Biography

Brooklyn-born Lee Hessel attended Columbia but left to serve in the army. They sent him to engineering school at the University of Michigan and Michigan State but he left to work in his father's fur business in Manhattan. In 1950, he married a fashion photographer, but it lasted only a few weeks and was annulment. The next year, he married actress Edith Fern Bell, who had been modeling for the annual Hessel Furs show for years. They had two children. At a fashion event in NYC, Lee had met the business partner of independent film maker Radley Metzger and ended up financing "I Spit on Your Grave," a French film. The film made money and in 1963, Hessel began Cambist Films, which distributed foreign films, dubbed and edited for America, which were mostly softcore sex. Soon, Cambist was distributing new films shot in NYC. Cambist also worked twice with director George Romero of "Night of the Living Dead" fame, on 1971's "There's Always Vanilla," and in 1973, on the horror film, "The Crazies," in which wife Eadie was cast in a supporting role. However, it was one of the few Cambist-financed films to lose money and by 1978, Cambria shut down. Eadie developed early-onset Alzheimer's by 1978 and she eventually died in 1981. Hessel became successful in real estate during the 1980's and in 1989, met ex-casting director Sally Dennison and they married two years later. He sold off all his properties and they moved to her cabin in Big Bear Lake, CA, which was on land leased from the Federal Government in a former campgrounds. An avid skier in New England, he loved the Big Bear area. In 1995, he had successful surgery for colon cancer. In 2003, Sally left Hessel and moved to Idaho. They were divorced in 2004 and he stayed in Big Bear. In January of 2012, Hessel either blacked out or fell while attempting to board a ski chairlift and fell 15 feet, landing on his head. Airlifted to a San Bernardino hospital, he was successfully treated for cranial edema, but he knew he could no longer live alone in a remote mountain cabin. He sold the cabin and moved to Raleigh, NC, where he passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2014. About 20 years earlier in Big Bear, he had two half-wolves and a cat. The wolves died of old age in Big Bear, but Katie the cat ended up moving to Raleigh with her master and as of his death in 2014, she was 22 years old.
- IMDb mini biography by: king_of_fuh