He is first heard of at the theatre in Leman Street, Goodman's Fields, London where he played, on 13 November 1745, Sir Charles Freeman in The Beaux' Stratagem.
His name appears, 14 November 1747, at Drury Lane under Garrick, as the Bastard (i.e. Edmund) in King Lear, and 3 December as Myrtle in The Conscious Lovers.
[1] Breaking his engagement with Garrick he made his first appearance at Covent Garden, 23 October 1749, as Ranger in The Suspicious Husband by Benjamin Hoadly.
Here he remained during this and the following season, playing secondary characters, except when he was allowed for his benefit on one occasion to enact Hamlet and Poet in Lethe, and on another, Lear and Don Quixote.
[1] A man of extreme and aggressive vanity and of quarrelsome disposition, he fumed under the management of Garrick, who seems to have enjoyed keeping in the background an actor who was always disputing his supremacy.
Romeo and Juliet was played in December 1752, and is held by Mr. Dibdin, the historian of the Edinburgh stage, to have probably been the unprinted version with which the memory of Lee is discredited.
He lost an action which he brought against Lord Elibank, Andrew Pringle, John Dalrymple, and others, and quit Edinburgh for Dublin, where he was engaged by Thomas Sheridan for £400 for the season.