Lanterns light way to a new year
It’s one of the great Hollywood ironies that Christopher Plummer didn’t like the film that made him a legend. He was an actor’s actor and had cut his teeth doing Shakespeare. “The Sound of Music,” he thought, was sentimental shlock. And he wasn’t alone — reviews at the time were famously terrible. Then, like a personal curse, it would go on to become a universally beloved classic. He’d played Henry V and Hamlet and yet Captain von Trapp, he said in 1982, followed him around “like an albatross.”
But even Plummer, who died on Friday at the age of 91, lived long enough to soften a bit. And why wouldn’t he? He also got to enjoy something that so few actors do: A genuine third act with terrific roles as “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace in Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” a widower who comes out later in life in Mike Mills’ “Beginners” and, most recently, a slain mystery writer in Rian Johnson’s whodunnit “Knives Out.” He got three Academy Award nominations in one decade and, at age 82, would become the oldest actor to ever win an Oscar (for “Beginners”). He still holds that title.
“You’re only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?” he said to his Oscar in 2012. “When I first emerged from my mother’s womb, I was already rehearsing my Academy thank you speech. But it was so long ago, mercifully for you I’ve forgotten it.”
Dapper and dashing with an aristocratic air, Plummer could have been a leading man without the talent. With it he was a star with a character actor’s spirit, which he later would attribute his longevity to.
“I’m thrilled that I turned into a character actor quite early on. I hated being a poncey leading man,” he told Vanity Fair in 2015. “You really start to worry about your jawline. Please.”
Born in Toronto in 1929, Plummer was the great grandson of Canadian Prime Minister John Abbott and fell for the theater at a young age. Classically trained, he was a self-proclaimed snob about the stage and resisted the allure of the big screen for a time. As if to prove his own point, his first few films are not wellremembered. Then came “The Sound of Music.” It didn’t help that he got the added blow that his singing voice was going to be dubbed in the final film.
“The only reason I did this bloody thing was so I could do a musical on stage on film!” he said. But he did get a lifelong friendship with Julie Andrews out of the deal.
He retreated to the theater for a time, which would be a refrain through his life. He won Tony Awards for Cyrano and Barrymore and would even get to go back to Shakespeare, as King Lear, later in life.
Over his six-decade career, his screen credits would prove wildly diverse. He was in “Malcolm X” and “Must Love Dogs.” He was a Klingon in a “Star Trek” and Tolstoy in “The Last Station,” Rudyard Kipling in “The Man Who Would Be King” and Captain Newport in “The New World.”
“For a long time, I accepted parts that took me to attractive places in the world. Rather than shooting in the Bronx, I would rather go to the south of France, crazed creature than I am,” he said in 2007. “I sacrificed a lot of my career for nicer hotels and more attractive beaches.”
Plummer was also a legendary “hardfisted” drinker, alongside similarly inclined friends like Jason Robards, Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole.
“Our intention was that we should be if were to be called men. We must drink as much as we can. And if we can still get through Hamlet the next day without a hitch, that made you a man, my son,” he told Terry Gross in 2008. “You weren’t worth anything unless you could.”
A little Fernet-Branca laced with creme
de menthe was his preferred “pickme-up” before going on stage after an especially heavy night. But, he warned, stick to one. Two or three and “you’re drunk again.”
He slowed down in later years and would write about his own antics in his acclaimed memoir “In Spite of Myself.” Plummer had decided that he was going to “keep crackin’” since “retirement in
any profession is death.” And he did, marking his turn in “The Insider,” from 1999, as a turning point.
“Then the scripts improved. I was upgraded! Since then, they’ve been firstclass scripts,” he said at the time. “Not all successful, but worth doing.”
In 2017 in the thick of the first #MeToo revelations, he made headlines when he replaced a disgraced Kevin Spacey as J. Paul Getty in Ridley Scott’s “All the Money in the World” just six weeks before the film was set to hit theaters. Not only did the rush recall the energy of the theater for him, it also proved professionally fruitful: The role got him his third Oscar nomination.
And although he retained some of that charming arrogance to the end, Plummer was also a man capable of evolving, even about “The Sound of Music.”
“As cynical as I always was about ‘The Sound of Music,’” Plummer told Vanity Fair, “I do respect that it is a bit of relief from all the gunfire and car chases you see these days. It’s sort of wonderfully, old-fashionedly universal.”
Plummer entered his 80s worried about what he’d be able to accomplish, but a few years in he had put those worries aside.
“I’m enjoying myself very much. And in my 80s, I had another career. I’m very happy about that. It’s gone better than most other decades have,” he said in 2018. “I played everything in the theater. I still would like to do something else in the theater, of course. But I’ve played all the great parts. And not too shabbily. Now I want the same great parts, if I can, on the screen. And so far, yes. I’ve played marvelous characters.”
I played everything in the theater. I still would like to do something else in the theater, of course. But I’ve played all the great parts. And not too shabbily. Now I want the same great parts, if I can, on the screen. And so far, yes. I’ve played marvelous characters.
It had been at least eight months since she touched her 77-year-old husband Len, who has dementia and has been at an assisted living center in suburban Denver for the last year.
Last week, she got a small taste of what life was like before the coronavirus pandemic.
Sort of.
Thanks to a “hug tent” set up outside Juniper Village at Louisville, Hartman got to squeeze her husband of nearly 55 years — albeit while wearing plastic sleeves and separated by 4 mil plastic sheeting, which is 4 thousandths of an inch (2.54cm) thick.
“I really needed it. I really needed it,” the 75-year-old said after her brief visit. “It meant a lot to me, and it’s been a long, long time.”
Hartman, who fractured two vertebrae and could no longer take care of her husband by herself, said she thought he was a little confused but that it was important for them to embrace again.
“We’ve been trying to do it for a long time,” she said. “It felt good. I kept hitting his glasses when I hugged him, though. And he got cold.”
Although the setup wasn’t ideal, Hartman said, “At least you can do something, and it’s important.”
Since the pandemic hit, similar tents have popped up around the country and in places like Brazil and England, where some people call them “cuddle curtains.”
The assisted living facility in the Denver suburb of Louisville, which has fully vaccinated its residents and staff, partnered with nonprofit health care organization TRU Community Care to set up the tent with construction-grade plastic on a blustery but warm winter day this week.
“I think it’s just a huge weight off their shoulders, just being able to have that hug that they haven’t had in so long,”
said Anna Hostetter, a spokeswoman for Juniper Village at Louisville. “When we were planning this and setting it up, and I saw pictures, I wasn’t sure if with all the plastic and everything you could really get that human contact. But I teared up on some of them. It was really special for our families.”
For Gregg MacDonald, holding hands with his 84-year-old mother Chloe MacDonald was important because they hadn’t touched since April. She likes to get updates on her grandson and granddaughter.
“Time is a precious commodity, so while we all wait to get back to more normality, in the meantime, everyone is doing what they can,” Gregg MacDonald said. “So I appreciate any efforts that they are making to allow us to have more contact with everybody.”
Amanda Meier, project coordinator for TRU Community Care, said she, her husband and some volunteers built the hug tent around a standard 8-by-8-foot
(243.84cm) popup frame and attached the construction-grade plastic with glue and Velcro. Plastic arm sleeves built into the tent are attached with embroidery hoops.
Since the beginning of November, she has helped set up four hug tents in Colorado and said the feedback has been positive.
“Lots of tears, but happy sort of tears, and a lot of shocked expressions of how in the world can we be doing something like this. It’s so weird,” Meier said.
But after the initial weirdness, the benefits are clear, she said.
“You can see sort of relief in their bodies and their faces when they finally get to have that physical contact, which is really a basic human need. And in these facilities, a lot of times they’re missing it anyway because they’re just not with their families,” Meier said.
“I don’t think it’s measurable, really. You just know it when you see it and feel it when you’re there.”
Lots of tears, but happy sort of tears, and a lot of shocked expressions of how in the world can we be doing something like this.
Amanda Meier Project coordinator