Among the very few interviews he gave were those for the Minneapolis Star Tribune in April 1998 and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in July 2005.Lee spent the last 12 years of his life in the Minneapolis area. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2004 and, after seeming to have responded to treatment, was told that it had returned and spread to his brain. Bann's book Our Gang: the life and times of the Little Rascals (1977), a man claiming to have been Porky withdrew after his claims were challenged in the early 1970s.In 1984, Lee is said to have received a sizeable private settlement over the unauthorised use of his character in a television cartoon series. For many years, he did not take part in any reunions or celebrations and, during this absence from public view, became one of several Gang members whose identity was reportedly assumed by someone else According to Leonard Maltin and Richard W. His leisure activities centred around European sports cars, variously as restorer and trader.Lee said he was much prouder of his achievements as a teacher than as a child actor. He had long preferred to distance himself from his film experience, not least because of the bullying it had attracted when he returned to an ordinary school. His career was spent teaching history, initially in Post, west Texas, then at Denver and Boulder in Colorado.
Lee retained the forename throughout his life and, in further tribute to his mentor, named his only son Douglas.Eugene Lee was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and was adopted at an early age by an undertaker and his wife, a stenographer. Following his tenure with "Our Gang", Lee and his family returned to Texas, initially to their hometown of Fort Worth, then moving on to Lubbock. After high school, Lee tried his hand at several jobs before continuing his education, first at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, then at the University of Houston, studying political science, psychology and education. "The big car would come and pick me up, and I would go to the movie lot.
We were just playing and having fun on the greatest playground in the world") - something which added to the natural air of the films that so often distinguished them from their competitors.When, in 1936, direction of the series was taken over by the 27-year-old Gordon Douglas - his first effort, Bored of Education, won the Gang's only Oscar - Lee's parents were so taken with him that they began to call Eugene "Gordon" in the director's honour. Filka, a convict going under the name of Luka Kizmir, tells his story during the first act and this was powerfully recounted by the tenor. In 1987 he sang Calaf in Puccini's Turandot in Warsaw, and Tannh?er in Barcelona, neither of which was really a suitable role for his voice. However, he returned to Warsaw in 1988 and 1989 to take part in the first complete Ring cycle ever given there, singing Siegmund in Die Walk?and Siegfried in G?rd?erung. The latter was a particularly good characterisation.Reece took part in an unusual opera, Lortzing's Undine, in 1991, when his Hugo von Ringstetten was warmly received. He took on another Wagner role at Brisbane in 1995, when he sang Parsifal, whose vocal line appears to have suited him well.After the tenor stopped singing he, together with his second wife Kate, a British dancer, opened the Reece Studio Theatre School in Dorsten, Germany, where they had lived since the mid-1980s.
