The Shakespearean actor who starred in The Sound of Music
Christopher Plummer 1929–2021
For decades, Christopher Plummer loathed the movie that defined his career. The Sound of Music was “awful and sentimental and gooey,” the dashingly handsome actor told one interviewer, rechristening the beloved 1965 musical “The Sound of Mucus.” He deemed his character, Capt. Georg von Trapp—the stern, widowed father of seven folksinging children—an “empty carcass” and likened working alongside the relentlessly upbeat Julie Andrews to “being hit over the head daily with a Hallmark greeting card.” Plummer was already an acclaimed Shakespearean performer at the time of filming; the movie made him an international star and he went on to take scores of memorable roles on stage and screen in a wild variety of genres. He was a charming jewel thief in The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), a Shakespeare-spouting Klingon villain in Star Trek VI, and a declining Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009). In old age, he even softened toward his most famous film. “I was a pampered, arrogant young bastard,” Plummer wrote in 2008. “I still harbored the old-fashioned stage actor’s snobbism toward moviemaking.” Born in Toronto to parents who divorced soon after his birth, Plummer was raised in Montreal by his mother—a granddaughter of former Canadian Prime Minister Sir John Abbott—and his grandparents, said the Los Angeles Times. An only child, “he took refuge in literature” and developed exquisite diction by reading aloud to his family after dinner. Trained as a concert pianist, he found greater satisfaction in theater, and by 18 was performing classical roles with Canadian repertory companies. Plummer debuted on Broadway in 1954 in The Starcross Story, which closed on its opening night, and played Henry V at Canada’s Stratford Festival in 1956, said The Washington Post. Hailed by critics as the new Laurence Olivier, he “grew cocky fast” and rebuffed movie offers in order to play Hamlet in Ontario for $25 a week.
Plummer’s film career began in 1958 with a standout role in Sidney Lumet’s theatrical comedy Stage Struck, said The Times (U.K.). The Sound of Music elevated the actor to a new level of fame, and tales of his carousing soon began to spread. He once “partied so hard with Tyrone Power that they both contracted hepatitis”; his other drinking partners included Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, “and, on one occasion, a tequila-swigging horse.” Yet his hell-raising rarely interfered with his work, said The New York Times, and he played Macbeth, Richard III, Mark Antony, and Iago “on prominent stages to consistent acclaim.”
Plummer enjoyed something of a late-career movie renaissance.
“He gave one of his most authoritative performances” as the real-life newsman Mike Wallace in 1999’s The Insider, said The Guardian (U.K.), and played a psychologist in 2001’s Oscarwinning A Beautiful Mind. Plummer received the first Oscar nomination of his long career for 2009’s The Last Station and finally won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for 2010’s Beginners, in which he portrays a terminally ill widower who comes out to his son as gay. Addressing the golden statuette in his acceptance speech, the 82-year-old Plummer said, “You’re only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?”