USA TODAY International Edition
Christopher Plummer is no beginner
But veteran could takehome his first academy award
“It’s lovely to be nominated for awards,” Christopher Plummer says. “And it’s lovely to win them. But you can’t be preoccupied with them, and you can never predict anything.”
Perhaps not. But Plummer has, at 82, gotten a lot of attention collecting trophies lately — and many believe he’s a shoo- in to pick up another on Sunday night when the Academy Awards are handed out.
The stage and screen veteran is up for best supporting actor for his role in Mike Mills’ Beginners. Plummer plays Hal, a long- closeted gay man who, after losing his wife of 44 years, finally finds sexual and emotional fulfillment — only to discover that he has terminal cancer. Ewan Mcgregor stars as Hal’s son, Oliver, who must come to terms with his father’s new life and eventual death while struggling with his own relationship issues.
Plummer’s performance has already earned him a bevy of honors, including the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, Critics’ Choice and National Board of Review awards. At the popular entertainment awards website Goldderby.com, he’s given 4- 9 odds and a 70% chance of adding Oscar to his list.
Astonishingly, this is only Plummer’s second Academy Award nomination. He received the first just two years ago, for his portrayal of Leo Tolstoy in The Last
Station; the prize ultimately went to Inglourious Basterds’ Christoph Waltz.
Rather than harbor a grudge, Plummer takes comfort in history. “If you look back, men like Claude Rains were nominated ( for an Academy Award) but never won. These were extraordinary actors who pulled whole films together with their brilliance. And Charlie Chaplin didn’t get one until he was 83. Can you believe that?”
Like Chaplin, whose Oscar was honorary, Plummer has never rested on his laurels. Already a respected trouper by the time 1965’ s The Sound of Music made him a movie star, he has remained active in film, television and theater. His celebrated screen roles in recent decades include such real- life icons as Mike Wallace ( in 1999’ s The Insider), Cardinal Bernard Law ( in the 2005 TV movie Our Fathers) and F. Lee Bailey ( in 2000’ s American Tragedy, a miniseries based on O. J. Simpson’s murder trial).
More recently, Plummer reaped praise as Henrik Vanger in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. On the boards, he has played leading Shakespearean characters and starred in other classics on Broadway and in his native Canada, where he appears frequently at the annual Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
A ‘ gentleman actor’
Part of what attracted Plummer to Beginners, in fact, was the subtlety he could bring to Hal, who for all of his quirks is much more of an everyman than King Lear — or Captain von Trapp, for that matter.
“It was a chance to underplay on screen, which is something that I’m not always asked to do,” Plummer says. “It could have gone the other way, of course. Hal is a man who is determined to have fun; he’s so relieved and fulfilled to finally be out in the open. He’s shocked when he learns he’s going to die, but he recovers. It’s a terribly human little story, and a rather important one.”
Beginners premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2010 and had its initial commercial release last June, expanding its reach into July.
“I think that because it arrived so early, it could have been lost in the last- minute shuffle” for Oscars, says Plummer, the movie’s sole nominee. “So I’m thrilled if, in any way, ( my) winning some awards and being nominated here will help bring it back into people’s minds.”
Leading man Mcgregor notes that Plummer “comes from an era of gentleman actors; he’s old- school in the best possible way. But when you work with him, he’s completely contemporary. I like to be as real as possible, to not think too much about the delivery of the line in the moment; and he entered into that spirit with me.”
Director/ screenwriter Mills, who based Hal on his own father, was looking for “a man of culture and poise and refinement who could leave all that behind and become vulnerable. Christopher really got that.”
Mills was surprised, though, when he discovered how much the actor had in common with his model. “My dad was a museum director and an art historian,
“It was a chance to underplay on screen, which is something that I’m not always asked to do.” On playing Hal in Beginners
and I think of Christopher as a sort of dramaturgical historian; he’s got so many stories about acting. They would have loved each other. There’s something about that generation, this dread of self- pity, a determination to just move forward — they share that, too.”
Plummer both admired and related to Hal’s resilient spirit.
“I’m a terrible coward about many things, but I’ve always tried to put on a brave face,” he says. “It may be phony at times, but you can make people think that you’re laughing misfortune off. I think that’s the way to tackle life.”
What sustains him
That sensibility informs Plummer’s 2008 memoir, In Spite of Myself, in which the star comes across as both a working actor and a man who feels he has never really worked a day in his life. He writes effusively of the vast array of projects and personalities that helped shape his career, and he is just as frank about the penchant for carousing that stayed with him into early middle age.
“I was about to go out at the end of the ’ 60s,” Plummer concedes. “I was not in good shape. Had I gone on boozing and being an idiot like I was, I would have dropped dead.”
That he didn’t is, he feels, largely a credit to his third wife, Elaine. The British actress has been Plummer’s partner for more than 40 years, and he praised her “bravery and beauty” in his Golden Globes acceptance speech.
“I sometimes hate it when people win awards and they go on and on, thanking God and their parents and their servants,” Plummer says. “But you find that you have to acknowledge the people who keep you going — and my Lord, Elaine is certainly guilty of that. She is everything to me in terms of my own strength.”
Plummer will recount his personal history again this summer, when he brings a one- man show, A Word or Two, to Stratford. “I wrote and arranged it as an autobiographical journey through the literature I’ve read, from Winnie- the- Pooh and Alice in Wonderland to the King James Bible to W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot. Everyone’s in there. It gives me a chance to speak in my own voice and play other characters and read wonderful poetry.”
The actor had introduced the piece, in earlier incarnations, “at charity events and on special occasions. But I wanted to give it a bigger production this time, and to make it more personal. It’s actually rather like some of my book, but more disciplined and pulled together.”
Set to begin performances July 25, A Word or Two will reunite Plummer with Broadway veteran and Stratford artistic director Des Mcanuff, with whom he worked in the company’s 2010 production of The Tempest and its Caesar and Cleopatra two years before that.
“Christopher Plummer is to a director what a Ferrari is to a driver,” Mcanuff says. “He has the greatest skill set of any actor I’ve worked with. And he’s very entertaining — a brilliant mimic, a great raconteur and without question one of my favorite dinner companions. He’s just got tremendous energy.”
Othello is on his list
For all the legendary characters he has tackled on stage, in fact, Plummer hasn’t yet fulfilled his wish list. “I’d love to play Othello,” he says. “That can be difficult, politically— though not so much in England, strangely enough. I’ve done Iago and loved it, but I’ve always wanted to be the Moor. Falstaff ( in Henry IV) would be wonderful, too — but that would require such heavy padding that I might pass out.”
He also has three movies in the works, “but one needs money, and I don’t want to say what the other two are, either, because it can be rather bad luck. I’ve done that before, named movies that were being planned, and they didn’t happen.” ( According to The Hollywood Reporter, Plummer will star with Frank Langella in HBO Films’ Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, about the boxing great’s legal fight with the U. S. government over serving in the Vietnam War.)
Whatever pans out, chances are Plummer won’t be idle after A Word or Two ends its run in late August. “We might bring the show to New York, or somewhere.” He’s based in Connecticut and recently bought a home in Manalapan, Fla., near Palm Beach, yet he concedes he’s not given to lengthy vacations.
“I’ve played tennis all my life, and I like summer sports. But I get antsy if I’m not working. After three or four weeks of leisure time, I’ll start drumming my fingers and thinking, ‘ OK — let’s get on with it.’ ”