Christopher Plummer

Christopher Plummer: Seventy Years and the Music of Words

He was eighty when the Academy first nominated him, and his response was not gratitude. "Well, I said it's about time!" he told reporters. "I mean, I'm 80 years old, for God's sake. Have mercy." Two years later he won, becoming at eighty-two the oldest person ever to take an acting Oscar, and addressed the statuette directly: "You're only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?" By then he had been working for more than sixty years, most of it in theatres where nobody handed out statuettes at all.

Senneville, and Laurence Olivier's Henry V

Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was born on 13 December 1929 in Toronto and raised in Senneville, Quebec, fluently bilingual in English and French. The family had standing: through his mother, Isabella Mary Abbott, he was a descendant of Sir John Abbott, prime minister of Canada, and a second cousin of the British actor Nigel Bruce. He studied piano seriously as a schoolboy — an inheritance audible for the rest of his life in how he handled a line — and switched ambitions after seeing Laurence Olivier's *Henry V* in 1944. He never went to university, and said he regretted it always.

His professional debut came in September 1948 with Ottawa's Stage Society in *The Rivals*. He apprenticed at the Montreal Repertory Theatre alongside a young William Shatner. His Broadway debut, *The Starcross Story* in January 1953, closed on opening night.

Stratford and Elsinore

From 1956 he became one of the defining actors of the Stratford Festival in Ontario, working through the great classical parts — Hamlet, Henry V, Leontes, Mercutio — in a country that was only then building an indigenous classical theatre. In 1964 the BBC filmed him as Hamlet at Elsinore Castle itself, a production that brought an Emmy nomination and remains one of the few records of what he could do with verse at full stretch.

The RSC Season of 1961

His British debut came with the newly formed Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961, and it was not a modest entrance. He played Benedick in *Much Ado About Nothing* opposite Geraldine McEwan's Beatrice under Michael Langham, and the title role in *Richard III* for William Gaskill. Peter Hall then directed him as Henry II in Anouilh's *Becket*, opposite Eric Porter, at the Aldwych and the Globe — a performance that won him the Evening Standard Award. He had arrived in England as a colonial and left as a leading man.

"That Movie"

Then, in 1965, he played Captain Georg von Trapp in *The Sound of Music*, and became famous to hundreds of millions of people who had never seen him do anything else. He hated it for years. He called the part "so awful and sentimental and gooey"; he referred to the film as "that movie," as "S&M," and as "The Sound of Mucus," and for a long time declined to discuss it at all. "Although we worked hard enough to make him interesting," he conceded in 2009, "it was a bit like flogging a dead horse." He softened eventually, admitted on rewatching that he had been "totally seduced" by the film's quality, and kept a lifelong friendship with Julie Andrews. The episode is the best single illustration of the gap between what Plummer valued and what the world valued him for.

The Long Middle

The film work that followed was uneven by design; he took what paid and put the money into stage seasons. But the highlights are formidable: Rudyard Kipling in *The Man Who Would Be King* (1975), an Emmy-winning turn in *The Moneychangers* (1976), *Jesus of Nazareth* (1977), *The Thorn Birds*, a chilling Mike Wallace in *The Insider* (1999) that swept the critics' prizes, *A Beautiful Mind* (2001), the voice of Charles Muntz in *Up* (2009), and *The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo* (2011). On stage he kept returning to the hardest material — Iago to James Earl Jones's Othello on Broadway in 1982 — and collected two Tony Awards, for the musical *Cyrano* in 1974 and for *Barrymore* in 1997.

The Late Flowering

Plummer's last fifteen years were among his richest. He published *In Spite of Myself: A Memoir* in 2008, a genuinely well-written account of seven decades. He returned to Stratford for *Caesar and Cleopatra* (2008) and *The Tempest* (2010), both filmed for cinemas. In *Beginners* (2011) he played a man who comes out as gay at seventy-five and lives with more appetite than everyone half his age; it won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. In 2017 he was drafted into *All the Money in the World* at nine days' notice to replace Kevin Spacey, reshooting the role of J. Paul Getty and earning an Oscar nomination at eighty-eight. He played the murdered patriarch Harlan Thrombey in *Knives Out* (2019), and was still leading a television series, *Departure*, at eighty-nine.

He died on 5 February 2021 at his home in Weston, Connecticut, aged ninety-one, of complications from a fall.

Why Christopher Is Called a Genius

The quality in question is technical and specific: Plummer was one of the finest speakers of English verse of the twentieth century, and he understood that classical acting is a musical discipline before it is a psychological one. His manager of forty-six years, Lou Pitt, reached for exactly that word in his tribute, describing a man who loved his profession, had old-fashioned manners, self-deprecating humour, and "the music of words." The piano training was not incidental. What Plummer could do — sustain a long Shakespearean sentence across its whole architecture, land the sense on the right syllable, vary tempo and colour without ever sounding as though he were reciting — is a skill that takes decades and that very few actors on either side of the Atlantic ever fully acquired.

The second element is adaptability. Verse actors of his generation typically photographed badly, because stage technique reads as overacting on camera. Plummer solved it. His Mike Wallace in *The Insider* is all containment and dry authority; his Harlan Thrombey is warm and small; his Hal in *Beginners* is almost weightless. He was the only Canadian to complete the Triple Crown of acting — an Oscar, two Tonys and two Emmys.

The counter-case is one he made himself. He was an interpreter, not an originator: the words are always someone else's, and he never wrote a play, directed a film, or founded a company. He spent large stretches of his career in films he did not respect, taken frankly for money, and he described his own attitude to much of that work with a candour that borders on dismissal. "Genius" in the inventive sense does not apply. What applies is mastery — a craft pursued for seventy-three years to a level almost nobody else reached.

Legacy

Canada made him a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1968, gave him a Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement in 2001, a star on Canada's Walk of Fame in 1998, a Canadian Screen Award for lifetime achievement in 2016 and a commemorative stamp in 2021; the American Theatre Hall of Fame took him in 1986. He was married three times — to Tammy Grimes, with whom he had a daughter, the actress Amanda Plummer; to Patricia Lewis; and from 1970 until his death to Elaine Taylor. The Sound of Music will outlive all of it in raw audience numbers, which he would have found funny and slightly unbearable. The real monument is quieter: a recording of a Canadian actor at Elsinore in 1964, doing the words justice.

Achievements

• Companion of the Order of Canada — 1968
• Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — 2012
• John Willis Award for Lifetime Achievement — 2014
• Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play — 1997
• Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical — 1974
• Worked as television actor, film actor and voice actor