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Born: December 13th, 1929 Died: February 5th, 2021
Christopher Plummer, the prolific and versatile Canadian-born actor who rose to celebrity as the romantic lead in perhaps the most popular musical film of all time, was critically lionised as among the pre-eminent Shakespeareans of the past century and won an Oscar, two Tonys and two Emmys, died on Friday at his home in Weston, Connecticut. He was 91.
His wife, Elaine Taylor, said the cause was a blow to the head as a result of a fall.
The scion of a once-lofty family whose status had dwindled by the time he was born, Plummer nonetheless displayed the outward aspects of privilege throughout his life. He had immense and myriad natural gifts: a leading man’s face and figure; a slightly aloof mien that betrayed supreme confidence, if not outright self-regard; an understated athletic grace; a sonorous (not to say plummy) speaking voice; and exquisite diction.
He also had charm and arrogance in equal measure, and a streak both bibulous and promiscuous, all of which he acknowledged in later life as his manner softened and his habits waned. In one notorious incident in 1971, he was replaced by Anthony Hopkins in the lead role of Coriolanus at the National Theater in London; according to the critic Kenneth Tynan, who at the time was the literary manager of the National, Plummer was dismissed in a vote by the cast for crude and outrageous behaviour.
For years, until he came to share the widely held opinion of his best-known film – the beloved 1965 musical The Sound of Music, in which he starred as the Austrian naval officer Georg von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews – as a pinnacle of warmhearted family entertainment, Plummer disparaged it as saccharine claptrap, famously referring to it as “S&M” or “The Sound of Mucus.”
“That sentimental stuff is the most difficult for me to play, especially because I’m trained vocally and physically for Shakespeare,” he said in a People magazine interview in 1982. “To do a lousy part like von Trapp, you have to use every trick you know to fill the empty carcass of the role. That damn movie follows me around like an albatross.”
Plummer’s CV, which stretched over seven decades, was at least colossal, if not unrivalled, encompassing acting opportunities from some of dramatic literature’s greatest works to some of commercial entertainment’s crassest exploitations. He embraced it all with uncanny grace, or at least professional relish, displaying a uniform ease in vanishing into personalities not his own – pious or menacing, benign or malevolent, stern or mellow – and a uniform delight in delivering lines written by Elizabethan geniuses and Hollywood hacks.
Shakespearean star
He played Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Mark Antony and others of Shakespeare’s towering protagonists on prominent stages to consistent acclaim but he also accepted roles in a fair share of clunkers, in which he made vivid sport of some hoary cliches – as the evil bigot hiding behind religiosity in Skeletons (1997), for example, one of his more than 40 television movies, or as the sombre emperor of the galaxy who appears as a hologram in Starcrash, a 1978 rip-off of Star Wars.
One measure of his stature was his leading ladies, who included Glenda Jackson as Lady Macbeth and Zoe Caldwell as Cleopatra. And even setting Shakespeare aside, one measure of his range was a list of the well-known characters he played, fictional and non, on television and in the movies: Sherlock Holmes and Mike Wallace, John Barrymore and Leo Tolstoy, Aristotle and F Lee Bailey, Franklin D Roosevelt and Alfred Stieglitz, Rudyard Kipling and Cyrano de Bergerac.
Plummer won a belated Oscar in 2012 for the role of Hal, a man who enthusiastically comes out as gay after a decades-long marriage and the death of his wife, in the bitter-sweet father-son story Beginners.
“You’re only two years older than me, darling,” Plummer said, addressing the golden statuette during his acceptance speech. “Where have you been all my life?”
“I’m not a superstar – thank God,” he said in an interview with the Times in 1982. “Christ, to be a superstar must be extremely tiring and limiting.
“I prefer being half-recognised on the street and getting good tables in restaurants,” he added. “Unfortunately, the really good, smashing parts do not always come my way because they go to the first tier of superstars who are bankable.”
As accurate as that self-assessment was, it pertained only to the movies. Onstage, with a fierce intelligence, exemplary control of his body and voice and a formidable command of language, Plummer had few equals.
For more than a half century, through to 2010 – when, at age 80, he appeared at the Stratford festival as Prospero in The Tempest – Plummer’s performances, including those in New York and in London, where he lived in the 1960s, were more often than not appreciated in extravagant terms.
Plummer played King Lear on Broadway in 2004, in what Ben Brantley of the New York Times called “the performance of a lifetime”.
Absent father
Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was born in Toronto on December 13th, 1929. His parents separated around the time of his birth, and he did not meet his father, John Orme Plummer, until he was 17, when the elder Plummer came to see his son perform in a play.
“Our paths would cross once or twice again in our lifetimes and then no more,” Christopher Plummer wrote in his memoir.
Plummer grew up in Montreal with his mother – Isabella Mary Abbott Plummer, a granddaughter of a Canadian prime minister and a railroad president – and her extended family in what he described as a colony of fading social aristocracy, where bird-watching and tennis were frequent recreational pursuits and the after-dinner activity was reading aloud. It was a background, he once said, that “made me want to be bad and rough and find the secrets rather than the gates.”
Pampered, gifted and rebellious, he aspired early on to be a concert pianist, though in high school, where his classmates included the future jazzmen Oscar Peterson and Maynard Ferguson, he gravitated to their musical style and a life at night that included heavy drinking.
“How often as a mere teenager, tanked to the gills on cheap rye whiskey and Molson chasers, did I stagger home in the blinding cold,” he wrote in his memoir.
He gave up the idea of a musical career because, he said, “I realised acting came easier”. He performed in high-school shows – including as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, in which he received a favourable review from the Montreal Gazette that “instantly went to my head” – and made his professional debut at 16 at the Montreal Repertory Theater.
Joining a troupe in Ottawa, Plummer performed in dozens of low-budget productions and, in what amounted to an extended education, took on roles in radio theatre for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and spent a season with a professional company in Bermuda. The actor Edward Everett Horton, who had appeared with the company, secured him a role in a touring production of Nina, a French comedy, and opportunities accrued quickly.
His first feature-film role was as a playwright in Stage Struck, a 1958 drama about the New York theatre world, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Henry Fonda, Susan Strasberg and Herbert Marshall.
Cantankerous rage
By the early 1960s Plummer had become allied with the bad boys of the British acting world – Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole – motivated, he once said, by the cantankerous rage against propriety exhibited in the work of John Osborne.
In his memoir, a dishy, rollicking account of a life lived sensually and energetically, he was not shy in detailing his amorous adventures, or his drinking with fellow actors. In a 1967 interview with the CBC, he acknowledged himself to be a drunk – “though not when I’m working, producers take note,” he said – and considered the question of why actors in general drink.
“The more you give to an audience, which is a tremendous amount that you give during a night if you care about your work, the more you spill out of yourself with either loathing or loving them and getting loathing and loving back,” he said. “It’s a tremendous letdown when the evening is over. You’ve given an awful lot of your own personality with just the reward of applause at the end, which is a marvellous reward but it isn’t quite enough to fill the rest of the night.”
In the same interview he noted that he’d given up trying to be liked. “I’m not a difficult type to get on with,” he said. “I’m only difficult when I’m impatient with people who don’t understand temperament has nothing to do with lack of professionalism.”
Plummer’s first two marriages, to the actor Tammy Grimes and British journalist Patricia Lewis, ended in divorce. In addition to Taylor, he is survived by his daughter with Grimes, the actor Amanda Plummer.
By both their accounts, Plummer and his daughter became friends after she became an adult, though they had rarely seen each other while she was growing up.
“I didn’t want anything to do with the upbringing of a child,” he told the Times in 1982. “I am really very bad at responsibility of any kind. Unless it’s my work, I’m hopeless.”
It was Taylor, Plummer acknowledged many times, who curtailed at last his liquid nights and general profligacy.
“My long-suffering wife Elaine,” he called her, in closing his Oscar acceptance speech, “who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for coming to my rescue every day of my life.” – The New York Times