Christopher Plummer, the Canadian actor whose career on stage and screen spanned six decades, died peacefully on 5 February at his home in Connecticut at the age of 91. “Through his art and humanity, he touched all of our hearts, and his legendary life will endure for all generations to come,” his longtime friend and manager Lou Pitt wrote in a statement. “He will forever be with us.”
While Plummer was perhaps best known for his role as Captain von Trapp in 1965’s The Sound of Music, he would, over the course of his career, portray figures both fictional and historical, including Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington (in 1970’s Waterloo); Rudyard Kipling (in 1975’s The Man Who Would Be King); Mike Wallace (in 1999’s The Insider); Leo Tolstoy (in 2009’s The Last Station); and J Paul Getty (in 2017’s All the Money in the World). His penultimate onscreen role was in Rian Johnson’s 2019 murder mystery Knives Out, filmed when Plummer was 89. His memorable and widely celebrated performance made the perfect conclusion to a career like no other.
In his 2008 book, In Spite of Myself: A Memoir, Plummer recalls his early years in Toronto, where he first began studying as a concert pianist before changing tack to embrace the itinerant life of a stage actor. By 18, he was playing a highly praised Oedipus in Jean Cocteau’s Infernal Machine at the Montreal Repertory Theater. But it would be another seven years before Plummer made his Broadway debut in a 1953 production of The Starcross Story.
Instantly at home on Broadway, Plummer “shunned celluloid and adopted toward it a repulsively snobbish disregard”, according to his memoir. That attitude, he later told an interviewer from TCM, “came from almost everyone in the theatre in those days... The theatre was the senior art, and the cinema was this kind of brash newcomer that had come in and made a lot of people famous without a hell of a lot of training.” It was John Barrymore’s memoir, Good Night, Sweet Prince, that inspired his ascension to the stage, Plummer said in the same interview. “It was the first book about an actor I had ever read and – my God – I thought that if this guy could look that good and be that good on the stage and still be a drunk – God love him! That was my idea of absolute heaven. To be able to drink, act, look handsome, and get girls!” (Plummer later won the Tony for his portrayal of the stage icon in 1997’s Barrymore.)
It makes sense, then, that Plummer’s initial rise to fame came largely through plays, whether he was taking on some of Shakespeare’s most challenging characters – including Othello’s Iago and Macbeth – or originating roles in new works by the likes of Peter Shaffer, Elia Kazan, and Arthur Miller, all of which were received with critical acclaim. But Plummer’s most lasting legacy lies in his appearance as Captain von Trapp in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, a film that continues to resonate through the generations, even if Plummer came to dislike it. (He would even, on occasion, refer to the film as the “The Sound of Mucus”.) While Plummer continued to prioritise his stage work over the following decades, his careful selection of onscreen roles revolved around his respect for the director, resulting in fruitful collaborations with auteurs including Terry Gilliam, Spike Lee, and David Fincher.
Plummer’s most prestigious accolades came late in life: He received an Academy Award for best supporting actor thanks to his performance in Mike Mills’s Beginners, making him the oldest-ever recipient of an acting Oscar at the age of 82. Following his performance in All the Money in the World, he was nominated again for the award at the age of 88, also making him the oldest-ever nominee. With two Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, a Golden Globe, a SAG Award, and a British Academy Film Award under his belt, Plummer was one of just 24 actors to have won the so-called triple crown of acting: an Academy Award, Emmy Award, and Tony Award.
Plummer was married three times, first in 1956 to the actress Tammy Grimes, with whom he had a daughter, Amanda. “We were two fans observing and admiring each other at 40 paces – hardly the stuff to secure a union,” Plummer wrote of Grimes in his memoir. “We were having too much fun enjoying our separate ascendancies – much too immature to take on the twin responsibilities of marriage and raising a child.” They divorced in 1960; according to his memoir, he only saw his daughter once during the first 21 years of her life. He married the British journalist Patricia Lewis in 1962; they divorced in 1967. In 1970, he married the English actress Elaine Taylor, with whom he remained until the end of his life.
“I’ve made over 100 motion pictures, and some of them were even good,” Plummer told The New York Times in 2018. “It’s nice to be reborn every few decades because then you can have another career. The nice part about awards and being nominated is the fact that it wakes everybody up again and makes them realise you’re alive and kicking and available. The roles have got more interesting as I’ve got older.”
Yet the peak of his career always remained, he believed, on the stage. “I remember times spent in New York City, the golden days of Broadway. It seemed like everything was happening during that time,” he said in 2008. “These days, I frequently go back to the 1940s and 1950s, especially when I watch old movies.…These old pictures, they all had their own pace, were witty and simply wonderful. In my view, cinema nowadays is all about pace. Frank Capra’s movies weren’t fast, but they made the audiences sit on the edge of their chairs. They used stillness well, knew how to revere silence. In today’s cinema, there’s no more place for silence, I don’t think.”
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