In 1965, the musical film The Sound of Music, adapted from the Broadway play of the same name, appeared to huge international success. The film’s popularity led it to surpass Gone With the Wind as the biggest box office hit of all time, and reaffirmed the superstardom of singer-actress Julie Andrews. It also vaulted a hitherto unknown lead actor, Christopher Plummer, into the front rank of film actors.
Unknown, that is, to mainstream film audiences. By 1965, Christopher Plummer was a well-known and highly regarded stage actor, having earned considerable plaudits for performances on New York’s Broadway, London’s West End, and in Shakespeare festivals and repertories in the United States, Britain, and Canada. His career, which spanned over seven decades, led him to win Best Actor Awards for theater (Tony Award), film (Academy Award), and television (Primetime Emmy Award), earning him the so-called Triple Crown of Acting. To date, he remains the only Canadian to be thus decorated.
His performances displayed a diversity seldom matched, ranging from traditional Hamlet and King Lear to the Klingon General Chang in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. As Chang, he observed, Shakespeare should be read in its original Klingon. On stage, film, and television, he portrayed historical figures, such as the Duke of Wellington and Kaiser Wilhelm II; actors, such as John Barrymore; the billionaire J. Paul Getty, and television correspondent Mike Wallace. He also portrayed Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, the Roman Emperor Commodus, the Conquistador Juan Pizarro, and many more, too numerous to list.
Yet he became largely known and connected with his role as Von Trapp, a role he frequently spoke of disparagingly, calling it “…a bit like flogging a dead horse”. Eventually, he came to regard the film and his role in it more fondly, though he did ask The Guardian in 2018, “Don’t these people ever see another movie? Is this the only one they’ve ever seen?” Compared to his body of work, the question begs an answer.
A Privileged Childhood
Christopher Plummer was born in Toronto, Canada, on December 13, 1929, and was christened with the imposing name of Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer. His maternal great-grandfather had been Sir John Abbott, the third Prime Minister of Canada. His father, who worked as a stockbroker and securities analyst, left the family shortly after his birth, and Christopher and his mother lived in her family’s estate in Senneville, Province of Quebec, located on Montreal Island. An only child, Christopher studied piano along with schoolwork, with an eye on a potential career as a concert pianist.
As a child living in the Abbott family manse, Christopher enjoyed a life which included the best schools, an indulgent mother, a staff of servants, and private tutors. He also grew up speaking both French and English, becoming fluent in both. The clarity of his English dialect led many to assume he was English in later years.
“I was raised by an Airedale”, Plummer later wrote, somewhat wistfully. Most of his companions during his early years were cousins and the dwindling staff of servants and their children. In his autobiography, In Spite of Myself, Plummer described his encountering the urges of puberty with the assistance of a member of the servant staff, whom he identified only as “Mademoiselle”. He explained Mademoiselle vanished from the home shortly after their still largely innocent tryst was discovered by one of the several Aunts frequently in attendance at the family home. Plummer described the large contingent of women in the home as “…a combined force that was, to say the least, intimidating”.
In such an atmosphere, Christopher Plummer grew up, enjoying tennis parties, formal teas at 5.00 PM, and listening to and making music. He became engrossed with the theater and acting, fascinated by the great actors of his day, especially John Barrymore. Gradually, he developed the urge to appear onstage himself. He began attending acting classes at the Montreal Repertory as well as in high school.
Plummer was 18 when he was cast as Oedipus in a Repertory production of La Machine Infernale. It was his first unpaid role, assigned to him as an apprentice actor. Plummer was also assigned an understudy, a young fellow Canadian named William Shatner. It was the beginning of a professional relationship that lasted for the rest of Plummer’s life.
The Professional Emerges
In the late 1940s, Christopher began taking roles as a professional, that is paid, actor in Montreal and Ottawa. In 1952, he relocated to the city of Hamilton, British Bermuda, where he appeared in several roles at the Bermudiana Theatre. While in a production there, Plummer was spotted by Edward Everett Horton, an American actor, director, and producer. Horton persuaded the young Canadian to take a role in the play Nina, which had been held by David Niven when the play was on Broadway. Though reluctant to leave Bermuda for a winter-time road production, Plummer eventually agreed.
By January 1953, Plummer was ready for his Broadway debut. It came in the form of the play The Starcross Story. The play opened and closed the same night, and was threatened with lawsuits for plagiarism. Though Christopher had nothing to do with the lawsuits, the closing did leave him in New York in mid-winter, out of work and with few prospects. Bermuda again beckoned. By Autumn, 1954, he was back in the United States, touring with the play Home is the Hero, beginning on Broadway and then appearing in several cities. He toured with the play as an understudy to American film and theater star Tyrone Power.
The following year, he enjoyed his first Broadway hit, starring in The Lark alongside Julie Harris, who won a Tony Award for her performance. Reviews of Plummer’s role were uniformly laudatory, and though he followed that success with an undeniable flop, Night of the Auk, he soon rebounded, appearing in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play J. B., by Archibald Macleish, directed by Elia Kazan. Plummer received his first Tony Award nomination as Best Actor for his role in J. B. He did not win, though the play won the Tony for Best Play of the Year, and Kazan won an award for Best Director.
Plummer chose to live in hotels while in New York and became a well-known denizen of the various haunts popular with the actors and directors in the city. New York was then the center for television production, as well as live theater. The reviews of Plummer’s onstage performances drew the attention of several leading television producers, and though some actors looked upon the new medium with disdain, Plummer was not among them.
Plummer entered the realm of television, accepting roles and appearing in several anthology programs, including the Kraft Television Theatre, The Alcoa Hour, General Electric Theater, and similar programs. In 1958, he appeared, again with Julie Harris, in the television adaptation of the play Little Moon of Alban. His performance earned him his first Emmy nomination, though he did not win the award.
The Bon Vivant
In the early days of his acting career, and largely throughout the 1960s, Christopher Plummer carried the reputation of enjoying life in the bars and restaurants of New York, Los Angeles, London, Toronto, and wherever he happened to hang his hat while on the road. While his career was still young, his reputation as a heavy drinker with a propensity to chase women caused some directors and producers to question hiring him to appear in their productions. Plummer’s professionalism at work served to reassure them.
While filming Inside Daisy Clover (1965) with Natalie Wood, Plummer at first expressed surprise at the hospitality bar, which remained open as long as filming continued through the day, often opening at nine in the morning. Soon, he was availing himself of its contents. He also wrote of his longing for Natalie Wood during filming. He found a competitor for her attentions in the form of Frank Sinatra, who, according to Plummer, was then filming on an adjoining soundstage. Sinatra spent an inordinate amount of time on the set of Inside Daisy Clover, always with Natalie, to Plummer’s chagrin.
While in New York, he was a regular at the famous Algonquin Hotel bar and a frequent visitor to the actors’ hangouts, including Sardi’s, 21, and other Manhattan watering holes. Among his drinking and dining buddies were Laurence Olivier, husband and wife Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall, David Niven, Rex Harrison, Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, and other leading lights of the stage and film of the day.
He preferred Scotch whisky as his drink of choice, along with fine champagnes and other wines. He developed the reputation of being a gourmand, enjoying fine dining, especially French cuisine. He also enjoyed his personal pleasures, preferring through the 1960s to travel to and from Europe by the ocean liners that still plied the Atlantic on scheduled voyages. Though considerably slower and more expensive than air travel, they offered the pleasures he came to expect during his time off the stage or away from the cameras.
He married three times, the first to actress/singer Tammy Grimes in 1956. Together, they had a daughter, actress Amanda Plummer, who was to be his only child. Their marriage ended in divorce, as did a second marriage to actress Patricia Lewis. In 1970, he married for the third and final time, to Elaine Taylor, whom he called Fuff. She remained his wife, traveling companion, and personal assistant for the rest of his life, providing a calming presence to the formerly rambunctious playboy.
He was careful to ensure his enjoyment of life did not have a negative impact on his work, though he was not so circumspect when it came to his private life. By his own admission, during his first wife’s labor with their only child, he left her to find a bar and drink. “Coward that I am, I’m afraid I couldn’t take any more and left”, he told Toronto Life in 2010. His womanizing and drinking contributed to the end of both his first and second marriages, as he freely admitted in interviews.
He never completely gave up drinking, though during his third marriage, he grew to limit it to wine. His third wife also prepared the French cuisine he loved for him at their home in Weston, Connecticut, which became their American base, far from the lights of Hollywood and the taverns of New York. “She can cook a French dinner that tastes like a French dinner but isn’t fattening”, he told an interviewer. When they traveled together (she served as his secretary/road manager), they often dined in the finest establishments, he resplendent in custom-made shirts, Savile Row suits, and Italian leather shoes. When it came to his comforts, he spared no expense.
A Shakespearean Giant
In the late 1950s, Plummer began filling lulls in his performance schedules by appearing at the American Shakespeare Festival, held in Stratford, Connecticut. In 1956, he appeared at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, making his debut there in Shakespeare’s Henry V, in the title role.
As his repertoire of performances grew, so did his professional reputation. Plummer was noted by his fellow actors, as well as directors, stage-hands, and critics, as never failing to be courteous, polite, prepared, and thoroughly professional, at least while working. In a profession known for having its share of prima donnas, Plummer stood out for his unfailing dedication to his craft and his fellow performers.
Plummer played the title roles in Richard III and Macbeth, the pivotal role of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, to name just a few, including some performances at the Globe Theater in London. He received the London Evening Standard’s Award for Best Actor of the Year in 1962 for his performance as King Henry II in Becket the preceding year. With Shakespearean laurels at his feet, he returned to Broadway in 1963, appearing as the conquistador Juan Pizarro in the play The Royal Hunt of the Sun, another praise-winning performance.
While playing Pizarro, Plummer suffered an accident onstage, which became a life-threatening health crisis. Pizarro was an epileptic, and in a scene in which the character suffered a seizure, the actor fell to the stage, severely injuring his right knee. Though it swelled to “the size of a tennis ball”, Plummer continued the play, which required him to perform at least two more falls. The next day, the entire right side of his body was in serious pain, and an examination by the hotel doctor revealed a blood clot in the knee had led to a pulmonary embolism, which had reached his left lung, somehow missing the heart. Had it entered the heart, it would likely have been fatal.
The play’s up to then successful run began to draw smaller and smaller audiences during Plummer’s hospitalization, as his understudy assumed his role. Its Broadway run ended before he was released.
He followed his successes on stage and television with his appearance in the film The Fall of the Roman Empire, in which he portrayed Commodus. The epic, and the string of reviews from critics, as well as his professional reputation, drew the attention of Robert Wise, an American director intent on bringing the successful Broadway musical The Sound of Music to the silver screen. Wise approached Plummer, who, though he had his doubts about the script, nonetheless accepted the role of Georg Von Trapp, opposite Julie Andrews as his housekeeper/nanny Maria. He would long regret his decision.
The Sound of Music
The Broadway musical The Sound of Music and its film adaptation purport to tell the story of the formation of the Trapp Family Singers, their opposition to Nazism, and their eventual flight from their Austrian homeland to freedom. The musical takes considerable liberties with the facts of their story. Captain von Trapp was much older than Plummer’s appearance during the events in the story. He was far less austere and a lover of music in his household. Maria did not introduce the children, of whom there were ten rather than the seven depicted, to music. Nor did the family escape, aided by a convent, by hiking over the Alps as the movie portrays; they traveled by train to Italy before leaving for the United States.
Plummer researched the story and his role assiduously, as well as prepared by hiring a vocals coach and taking singing lessons. When he found his singing was to be dubbed by another actor, he was furious. He later told The Guardian, “I had worked on my singing for so long, but in those days, they’d have someone trained who would sing through dubbing”. He found the resulting story “awful” and “sentimental”. Plummer said of the role, “The only reason I did this bloody thing was so I could do a musical on stage on film”. For years following its release, he would not utter the film’s name, referring to it as “that movie” or, on occasion, as “S and M”.
Despite his well-publicized misgivings over the film and his role in it, The Sound of Music made Christopher Plummer a major international film star. After years of struggling to establish himself onstage as a serious and dedicated actor, he achieved overnight success in a vehicle of which he disapproved. Despite his rejection of the film and true to his character, he remained friends with both Julie Andrews and Robert Wise for the rest of his life.
Years later, writing in his memoirs In Spite of Myself, Plummer said of the film, which he referred to throughout the book as “S and M”, “…the film belongs to Julie. Of that there is no doubt. It is her movie, her triumph.” He also described feeling a “sudden surge of pride that I’d been a part of it” while attending a screening for a children’s Easter party as a favor to a friend. He gave all credit for the film’s success to Robert Wise and Julie Andrews, and ascribed its ongoing popularity entirely to them, rather than to himself.
The success of The Sound of Music created a demand for Plummer as a film actor, which allowed him to command large salaries for roles he selected at his pleasure. He selected film roles with an eye on how their production would affect his stage roles. In the years which immediately followed The Sound of Music, he appeared in several films, in widely diverse roles, filmed in Europe and in the United States.
The International Star
Plummer began to select film roles as a character or supporting actor in films, appearing in several in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1969 British war film The Battle of Britain used an ensemble cast of mostly British actors, though as a Canadian, Plummer was an exception. In 1970, he appeared as the Duke of Wellington, opposite Rod Steiger as Napoleon, in the war epic Waterloo. Neither film was particularly successful.
He diversified by portraying Rudyard Kipling in a small role supporting Sean Connery and Michael Caine in The Man Who Would Be King. He followed up with a performance as Sherlock Holmes in 1979’s Murder by Decree. He also had a major role in 1975’s The Return of the Pink Panther. Despite achieving some success in films, he continued to focus on the stage in London and New York, as well as in his native Canada.
He played spies and Nazis, writers and musicians, soldiers and adventurers, preferring character roles to leading parts. He continued to perform in numerous roles in the plays of William Shakespeare. In the 1980s, his frenetic pace began to slacken somewhat, at least in film. In 1982, he revived Shakespeare’s Othello on Broadway, playing the villainous Iago, and supported by James Earl Jones, Kelsey Grammer, and Dianne Wiest. Rave reviews from the New York critics led to full houses, and Plummer took home another nomination for the Best Actor Tony Award for his performance. He lost to Roger Rees in Nicholas Nickleby.
The Elder Statesman
In 1997, Christopher Plummer received his second Tony Award for Best Actor, his first for a dramatic role (his earlier Tony had been for the musical Cyrano) for his role as John Barrymore in the Broadway play Barrymore. Plummer credited the award to the “ghost of John Barrymore,” which he claimed inspired him nightly. Plummer gave credit to the spirits of several of the historic personages he portrayed during his career, including Leo Tolstoy, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Rudyard Kipling. He also wrote of hearing ghostly voices in homes he owned at different times during his long career, especially in a house near Los Angeles where he lived with his wife for a time in the early 1980s.
Whether inspired by spirits or not, his film roles had yet to achieve the acclaim he had received for his stage performances. It wasn’t until 2009 that he received a nomination for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Leo Tolstoy. He did not win. In 2011, he received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as an elderly man coming out as gay in Beginners. When he won, he self-deprecatingly quipped to the statue. “Where have you been all of my life?” At the time, he was the oldest actor to ever win a competitive Oscar.
He received a third nomination for his role as J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World. Plummer stepped into the role after Kevin Spacey had completed filming all of his scenes. Spacey was dismissed from the production following a sexual imposition scandal, and Plummer refilmed all of his predecessor’s scenes. His professionalism helped ensure the finished film was only delayed in its release by a matter of a few days, rather than the expected months.
As an elder statesman of the stage, he continued to perform Shakespeare at Stratford, occasionally rewriting lines to better fit the innovative approach he took to some of his roles. He performed as King Lear, depicting the titular King as having suffered a stroke before the events of the play. The role drew critical acclaim.
Also, in the 21st century, he received Emmy nominations for his performances in Nuremberg, The Moneychangers (for which he won), and On Golden Pond, where he was reunited with Julie Andrews.
He was scheduled to play the title role in a filmed version of King Lear in 2021, though he died before the project began production.
Christopher Plummer died in his Weston, Connecticut home on February 5, 2021, aged 91. According to reports in some media, the cause of death was complications from a fall that had occurred some two weeks earlier. His manager of more than 40 years described him as “…an extraordinary man who deeply loved and respected his profession with great old-fashioned manners, self-deprecating humor, and the music of words. He was a national treasure who deeply relished his Canadian roots”.
Although no longer the oldest person to win an Acting Oscar, Anthony Hopkins achieved that distinction in 2021, he remains the oldest to have ever been nominated, receiving that nod for All the Money in the World in 2018 at the age of 88.
Despite the accolades, Plummer chose to remain humble. In his 2008 autobiography, he led the chapter that discussed The Sound of Music with a quote from American actor Doug McClure. “Watching The Sound of Music”, McClure wrote, “is like being beaten to death by a Hallmark card”. Such was the self-deprecating nature of one of film, stage, and television’s greatest and most prolific performers of all time.
