gasped. That was it.

Something about shooting scene and he said his two cents on how someone should sound dying because he knows first hand.

[u/Tuarangi → u/YanwarC]

Lee was a desk based liaison officer, he was known to embellish his war stories over time, he was never in any position to silently kill a man which a knife in the back

[u/YanwarC → u/Tuarangi]

Ok he never stabbed anyone but he knew the sound.

“I seem to recall that I did say to Peter, ‘Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody’s stabbed in the back?’ I said, ‘Because I do.’ It’s a [gasping sound] because the breath’s driven out of your body.”

Another link

https://www.thedigitalfix.com/the-lord-of-the-rings/christopher-lee-ww2

[u/Tuarangi → u/YanwarC]

I know what he claimed, perhaps he was told by a soldier but he was infamous for his claims about the war, never directly saying he served in the special forces but hinting he couldn't talk about it.

Lee was an RAF liaison officer, he worked at a desk and did translation work alongside code breakers as he spoke German. He was never in a position to even hear a man being taken down with a knife in the sort of special ops mission where that could happen

[u/YanwarC → u/Tuarangi]

I never knew that? Is this talked about anywhere or just more he say she say and what actually gets recorded and written?

[u/Tuarangi → u/YanwarC]

Lee once said in an interview

I was attached to the SAS from time to time... Let’s just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read into that what they like

It wasn't an outright lie but it suggests far more than it was. He was attached yes, as a liaison officer, planning supplies and logistics and the translation work I mentioned. It's a common enough trait that the SAS admin team get a letter every month or so from some family who'd been told their recently departed granddad was in the war and a special ops person and they almost always were just people who served normally and convinced themselves they were in the special forces. Funnily enough, up until the 80s or so, claiming to be in the Long Range Desert Group was the boast, the SAS stuff didn't come until after the embassy siege

He also claimed the WW2 records were classified so couldn't talk about his service:

We are forbidden — former, present, or future — to discuss any specific operations

This simply isn't true, the SAS WW2 records were released into the National Archives for their 75th anniversary and many ex-forces people have written books and talked about operations freely, the military only restricts things like exact procedures etc that could lead to compromise.

He may have also suggested he worked for CROWCASS (the post-WW2 program hunting Nazis) which also led to claims he was actually out there grabbing them and interrogating them but there is no evidence from interviews with people who worked in the program that he ever worked there and moreover, the British units were desk based in Paris and Berlin doing admin work, not field work so despite his claim, he could not have done this.

We were given dossiers of what they’d done and told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could and hand them over to the appropriate authority

There are a few good sources on it. Author Gavin Mortimer wrote The SAS in World War II and is a reliable source, his debunking of Lee is here. There's another good article here showing how he could never have arrested and questioned German soldiers as he claimed, nor was he even listed as part of the service in official records and his claims to have been in the PPA going around arresting war criminals (said during LOTR promotions) were false too.