Christopher Plummer, who died at the age of 91, is destined to be remembered as Captain von Trapp in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1965 film, The Sound of Music. He was a great actor and starred on stage, on screen and in the alpine meadows. for more than six decades.
With an imposing physique, a broad forehead, sculpted features and a beautiful voice, he played almost all of Shakespeare’s leading roles – mostly in his native Canada, during the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. But he also played briefly with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater in Britain, while maintaining a film career that never looked back on a favorable debut in Sidney Lumet’s theatrical comedy Stage Struck (1958), with Henry Fonda and Susan Strasberg.
He has survived fellow helicopters such as Peter Finch and Richard Burton – he once contracted hepatitis while partying with Tyrone Power – to become the award for senior starring roles. It ranged, just in 2009, from a dying but still robust and flirtatious, Leo Tolstoy in Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station – for which he was nominated for an Oscar – to the hilarious, eponymous showman in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, Heath Ledger’s last film, and the voice of explorer Charles Muntz in the computer-animated masterpiece Up. Beginners (2010) brought him a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Hal, a retired museum director who tells his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) about his terminal cancer and his relationship with a young male lover.
As head of the von Trapp family in one of the most popular films of all time, he displayed a firm authority that blended into fulfillment, and a romantic desire, that very few actors could bring so charmingly, though Plummer himself never from did not like the movie. He refuses to take part in the 40-year existence, but softens for the 45th, acknowledging the appeal of the film, saying it was never really his “cup of tea”. He calls it ‘The Sound of Mucus’ or ‘S&M’.
Plummer came from wealthy railroads, the only son of John Plummer, secretary of the dean of science at McGill University, and his wife, Isabella (née Abbott). His maternal great-grandfather was the third Canadian Prime Minister, Sir John Abbott. His parents divorced, and he was raised and raised bilingually in his mother’s family home in Senneville, outside Montreal, Quebec, and apparently on his way to a musical career.
But his plan to become a concert pianist was surprised by his discovery of the theater, and he joined the Canadian representative in Ottawa in 1950 and played dozens of roles before joining the Bermuda Repertory Company in 1952. His New York debut follows in 1954, as George Phillips in The Starcross Story, and he was ripe for stargazing in the next Broadway season, when Kenneth Tynan translated him as Warwick’s Earl of The Anark, Jean Anouilh. by Lillian Hellman: “One salutes a great actor in embryo, reserved and saturn, and as powerful in promise as the Olivier of 20 years ago. ”
In the next five years, he becomes the biggest name at the Shakespeare Summer Festival in Stratford, Ontario, and begins an assault course on the lead roles without comparison on either side of the Atlantic: Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and Ferdinand in The Tempest were followed by a Henry V who came to the Edinburgh Festival in 1956 (‘an performance of charismatic flair’, said critic and festival historian Iain Crawford); thereafter, in the next three years, Hamlet, Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, Benedick in Much Ado, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, The Bastard in King John and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.
Peter Hall was creating the first full-scale RSC ensemble and invited Plummer to join the company in 1961 as Benedick in Geraldine McEwan’s Beatrice in Much Ado, Richard III, and King Henry in Anouilh’s Becket, opposite Eric Porter , who played. both Buckingham and the religious martyr. Becket on the Aldwych won Plummer the Evening Standard Award for Best Actor. His Richard (with Edith Evans as Queen Margaret), directed by William Gaskill, struck the critic Caryl Brahms as “fully and carefully devised and executed effortlessly … astonishingly good” game of humor “.
Plummer, like his drinking partner Albert Finney, was known for loving his leading ladies. Charmian Carr (the eldest daughter, Liesl von Trapp), later cheerfully admitted that she learned to drink from the time they spent together during the filming of The Sound of Music.
In 1956, he married actor Tammy Grimes, and they had a daughter, Amanda, who also became an actor. The marriage ended in divorce in 1960, and Plummer began a wild romance with British entertainment journalist Patricia Lewis.
They were in an apartment in Mayfair and hit the night spots, but were in a horrific car accident outside Buckingham Place one night after leaving Peter Cook’s settlement club in Soho; Plummer is unharmed, but Lewis has been in a coma for months. They were married in 1962 and divorced five years later.
The RSC association was only temporary: Plummer stepped in when Peter O’Toole broke a contract to make Lawrence of Arabia, and he would not return to the London stage for a decade. Back in Stratford, Ontario, he played Macbeth and Cyrano de Bergerac, and strengthened his reputation on Broadway with critically acclaimed appearances as Brecht’s Arturo Ui in 1963 and Pizarro in Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun in 1965 (in the 1969 film he was Atahuallpa, the last Inca emperor).
Rehearsals for Antony and Cleopatra in Stratford with Zoe Caldwell were delayed while he completed filming in Greece with Lilli Palmer and Orson Welles on Philip Saville’s Oedipus the King (1968), but Caldwell remembers a performance she used as a cornerstone in her career considered: ‘Because Christopher was so daring and fearless and led me to be the same, we built a relationship on stage of absolute freedom to love, to play, to fight. We were royal, we were carnal, we were leaders, we were slaves, and anything was possible. ”
By the time Plummer returned to London in 1971 to join the National, he had made a series of Hollywood films, including Anthony Mann’s rural trailer The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), but the glitter was not not catching: the title role is put into the role. of Brecht’s version of Coriolanus, he falls out on the first day of rehearsals with two East German directors brought from the Berlin Ensemble, and is replaced by Anthony Hopkins.
He was as unhappy as Jupiter in Laurence Olivier’s misguided production of Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38 in 1971, with McEwan, but he could not ignite the spark he once found at the RSC. In the National’s New Theater (now Noël Coward) season, he had more success in Jonathan Miller’s production of Buchner’s Danton’s Death, translated by John Wells, but his days as a member of the company, in Britain or Canada, were over.
Back on Broadway in 1973, he won his first Tony Award in Cyrano’s musical, with book and lyrics by Anthony Burgess. Although New York Times critic Clive Barnes wanted the music to simply disappear, he applauded the “kinetic grace” of Plummer’s performance, making Cyrano ‘a poetic hero rather than a moving buffalo with’ a heart as big as his nose ‘.
Some of his most interesting films have followed in this decade: he was a suave and witty man for Peter Sellers in Blake Edwards’ The Return of the Pink Panther; a grippingly impressive Rudyard Kipling in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (both 1975), who appears with his good friends Sean Connery and Michael Caine in the Kipling yarn; and a stalwart in Jack Gold’s Aces High (1976), a transposition to the skies of RC Sherriff’s first world war drama in the trenches, Journey’s End.
His theatrical attractions became scarce in the 1980s when he played the hot, satanic cardinal in the TV mini-series The Thorn Birds (1983), but he played Iago and Macbeth on Broadway (in 1982 and 1988) and appeared in Harold Pinter’s elegiac No Man’s Land in 1994. Terry Gilliam’s sci-fi thriller 12 Monkeys (1995) apparently propelled him into a new phase of accommodation with the new breed in Hollywood, and he made one of his most authoritative appearances as the actual television delivered. journalist Mike Wallace in Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.
With Crowe again, he appeared in Ron Howard’s absorbing A Beautiful Mind (2001) and won new fans as Ralph Nickleby in Douglas McGrath’s all-star, irresistible Nicholas Nickleby (2002) and in Spike Lee’s heist film Inside Man (2006). ). He cursed the day he turned down Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Ian McKellen stepped in) – but he remained in demand and played the head of the family and industrial magistrate Henrik Vanger in Hollywood version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011).
Plummer won his second Tony on Broadway in 1997 with a performance in Childhood as the legendary actor John Barrymore in his one-man show, Barrymore (a film that followed in 2011), and returned in 2004 in Jonathan Miller’s Stratford, Ontario , revival of King Lear. In 2007, he starred again on Broadway in Henry Drummond in the old Darwinian war horse, Inherit the Wind, and bowed out at his beloved Stratford, Ontario, with Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra in George Bernard Shaw, and a thunderously award-winning, long-haired, 80-year-old Prospero in The Tempest in 2010.
Another Oscar nomination comes for his portrayal of J Paul Getty in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World (2017); he replaced Kevin Spacey in light of allegations of sexual misconduct. In Todd Robinson’s The Last Full Measure (2019), he plays the dying father of Vietnam War hero William H Pitsenbarger, while the former colleagues of his dead son – including William Hurt, Samuel L Jackson and Peter Fonda (in his last film) – campaign for a posthumous award of the Medal of Honor. And his voice will be heard in Sean Patrick O’Reilly’s Heroes of the Golden Masks, which appears later this year.
Like many big stars, he was sometimes known for being bad or ‘difficult’, although the longevity and scope of his career suggests creative deployment of his temperamental excess. He has long distanced himself from wild party days, although he liked to talk about them with journalists, and in his vivid autobiography, In Spite of Myself (2008).
He had been estranged from his daughter for years, but they were reconciled and he lived contentedly in a farmhouse in Weston, Connecticut, with his third wife, British dancer and actor Elaine Taylor, whom he married in 1970. She and Amanda survive him.
• Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer, actor, born December 13, 1929; passed away on February 5, 2021