Christopher Frayling

Career

Frayling taught history at the University of Bath and was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Arts) from that University in 2003. In 1979, Frayling was appointed Professor of Cultural History at London's post-graduate art and design school, the Royal College of Art. Frayling was Rector of the Royal College of Art from 1996 to 2009.

In 2003, he was awarded the Sir Misha Black Award and was added to the College of Medallists. He was the Chairman of Arts Council England from 2005 until January 2009. He served as Chairman of the Design Council, Chairman of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, and a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a governor of the British Film Institute in the 1980s.

In April 2014, he was appointed Chancellor of the Arts University Bournemouth.

He has had a wide output as a writer and critic on subjects ranging from vampires to westerns. He has written and presented television series such as The Art of Persuasion on advertising and Strange Landscape on the Middle Ages. He has conducted a series of radio and television interviews with figures from the world of film, including Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr, Ken Adam, Francis Ford Coppola and Clint Eastwood. Frayling has written and presented several television series, including The Face of Tutankhamun and Nightmare: Birth of Horror.

He studied Spaghetti Westerns and specifically director Sergio Leone. Frayling has written a popular biography of Leone, Something To Do With Death (2000); helped run the Los Angeles-based Gene Autry Museum's exhibit on Leone in 2005; and appeared in numerous documentaries about Leone and his films, particularly the DVD documentaries of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). He also provided audio commentaries for the special edition DVD releases of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, Once Upon a Time in the West and The Colossus of Rhodes.

In January 2018, he gave a lecture at the British Library in the Hogwarts Curriculum Lecture series on "Defence against the Dark Arts". This specialised in the treatment of vampires.

Knighthood

In 2001, Frayling was awarded a knighthood for "Services to Art and Design Education" and chose as his motto "PERGE SCELUS MIHI DIEM PERFICIAS", which can be translated as "Proceed, varlet, and let the day be rendered perfect for my benefit". The motto is a reference to a line attributed to Clint Eastwood's character Harry Callahan from Dirty Harry (1971): "Go ahead, punk, make my day".

Arms

Select bibliography

Literature

• Napoleon Wrote Fiction (1972)
• The Vampyre (1978); Gollanz
  • Expanded as Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1991); Faber & Faber
  • Expanded as Vampyres: Genesis and Resurrection from Count Dracula to Vampirella (2016); Thames & Hudson
• Nightmare: Birth of Horror (1996)
• On Craftsmanship: towards a new Bauhaus (2011)
• The Yellow Peril – Dr Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinophobia (2014)
• Inside the Bloody Chamber: on Angela Carter, the Gothic and other weird tales (2015)

History

• The Face of Tutankhamun (1992)
• Strange Landscape: Journey Through the Middle Ages (1995)

Film

• Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (1981)
• American Westerners (1984)
• Clint Eastwood (1992)
• Things to Come (1995)
• Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death (2000)
• Mad, Bad and Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema (2005)
• Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in Italy (2005)
• Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design (2005)
• Once Upon a Time in The West Shooting a Masterpiece (2019)

Education

• The Royal College of Art: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Art and Design (1987)
• Design of the Times: One Hundred Years of the Royal College of Art (1996)
• The Art Pack (1998)

List of audio commentaries

• Beauty and the Beast (1946)
• The Big Country (1958) – only on the US Kino Lorber and German Koch Media Blu-rays.
• The Colossus of Rhodes (1961)
• Duck, You Sucker! (1971)
• A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
• For a Few Dollars More (1965)
• Frankenstein (1931)
• Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
• The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
• The Innocents (1961) – only on the UK BFI and US Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray, along with a featurette he presents.
• The Magnificent Seven (1960) – only on the US MGM Collector's Edition DVD, along with a featurette he presents.
• Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), with actress Claudia Cardinale; directors Bernardo Bertolucci, John Carpenter, Alex Cox and John Milius; and fellow film historian Dr. Sheldon Hall.