Multiple award-winning actor Christopher Plummer has died at the age of 91 at his home in Weston.
His wife, former actress Elaine Taylor, said her husband died following a head injury incurred during a recent fall.
Born in Toronto in 1929 and raised in Senneville, near Montreal, Plummer began acting in high school. In 1953, he made his formal stage debut in a road show production of “Nina” by French playwright André Roussin, playing the part originated on Broadway by David Niven. That same year he made his Canadian TV debut in a production of “Macbeth” starring Lorne Greene in the title role.
His Broadway debut took place in January 1954 in Diana Morgan”™s “The Starcross Story,” which closed after one performance. “I thought it was the end of my career, but at least I”™d got there,” Playbill quoted him as saying. “And soon afterward I was working again. I never looked back.”
Indeed, in 1959 he received his first Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play for Archibald MacLeish”™s “J.B.” He went on to be nominated in the same category five more times ”“ winning in 1997 for playing another acting legend, John Barrymore, in “Barrymore.” He also was named Best Actor in a Musical for 1974”™s “Cyrano.”
He assayed most of the major Shakespearean roles, including Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, and King Lear. While most of those were considered triumphs, his not insubstantial ego resulted in his dismissal from a London production of “Coriolanus;” according to The New York Times, he was “dismissed in a vote by the cast for crude and outrageous behavior” and was replaced by Anthony Hopkins.
But it was in movies that he made his biggest impact with the public, arguably no more so than in 1965”™s blockbuster “The Sound of Music,” in which he played Georg von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews. Famously disdainful of the film, which he variously disparaged as “S&M” and “The Sound of Mucus,” he had by time of a 2015 Vanity Fair interview apparently come to terms with its ongoing popularity.
“As cynical as I always was about ‘The Sound of Music,’ I do respect that it is a bit of relief from all the gunfire and car chases you see these days,” he said. “It”™s sort of wonderfully, old-fashionedly universal. It”™s got the bad guys and the Alps (and) it”™s got Julie and sentiment in bucketloads.”
While the movie received 10 Oscar nominations and won five ”“ including Best Picture, Best Actress (Andrews) and Best Director (Robert Wise) ”“ Plummer was not among them. Instead he was nominated three times for Best Supporting Actor for portraying Leo Tolstoy in 2009”™s “The Last Station,” replacing Kevin Spacey to play J. Paul Getty in 2018”™s “All the Money in the World,” and winning the prize for “Beginners,” wherein he played a man who comes out as gay to his son (Ewan McGregor) soon after his wife dies.
Wide range of roles
His sizable filmography ranges from tragedy to comedy and all points in between, with historical figures becoming something of a specialty: Commodus in “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964); Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in “The Night of the Generals” (1967); Athualpa in “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” (1969) and Wellesley in “Waterloo” (1970).
He was also an amused master criminal opposite Peter Sellers”™ Clouseau in “The Return of the Pink Panther” (1975); a bemused Rudyard Kipling in John Huston”™s “The Man Who Would Be King” (1975); a memorably vicious killer in “The Silent Partner” (1978); and Sherlock Holmes in “Murder by Decree” (1979) ”“ a second cousin was Nigel Bruce, who memorably played Dr. Watson in a series of Holmes movies from 1939 to 1946.
His later films veered from the silly (1986’s “Vampire in Venice,” 1987”™s the big-screen remake of “Dragnet”) to the campy (1979’s “Starcrash,” as “The Emperor”; the Shakespeare-spouting Klingon in 1991’s “Star Trek VI”) and back to serious work with such directors as Spike Lee (1992’s “Malcolm X” and 2006’s “Inside Man”), Terry Gilliam (1995’s “12 Monkeys” and 2009’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”), Atom Egoyan (2002’s “Ararat” and 2015’s “Remember,” where he impressively played a dementia-plagued Holocaust survivor-turned-hitman), and Michael Mann (playing Mike Wallace in 1999’s “The Insider”).
He also provided voice work for a number of animated films, including “An American Tail” (1986), “Up” (2009) and “Pixies” (2015). He ended his film career as the sly murder victim in “Knives Out” and a bereaved father in the war drama “The Last Full Measure,” both released in 2019.
Plummer was also a regular presence on television, appearing on early anthology series like “Kraft Television Theatre,” “General Electric Theater” and “The Alcoa Hour” in the 1950s, as the title character in “Hamlet at Elsinore” in 1964, and in small-screen remakes of “The Philadelphia Story,” “Dial M for Murder” and “On Golden Pond” (opposite Andrews again). Other appearances included “Jesus of Nazareth,” “The Thorn Birds” and “The Cosby Show” in an episode titled, perhaps inevitably, “Shakespeare”).
He also played everyone from Holmes and Wellesley to Alfred Stieglitz, Franklin Roosevelt, F. Lee Bailey, and Cardinal Bernard Law. Nominated seven times for an Emmy, he won for Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie in 1977 for “Arthur Hailey”™s The Moneychangers,” and for Voice-Over Performance in 1994 for “Madeline.”
Plummer also received five lifetime achievement awards over his last two decades, including from the National Board of Review in 2002.
His first two marriages, to actress Tammy Grimes and journalist Patricia Lewis, ended in divorce. In addition to Taylor, he is survived by Amanda Plummer, his actress daughter by Grimes.
“I”™m not a superstar, thank God,” Plummer told The New York Times in 1982. “Christ, to be a superstar must be extremely tiring and limiting. I prefer being half-recognized on the street and getting good tables in restaurants.”
