Christopher Plummer was gracious, self-effacing and unapologetic.
Oscar-winning Canadian star loved Stratford
Christopher Plummer, the acclaimed Canadian stage and film star who brought both charm and an air of menace to a range of roles from King Lear to a Klingon villain, has died at the age of 91.
Plummer died Friday at his home in Weston, Conn. The cause was not disclosed.
Since coming of age in his native Canada, Plummer saw his career propelled by his dashing matinee-idol looks and his forceful characterizations of Shakespearean and other classical roles.
A major stage draw for half a century, he returned through the years to the boards of broadway, London’s West end and the two Stratfords — england and Ontario — and shifted with ease between parts created by such disparate writers as Neil Simon and Harold Pinter.
He made a dazzling impression as Iago to James earl Jones’s moor in Othello in a 1982 broadway staging. Writing in the New york Times, critic Walter Kerr called Plummer’s portrayal “quite possibly the best single Shakespearean performance to have originated on this continent in our time.”
He won a Tony in the title role in a 1973 musical version of edmond rostand’s play Cyrano de bergerac. His second Tony came in 1997 when he played his lifelong stage hero, John barrymore.
Plummer’s dramatic gift was to imbue his performances with a measure of peril, said Antoni Cimolino, artistic director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario. “There is a sense of unpredictability which is the heart of theatre,” he said. “And that sense of danger gave him so much power, both as a villain and also as a leading man.”
For all his stage renown — he earned seven Tony nominations — it was his casting in The Sound of Music that launched him to stardom. He had taken the role, he later said, because he wanted to try his hand at a musical.
The film won five Academy Awards, including best picture, and remains one of the most popular movies ever made. To Plummer, it was “so awful, and sentimental and gooey.”
In all, he appeared in more than 200 movies and TV dramas.
Among his more memorable performances, he was a cunning and ambitious archbishop in The Thorn birds (1983). He was a young rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would be King (1975) and adroitly captured the mannerisms and nuances of 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace in The Insider (1999).
He received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role as russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009) and an Academy Award win for his supporting role in a romantic comedy, beginners (2010).
Accepting his Oscar, the octogenarian turned to the statuette and declaimed, “Where have you been all my life?”
The prize made him the oldest actor to win an Oscar, but his career was by no means over.
In 2018, at the age of 88, he received another Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his portrayal of the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World.
Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was born in Toronto on dec. 13, 1929. An only child, he was a toddler when his parents divorced, and it would not be until his late teens that he saw his father again. Meanwhile, Plummer moved with his mother to live with his grandfather and maiden aunts in Montreal.
His mother’s family was of patrician and cultured stock — a forebear was John Abbott, a former railroad president and Canada’s first native-born prime minister. His upbringing in an atmosphere of faded grandeur proved formative to Plummer’s life and career.
“Several nights a week we would indulge in that quaint but delightful Victorian diversion — we read aloud to each other after dinner,” he wrote in his 2008 memoir, In Spite of Myself.
The reciting helped instill in him a love of literature and language that became the hallmark of his theatrical work.
After learning the ropes and much of the stage canon in radio drama and theatre repertory, he was plucked for major dramatic roles while still in his mid-20s.
His first appearance at Ontario’s Stratford Festival, which would become a theatrical home over his career, was as Henry V in 1956.
Plummer said he grew cocky fast, turning down prestige movie work offered by the Hollywood mogul david Selznick in the late 1950s in favour of an offer to play Hamlet in Ontario “for 25 bucks a week. but at least it was Hamlet.”
He added in his memoir that he “still harboured the old-fashioned stage actor’s snobbism toward moviemaking.”
His demanding career and frequent all-night carousing with Peter O’toole, richard Harris and other legendarily bibulous actors took a costly toll on his personal life.
“I was a lousy husband and an even worse father,” he wrote, singling out his absenteeism from his first wife, singer and actress Tammy Grimes, and their daughter, Amanda Plummer, who became a Tony-winning actress.
His second marriage, to Patricia Lewis, a showbiz columnist for a London newspaper, lasted five years.
Plummer found the anchor for his personal life in 1968, ironically, while shooting Lock up your daughters!
The film bombed but one of the cast, elaine Taylor, would become his abiding partner, consenting to marry but only if he cleaned up his act.
Taylor and his daughter survive him.