By Karl Rozemeyer
Plummer’s screen roles were exceptionally diverse and varied, from Sherlock Holmes in Murder By Decree (1979) to a psychotic bank robber in The Silent Partner (1979). He played television newsman Mike Wallace in The Insider (1999) and an empathetic psychiatrist in A Beautiful Mind (2001).
He won a Best Supporting Oscar for his performance as a gay father and widower who comes out of the closet to his son toward the end of his life in Beginners (2011), becoming the oldest performer to receive the award in that category. In a portrayal that earned him his third Best Supporting Actor Academy nomination, he replaced Kevin Spacey in the role of J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World (2017). And most recently, his character, Harlan Thrombey, a mystery writer who dies on his 85th birthday, was at the crux of the comedic mystery thriller Knives Out (2019).
Yet, it was Plummer’s performance opposite Julie Andrews 56 years ago in the iconic Sound of Music that would overshadow the rest of a profound and productive career that spanned nearly seven decades.
When I interviewed Plummer in 2009 for his performance as Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station, he made no mention of The Sound of Music. Aware that Plummer would rather not discuss the film that defined his acting life in every press interview, I was careful not to reference Capt. Von Trapp.
“They still don’t understand how to make a proper cup of tea,” Christopher Plummer grumbled. “Or coffee!” The Canadian actor flashed a broad smile, to show that his outrage at “them” — Americans in general, that is, not simply the staff at the Regency Hotel in New York — was feigned. Regardless, Plummer ordered some boiling water from room service so that he could brew his own tea.
“Sit wherever you like. Please,” Plummer insisted, gesticulating to one of the several sofas and chairs. His renowned old-fashioned manners and twinkling humour were on immediate display. “But don’t turn that light on,” he warned with a mischievous grin, pointing to a corner table lamp, “or you will get electrocuted. I almost did. All the wires are exposed.” He then explained how he’d discovered a note attached to the lamp with the pronouncement “Danger!”
At the time, Plummer was 80 and the hair that was once a meticulously groomed brown in The Sound of Music was by then a shock of silver-gray. Yet he still had the deportment and authority that he commanded in the screen adaptation of the Rodgers & Hammerstein hit musical. Before sitting down for the interview, he strode up and down the hotel room with the same brisk purpose that defined Von Trapp. Eventually, he settled on an armchair, announcing: “I’ll sit here in the shade.”
Before the interview formerly commenced, he warned me that he may fall asleep during our chat: “I’m on heavy antibiotics,” he confessed. “They’re so strong. I have an infected toe, which is not pleasant.” His gait had given no indication of any possible pain he may have been experiencing. “It’s getting better though.” I offered to nudge him awake should he doze off.
The year 2009 marked a turning point in the latter stages of Plummer’s career. In addition to providing a voice for the animated My Dog Tulip, he voiced the villainous zeppelin adventurer Charles Muntz in the smash hit Up and the cowardly leader of a band of burlap dolls in the apocalyptic stop-motion film 9. Plummer also played the title character in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
But, most significantly, Plummer garnered his first Academy Award nomination for his performance as Tolstoy in the twilight of his literary career in The Last Station. “You have to rely on your imagination and your instincts to play Tolstoy. You’re not playing the rest of his history. You are not playing the full life,” he noted, emphasising that the script focused on Tolstoy in old age. “He was a very contradictory character. But he must have had some sense of humour, and the script brings that out very well. Also, Tolstoy had so much humanity in his writing,” Plummer added. “If one can concentrate on that part of his personality, people perhaps won’t feel that he is so remote and dry. There are some great human touches, which he undoubtedly had.”
Besides Tolstoy, Plummer tackled a number of iconic biographical roles on screen through the decades, including, among others, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in The Night of Generals (1966), The Duke of Wellington in Waterloo (1970), Rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Aristotle in Alexander (2004) and John Barrymore in Barrymore (2011). “Playing a genius is tough,” Plummer mused. “The only way you can play a genius, or an icon of that magnitude is to make him as unassuming and as simple as possible.”
In his last performance based on a well-known historical figure, Plummer stepped in at the eleventh hour to replace Kevin Spacey as oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in the kidnap drama All the Money In the World (2019). Director Ridley Scott later claimed that he had originally wanted Plummer for the role, but had been dissuaded by studio executives who had a preference to see Spacey take on the part. Plummer’s nine days on set were to earn him his last Academy Award nomination at the age of 88 — the oldest performer to be nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category.
Ridley Scott can be included in the impressive list of top directors with whom Plummer collaborated. Others included Sidney Lumet, who gave Plummer his first screen role when he cast him as a young writer in Stage Struck (1958), as well as Blake Edwards, Atom Egoyan, John Huston, Terrence Malick, Mike Nichols, Oliver Stone and Franco Zeffirelli. Plummer worked with several celebrated directors on more than one film. Before The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Gilliam had cast Plummer as Nobel Prize-winning virologist Dr. Leland Goines in the sci-fi thriller Twelve Monkeys (1995). And Plummer appeared in two Spike Lee films, as the bank president in the heist thriller Inside Man (2006) and as a racist prison chaplain in Malcolm X (1992).
“A lot of directors are good directors for various reasons,” Plummer noted, “and not all of them are actors’ directors. So, what one has learned over the years is how to protect oneself against a bad director — and there are thousands of them,” he added with a short laugh. “You must know how to direct yourself, even stage yourself. My years in the theater have taught me how to do that. So, you have to know where the cameras are, and you have got to suggest subtly.”
The best thing a director can do, Plummer observed, is to cast a movie well. He recalled once, during the making of The Man Who Would Be King (1975), asking John Huston for guidance. “Chris, don’t ask me any questions, please,” he said, mimicking Huston’s distinctive deep, gravelly cadence. “I cast you because I trust you.” If the casting is right, Plummer posited, less can be more. “Huston never directed,” he said, “except for one or two wonderful things that he said.”
Plummer admitted to having given thought about helming a film, and says he has even tried to find projects to direct. “I thought of films that I might have wanted to direct. A small, heart-wrenching little movie would be nice to do. And then I watched my friends doing it, and it is such agony for them,” he recalled, pointing out that he’d completed over a dozen roles in the same period of time that a friend had attempted to direct a single film. “I can also make more money as an actor. I think I would go totally broke as a director, unless (I were) at the very top of the heap.”
Over the last two decades of his life, Plummer was invariably the most experienced actor on any given set. However, he neither offered advice nor, he noted, was asked for any. “Because the wonderful thing about this profession is that it is sort of ageless,” he observed. “Actors among each other always try to kind of put on a front that we are really all the same age and we are just students.” Plummer said that he would try to be as young as, say, a co-star in his 20s — if he were with that actor. “I don’t want to suddenly become some pompous old git. And it is awfully nice when you hear them say, ‘God, I loved working with him’,” Plummer admitted. “That’s terrific.”
Plummer managed to successfully navigate between film work and the theater, and played most of the great Shakespearean roles. “It would be terribly boring for me to be just a film actor and not do anything else. The theater is much more my home than the screen is because it is all about us. The actor’s and the writer’s world is the theater. In movies, the less you say, the better.”
“(Filmmaking) is run by committee,” he continued. “So, everything is out of your hands. They can’t come along and cut you (on stage), so your performance doesn’t end up on the cutting room floor – even though it is horrible! You have the chance to do it again the next night, better. I think balancing the two is great. It keeps you in tune with your craft.”
When he used the word “craft”, however, it was with a melodramatically exaggerated enunciation and with a hand extended in a parody of the gravitas of the grand stage actor. It’s a tongue-in-cheek quality that informed so much of his work and is frequently to be found in his memoir, In Spite of Myself (Knopf, 2008).
“The last thing I wanted to do was dwell in an indulgent way on my career as an actor, which is why I send myself up all through the book.” In the memoir, Plummer lingers on why he liked certain roles, but devotes much space to discussing the performances of other actors. “I am not bitchy about hardly anybody, I think,” he asserted with a smile.
His publishers, he pointed out, initially pressured him to impart his ideas about acting. “There is nothing more boring or pompous. So, I chose the other tack. And I am right. Peter O’Toole had done it before me. He had done his own version of sending himself up. It’s fun.”
Even as he was about to enter his ninth decade, Plummer seemed genuinely shocked at the suggestion that retirement might have been a consideration. “I love my job,” Plummer emphasised. “I always have. It’s a great escape. As the world progresses downhill as we speak, what better time to escape? I think it is a wonderful profession to be in when the world turns angry and violent. What else can you do but dream of another kind of world, a world that is more interesting, more exciting and sexier than the world we are in?”
Plummer died on Friday, February 5, 2021 in the morning at his home in Weston, Connecticut. His wife, Elaine Taylor, was by his side.
