Destined, or condemned, to be remembered as Captain von Trapp in the 1965 film The Rodgers and Hammerstein Rebel Novice, Christopher Plummer, who died at age 91, was a great actor and main star on stage, on screen and in the alpine clearing for more than six decades.
With an imposing physique, wide eyebrow, sculpted features and a magnificent voice, he played almost all of Shakespeare’s leading roles – mainly in his native Canada, at the Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario. But he also had brief stints at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater in Britain, while maintaining a film career that never looked back after an auspicious debut in Sidney Lumet’s theatrical comedy Stage Struck (1958), alongside Henry Fonda and Susan Strasberg.
He survived other creators from hell, like Peter Finch and Richard Burton – he once contracted hepatitis when he was partying with Tyrone Power – to become the favorite actor for senior star roles. These ranged, only in 2009, from a dying but still robust and seductive Leo Tolstoy in Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station – for which he was nominated for an Oscar – to the hilarious namesake showman in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, O Heath Ledger’s latest film and the voice of explorer Charles Muntz in the computer-animated masterpiece Up. Beginners (2010) brought him the Oscar for best supporting actor, such as Hal, a retired museum director who tells his cartoonist son, Oliver (Ewan McGregor), about his terminal cancer and his relationship with a young lover.
As head of the von Trapp family in one of the most popular films of all time, he displayed a steel authority transforming into obedience and romantic desire, which few actors could perform so charmingly, although Plummer himself never liked the film. . He refused to participate in the 40th anniversary fraternization, but slowed down to the 45th, recognizing the appeal of the film and saying that it was never really his “cup of tea”. He dubbed it “The Sound of Mucus” or “S&M”.
Plummer came from a wealthy railroad, the only son of John Plummer, secretary to the Dean of Sciences at McGill University, and his wife, Isabella (born Abbott). Her maternal great-grandfather was the third Canadian Prime Minister, Sir John Abbott. His parents divorced and he was raised in his mother’s family home in Senneville, outside Montreal, Quebec, growing up bilingual and apparently heading towards a music career.
But his plan to become a concert pianist was ruined by his discovery of the theater, and he joined the Canadian Rep in Ottawa in 1950, playing dozens of roles before joining the Bermuda Repertory Company in 1952. His debut in New York took place in 1954, as George Phillips in The Starcross Story, and he was ripe for stardom on Broadway’s next season, when Kenneth Tynan hailed him as the Earl of Warwick in Jean Anouilh’s The Lark, translated by Lillian Hellman: “Someone salutes a great embryonic, reserved and saturnine actor, and as powerful in promise as Olivier of 20 years ago. “
In the following five years, he became the biggest name at the summer festival in Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare, launching an assault course in the leading roles unmatched on both sides of the Atlantic: Marco Antonio in Julius Caesar and Ferdinand in The Tempest were followed by a Henry V who came to the Edinburgh festival in 1956 (“a performance of charismatic talent,” said festival critic and historian Iain Crawford); then, for the next three years, Hamlet, Aguecheek on the 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 in the process of creating the first full-scale RSC set and invited Plummer to join the company in 1961 as Benedick to Geraldine McEwan’s Beatrice in Much Ado, Richard III and King Henry in Anouilh’s Becket, alongside Eric Porter, who played both Buckingham and the religious martyr. Becket at Aldwych won the Evening Standard award for best actor for Plummer. His Richard (with Edith Evans as Queen Margaret), directed by William Gaskill, impressed critic Caryl Brahms as “totally and carefully designed and executed effortlessly … incredibly good … a biting humor evident even in moments of self-torture and a wonderful certainty of humor ”.
Plummer, like his drinking friend Albert Finney, was known for dating his protagonists. Charmian Carr (eldest daughter, Liesl von Trapp), later happily confessed that she learned to drink from the time they spent together while filming The Sound of Music.
In 1956 he married actor Tammy Grimes, and they had a daughter, Amanda, who also became an actress. That marriage ended in divorce in 1960, and Plummer embarked on a wild romance with British entertainment journalist Patricia Lewis.
Based at an apartment in Mayfair, they went to the nightclubs, but were involved in a terrible car accident outside Buckingham Place one night after leaving Peter Cook’s Establishment in Soho; Plummer came out unscathed, but Lewis remained in a coma for months. They were married in 1962 and divorced five years later.
The RSC association was only temporary: Plummer entered the breach when Peter O’Toole broke a contract to make Lawrence of Arabia, and he would not be returning to the London stage for a decade. Back in Stratford, Ontario, he played Macbeth and Cyrano de Bergerac, and consolidated his reputation on Broadway with critically acclaimed performances such as Arturo Ui de Brecht in 1963 and Pizarro in Peter Shaffer’s The Real Hunt for the Sun in 1965 (in the film by 1969 he was Atahuallpa, the last Inca emperor).
Rehearsals for Antony and Cleopatra in Stratford with Zoe Caldwell were postponed while he completed filming in Greece with Lilli Palmer and Orson Welles in Philip Saville’s Oedipus King (1968), but Caldwell celebrated a performance that she considered the cornerstone of her career. : “Because Christopher was so bold and fearless and led me to be the same, that we built a relationship on the stage of absolute freedom to love, to play, to fight. We were royalty, we were carnal, we were leaders, we were slaves and anything was possible. “
When Plummer returned to London in 1971 to join the National, he had already made a number of Hollywood films, including Anthony Mann’s masterful blockbuster, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), but the brilliance was not contagious: title role in Brecht’s version of Coriolanus, he fell out on the first day of rehearsals with two East German directors brought in from the Berliner Ensemble, and was replaced by Anthony Hopkins.
He was as unhappy as Jupiter at Laurence Olivier’s failed production of Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38 in 1971, alongside McEwan again, but failed to light the spark he once found with her with the RSC. During the National’s New theater season (now Noël Coward), 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 the musical Cyrano, with book and lyrics by Anthony Burgess. Although New York Times critic Clive Barnes wished the song would simply go away, he applauded the “kinetic grace” of Plummer’s performance, making Cyrano “a poetic hero rather than a noisy buffoon with a heart as big as his nose” .
Some of his most interesting films followed this decade: he was a straightforward, soft and witty man for Peter Sellers in Blake Edwards’ Return of the Pink Panther; a touching and impressive Rudyard Kipling in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (both 1975), appearing in Kipling’s story alongside his good friends Sean Connery and Michael Caine; and a brave Jack Gold’s Aces High (1976), a transposition into the skies of RC Sherriff’s first world war drama in the trenches, Journey’s End.
His sightings in the theater became more rare in the 1980s, when he played the warm and satanic cardinal in the TV miniseries 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), seemed to propel him into a new phase of accommodation with the new generation in Hollywood, and he gave one of his most important performances as the real-life television journalist Mike Wallace in Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), alongside Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.
With Crowe again, he appeared in absorbing Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) and won new admirers like Ralph Nickleby in Douglas McGrath, the irresistible Nicholas Nickleby (2002) and Spike Lee’s assault film, Inside Man (2006). He cursed the day he turned down Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (Ian McKellen came on the scene) – but remained in demand, playing family head and industrial tycoon Henrik Vanger in the Hollywood version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) ).
Plummer won his second Tony on Broadway in 1997 with a barnstorming performance as the legendary actor John Barrymore at his solo show, Barrymore (a film followed in 2011), and returned in 2004 at Jonathan Miller Stratford, Ontario, King Lear’s revival. On Broadway again in 2007, he played Henry Drummond on the old Darwinian warhorse, Inherit the Wind, and said goodbye to his beloved Stratford, Ontario, with Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw in 2008, and a loudly acclaimed and hairy Prospero, 80, on The Tempest in 2010.
Another Oscar nomination came for his interpretation of J Paul Getty in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World (2017); he had replaced Kevin Spacey in light of allegations of sexual misconduct. In Todd Robinson’s The Last Full Measure (2019), he played the dying father of Vietnam war hero William H Pitsenbarger, while his dead son’s former colleagues – including William Hurt, Samuel L Jackson and Peter Fonda (in his final film) – campaign for a posthumous Medal of Honor award. And his voice will be heard in Heroes of the Golden Masks, by Sean Patrick O’Reilly, which will be released later this year.
Like many great stars, he was sometimes known to be moody, or “difficult,” although the longevity and scope of his career suggested a creative outgrowth of his temperamental excesses. He had renounced days of wild partying, although he loved to tell journalists about them and in his vivid autobiography, In Spite of Myself (2008).
For many years he moved away from his daughter, but they were reconciled, and he lived contentedly in a farmhouse in Weston, Connecticut, with his third wife, the British dancer and actor Elaine Taylor, whom he married in 1970. She and Amanda survived it.
• Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer, actor, born December 13, 1929; died on February 5, 2021