Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia
Plummer, Christopher
Internationally recognized actor born in Toronto, Ontario in 1929. He is the great-grandson of the first Canadian Prime Minister born in Canada, Sir John Abbott. His parents separated when he was an infant and he was raised in a cultured home in Montreal by his mother and his aunts. He was exposed to opera, ballet and theatre but, when he could, prowled Montreal's clubs where he saw the great acts of the day - Sinatra, Piaf - perform. He acted in high school and received his first favourable notice from Herbert Whittaker in 1946 for his portrayal of Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (Montreal High School). He was an apprentice with the Montreal Repertory Theatre before working with Ottawa's Stage Society.
Though he auditioned for Tyrone Guthrie for the Stratford Festival 's first season, he was not accepted. He went to New York in 1954 and worked on Broadway before being invited by Stratford's new artistic director, Michael Langham , to take on Henry V. With the company he subsequently performed the leads in Macbeth, Hamlet(the innaugural production of the company's Festival Theatre in 1957), Antony and Cleopatra (opposite Zoe Caldwell ), Cyrano de Bergerac, King Lear (2002, dir Jonathan Miller, remounted on Broadway), and a highly acclaimed reprise of Caesar and Cleopatra (2008). In 2010, at the age of 80, he will undertake the role of Prospero in The Tempest.
He has also performed in London both at the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier and for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1981, in the U.S., he turned in a stunning Iago to James Earl Jones' Othello. New York Times critic, Frank Rich, in his anthology Hot Seat, calls Plummer's acting in the work one of the twenty indelible performances he had seen during his career with the paper.
He has also toured in one-man-shows about Stephen Leacock and John Barrymore. His John Barrymore one-hander merited him a Broadway Tony for best actor in 1997. He also won a Tony in 1974 for the musical,Cyrano.
He has appeared in over a hundred films and on television, but is probably still best known for his role as Baron von Trapp in the movie The Sound of Music (1965), a film he claims to despise. More recent films include The Insider (1999); Emotional Arithmetic (2007), based on a novel by Canadian author, Matt Cohen; The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009); and The Last Station (2010), based on the life of Leo Tolstoy.
However, he has stated that his most constant love is the theatre: "The theatre has given me the most joy professionally, because of the live audience. I think it's desperately important to form a communion with your audience. That's your partner. Though I admire and take pleasure in movies, they can't replace the stage. Because it's our medium, the actors' and writers' (The Globe and Mail, 26 Jan 2010): R5).
He is a Companion of the Order of Canada, and in 2001, received a Governor General's Award .
His controversial, frank, and iconoclastic autobiography, In Spite of Myself: A Memoir was published in 2008.
He lives with his third wife, Elaine Taylor on a 30-acre estate in Weston, Connecticut. Although he spends most of his time in the United States, he remains a Canadian citizen.
Source: "Plummer to play Lear at Stratford in 2001," Canadian Press, 31 July 2001
Last updated 2010-01-18
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