Screen legend Christopher Plummer, whose career spanned seven decades across stage and screens big and small, passed away on Friday at 91. The actor — who enthralled movie lovers across generations as the handsome Captain Georg von Trapp in the cult classic The Sound of Music — continued acting well into his 80s, churning out some memorable turns in his last years, even as the shelves in his house groaned under the weight of many an acting trophy.
Plummer was one of the few performers to win an Oscar, Emmy and Tony in acting categories — the top awards for film, television and theatre, known as the “Triple Crown of Acting”. He portrayed numerous major historical figures, including Commodus in The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington in Waterloo (1970), Rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Mike Wallace in The Insider (1999), Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009), Kaiser Wilhelm II in The Exception (2016), and J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World (2017). We take a look at some of his stellar work.
Stage and small screen story
Of Canadian descent, Plummer made his Canadian stage and TV debut, his American TV debut and his first appearance on Broadway all in the years 1953-54. His Broadway debut The Starcross Story didn’t have long legs, but his next appearance in Home is the Hero lasted 30 performances.
Over the years, the man — known as much for his classic good looks as his smooth, well-cultivated voice — became a towering presence on stage and on TV, playing Cyrano de Bergerac in Cyrano, Iago in Othello, as well as the titular roles in Hamlet at Elsinore, Macbeth, King Lear and Barrymore.
His other notable stage acts were in J.B., the Tony-and Pulitzer-winning modern retelling of the Book of Job, directed by Elia Kazan. He also stood out in No Man’s Land and Inherit the Wind.
He won two Best Actor Tony Awards, for Cyrano and Barrymore, among seven career nominations spanning close to four decades. He also won two Primetime Emmy Awards for The Moneychangers and Madeline. His TV appearances reportedly number close to a 100, and he was most recently seen as a regular in the Canadian series Departure.
Christopher Plummer with Julie Andrews on the sets of The Sound of Music Sourced by the correspondent
Movie magic
Sidney Lumet introduced Plummer to the big screen in the 1958 film Stage Struck. There were more misses than hits in the years immediately after. But it was as Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1965) that Plummer became the man every woman fell in love with. The strict widowed father of seven who gradually falls in love with his children’s nanny, played by the effervescent Julie Andrews, Plummer’s charming turn — we still can’t steal our eyes away when he strums the guitar and sings Edelweiss or looks into Maria’s (Andrews) eyes as the two waltz inside the gazebo in the garden under the moonlight — is memorable.
Notably, Plummer wasn’t pleased with his voice being dubbed in the film’s musical numbers, even referring to the film as ‘The Sound of Mucus’, only admitting that it was “A good picture” many years later. “I treasure the memories of our work together and all the humour and fun we shared through the years,” was how Julie Andrews chose to pay tribute to her co-star after his demise.
Plummer’s noteworthy films include The Man Who Would Be King, Battle of Britain, Waterloo, The Fall of The Roman Empire, Star Trek VI, Twelve Monkeys, A Beautiful Mind, Syriana, Inside Man, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Danny Collins and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In 2019, he starred in The Last Full Measure and the surprise box-office hit Knives Out.
His resonant voice, once described by critic John Simon as one that “in its chamois mode, can polish mirrors”, saw him ace many a dubbing job, including the antagonist Charles F. Muntz in the seminal Pixar animated film Up.
Plummer won his only Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actor, for the 2010 film Beginners, with Entertainment Weekly hailing his performance as, “The great Plummer creates an inspiring, fully rounded man in late bloom”.
At age 82, he became the oldest person to win an Academy acting award. “You’re only two years older than me, darling — where have you been all my life?” he laughed while accepting the long-overdue golden statuette. Seven years later, he replaced Kevin Spacey in All the Money in the World at the last minute, reportedly shooting 22 scenes in just eight days. The part earned the then 88-year-old Plummer a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars, making him the oldest person to be nominated in an acting category.