Christopher Plummer was a Montreal high school student when he played the role of Darcy in his school’s production of Pride and Prejudice with such flair that Herbert Whittaker of the Montreal Gazette wrote, “I was astounded that any student had the manner, the diction, the hauteur of Jane Austen’s snotty hero.”

Over the next two years he appeared in more than 100 different roles to become, in Whittaker’s words, “immensely versatile, always playing above his own age.” In 1953 Plummer joined an American touring company. A year later he was on Broadway in two roles, one of them a small part that nevertheless impressed Raymond Massey, who later recalled, “He had only a few lines, no movement, but he could listen,” adding that neither he nor his wife “could take our eyes off him.”
 

Christopher Plummer made his stage debut in Ottawa at age 17. In the tradtion of Gielgud, Oliver, and Richardson, Plummer, who was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1968, is a classical actor whose brilliant performances have captivated and enthralled audiences in the English-speaking world for over four decades [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star]

With the launch of the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Connecticut in 1955, Massey, playing Brutus in Julius Caesar, recommended Plummer as Mark Anthony in that play and as Ferdinand in The Tempest, the latter role prompting a New York Post critic to write, “Of all the actors in the cast, I think the ablest Shakespearean at the moment is Christopher Plummer whose young lover is an admirable example of style and eloquence.”

Style and eloquence describe Plummer throughout his half century as a professional actor. Born in Toronto in 1929, he grew up in Montreal where his mother encouraged him to read at an early age and took him to concerts and plays.

Following his success in Connecticut, he played the title role of Henry V at Stratford, Ontario, in 1956 and, a year later played Hamlet, both roles critically praised. His TV production of Hamlet on site at Elsinore Castle in Denmark was shown in 33 countries. In 1958, he played in the three Shakespearean productions at Stratford, Ontario, appeared on Broadway with Raymond Massey in the stage play JB, and made his first of more than 40 movies including the phenomenally successful The Sound of Music in 1965.

Being a stage performer, however, has always been his strongest desire, a point he made clear in a 1959 interview with Associated Press when questioned why, as a “hot property” for Broadway productions, TV, and movies, he elected to join the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in England “for $168 a week.” “Certainly I was delighted to go to England,” he responded. “I think every actor should play London and I was perfectly willing to give up anything to do it.”

There he played the title role in Richard III and was Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing before returning to Ontario’s Stratford Festival in 1962 to play the title roles in Cyrano de Bergerac and MacBeth. In 1967, he was again in Stratford, Ontario, to play Mark Anthony in Anthony and Cleopatra.

Movies and stage appearances in both North America and Europe filled the next decade. He went to Spain for the film version of Royal Hunt for the Sun, having played a different role in the 1965 New York stage production, spent months in Russia and Italy for the movie Waterloo in which he played Wellington, made three movies in 1975, including The Return of the Pink Panther and The Man Who Would be King while also acting in stage productions in London, Minneapolis, New York, and Washington, DC.

He continued the same hectic schedule of movie and stage roles throughout the 1980s. He was Sherlock Holmes in the movie, Murder by Decree, in 1980, and completed another three movies in 1981 before he played Iago in 1982 in a Broadway production of Othello that starred James Earl Jones in the title role. John Barber, an English critic, praised Plummer’s performance as “a remarkable creation,” and a veteran New York critic called it “perhaps the finest Shakespearean performance in this century.”

As early as 1955, he won a best actor award from Theater World as Count Zichy in The Dark is Light Enough. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, he won several awards for his television performances sponsored by companies like Alcoa, General Motors, Kraft, and Hallmark Cards. He was named a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1969 and, although the musical Cyrano lasted only two weeks on Broadway in 1974, he won the Perry, Outer Circle, and Drama Desk Awards as the best actor in a musical. His role as Iago won him a second Drama Desk Award in 1982, the same year he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame and, in Canada, presented with the first Maple Leaf Distinguished Arts and Letters Award. Plummer commented, “To be recognized at home is a lovely thing indeed.”

Now staging mainly one-man shows, Plummer has toured with Ibsen’s concert stage version of Peer Gynt, William Walton’s Henry V Musical Scenario, and, in 1996, he premiered his one-man show of John Barrymore at Stratford, Ontario, before taking it on tour. Another favourite is his own carefully developed one-man show, A Word or Two Before You Go, featuring his reading of excerpts from the works of numerous authors, that he has performed on many occasions to raise funds for numerous causes in both Canada and the United States. Now approaching 70, Plummer, living in Weston, Connecticut, takes pride in the acting accomplishments of his only daughter, Amanda. And he still holds the opinion he expressed in a 1938 interview: “If you aren’t enjoying what you are doing, your audiences won’t enjoy watching you.”

Mel James