A sterling renewal

Nothing comes from nothing. after six decades of showbiz, Christopher Plummer truly deserves something good.

YOU’RE only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?” Christopher Plummer says, clutching the 84-year-old Oscar statuette at the Academy Awards on Sunday. With that, the 82-year-old Best Supporting Actor becomes the oldest person to receive an Oscar in the history of the awards.

That title had previously been held by Driving Miss Daisy star Jessica Tandy, who was 80 when she was named Best Actress in 1990.

Plummer won for his role in Beginners, which is based on the true story of director Mike Mills’ experience with his own father. He plays 75-year-old Hal Fields, who, after a long marriage, announces he is gay and takes up with a young lover, only to succumb to terminal cancer.

The Canadian actor faced a strong challenge from Max von Sydow, also 82, who portrays an elderly World War Two survivor who becomes a mentor to a young boy after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on New York’s World Trade Center.

And von Sydow does it all without uttering a word in Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close. His character, known only as The Renter, does not speak because of the trauma of witnessing a bombing as a child.

Born in Sweden, von Sydow has had an illustrious 60-year career on stage, television and film, including 13 movies with the late, legendary director Ingmar Bergman. Best known as the priest in the 1973 horror movie, The Exorcist, he was also Oscar-nominated for his lead role in 1987 film, Pelle the Conqueror.

Before the winners were announced, Tom O’neil of awards website Goldderby.com had said: “We have two veterans slugging it out in a category that has a history of honouring the senior statesmen of Hollywood.”

O’neil added that Plummer, who had only one previous Oscar nomination for playing Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009), had the edge as a past nominee who appeared in two best picture Oscars – The Sound Of Music (1965) and Beautiful Mind (2001).

Backstage after receiving his gold statue, Plummer agrees with a reporter that the Oscar represents a dessert topping.

“It’s le creme on top,” he says. “It’s lovely to be accepted because you know beyond the pleasure of working in front of a live audience, it’s a sort of general acceptance of the work. I don’t poo-poo awards, although there are so many of them I can’t keep up.”

Asked whether the award represents his own beginning, he instead calls it “a renewal”.

“I hope I can do this another 10 years at least. I’m going to drop dead either on a stage or a set. We don’t retire in our profession, thank God.

“I think of actors being universally the same, gay or straight. A gay actor can play a straight (role) beautifully, and vice versa,” adds Plummer, who attended the ceremony with his wife, Elaine Taylor.

Despite appearing in numerous classical and Shakespearean roles on stage, and in movies such The Insider, A Beautiful Mind, and Syriana, he is still most widely remembered as the steely Captain von Trapp in the 1965 musical classic, opposite Julie Andrews.

It was a film he publicly despised for years after, but came to make peace with later in life. “I didn’t hate the movie at all. I just didn’t think my role was terribly exciting,” he was quoted in an article in 2010.

It has been a long hike from the Austrian Alps to Hollywood Hills for Plummer, who last month won a Screen Actors Guild award and a Golden Globe for his role in Beginners, the film he co-stars with Ewan Mcgregor.

Plummer says his role as museum director Hal is the most fun he has ever had on camera.

“I enjoy being different as much as I can be, but this was different on a very simple, human level. I have never had such a relaxed and good time playing anything on screen. It was an enchanting story.”

Backstage, the still-dapper veteran who has been in show business for over six decades, immediately walked to the thank-you cam, which allows winners to express gratitude to all the people they couldn’t fit into their onstage speeches.

“I left out my last sentence,” Plummer says, and then thanks the rest of the cast, including Goran Visjnic and a Jack Russell terrier named Cosmo. “I’m just sorry I didn’t mention it.” – Agencies