Outside, members of the archaeological team hear his screams and rush into the tomb to find Stephen in a catatonic state. After Joseph leaves to tell John the good news, Stephen finds the Scroll of Life and reads from it. Stephen and Joseph ignore him, and discover within the sarcophagus of Ananka. Before they enter, an Egyptian named Mehemet Bey ( George Pastell) warns them not to go in, lest they face the fatal curse against desecrators. John has a broken leg and cannot accompany his father and uncle when they open the tomb. I do however highly recommend Hammer's 'Blood From The Mummy's Tomb', even though it has no connection to 'The Mummy' and doesn't feature either actor.In Egypt in 1895, archaeologists John Banning (Cushing), his father Stephen ( Felix Aylmer) and his uncle Joseph Whemple ( Raymond Huntley) are searching for the tomb of Princess Ananka, the high priestess of the god Karnak. It's a pity that Hammer didn't make more Mummy movies starring Cushing and Lee. Both come with my highest recommendations and wipe the floor with the recent tongue in cheek versions starring Brendan Fraser et al.

In fact it's very difficult to choose one over the other. Though I still love the original version of 'The Mummy' this one is almost as good. Lee makes a menacing Mummy, even more powerful and threatening than Karloff's.

I've yet to see a Hammer movie where he didn't. Cushing gives a terrific performance as usual. Furneaux is probably best remembered for playing Catherine Deneuve's sister in Polanski's classic 'Repulsion', and also appeared in another sixties art film classic Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita'. Yvonne Furneaux plays Cushing's devoted wife who is also a dead ringer for Princess Ananka, the woman the Mummy loved centuries earlier. Peter Cushing plays the leading man role, an archaeologist who is initially sceptical but soon must accept the existence of the Mummy. Once again Lee plays the Karloff role, except a second character played by George Castell has been created for this version, so we don't get to see Lee without his bandages, apart from a brief flashback sequence. By the time they made 'The Mummy' two years later some kind of understanding had been entered into and this movie, though it isn't credited as such, and the characters names have been changed, is pretty much a remake of the 1932 Universal classic which starred Boris Karloff. Universal threatened legal action if they copied the makeup of their Frankenstein's monster for example, which is the reason the Monster (played by Christopher Lee) looked quite different to Karloff's in Hammer's 'Curse Of Frankenstein'(1957). When Hammer started making horror movies in the 1950s that were inspired by some of the classic Universal movies of the 1930s they had to tread carefully.

Actress in the mummy movies