Festeggiato 60 anni di carriera come uno degli attori di teatro in lingua inglese più raffinati e come veterano riconosciuto a livello internazionale per aver lavorato in oltre 100 film.
E' stato nella sua città di origine, Montreal, che Plummer ha iniziato la sua carriera professionale a teatro e alla radio, sia in francese che in inglese. Dopo il debutto newyorkese offertogli da Eva Le Gallienne (1954) ha continuato a lavorare in diverse famose e premiate produzioni a Broadway e a Londra nel West End, comprese la produzione di Elia Kazan del dramma premio Pulitzer di Archibald MacLeish "J.B.", e come protagonista nel musical di Anthony Burgess "Cyrano", per la cui interpretazione Plummer ha vinto il suo primo premio Tony. Oltre a "Re Lear", il suo più importante successo recente a Broadway è stato "Barrymore" per il quale ha vinto il Tony, il Drama Desk, l'Outer Critics' Circle Award , l'Edwin Booth Award, il Boston Critics' Award, il Chicago's Jefferson Award, e il Los Angeles' Ovation Award come miglior attore 1997-1998. E' stato anche primo attore del Britain's National Theatre diretto da Sir Laurence Olivier, della Royal Shakespeare Company diretta da Sir Peter Hall, e nei suoi anni della formazione del Canada's Stratford Festival diretto da Sir Tyrone Guthrie e Michael Langham. Ha interpretato la maggior parte dei ruoli fondamentali del repertorio classico.

L'eclettica carriera di Plummer sullo schermo è cominciata quando Sidney Lumet gli ha offerto di debuttare in Fascino del palcoscenico. Da allora è apparso in una miriade di film notevoli tra i quali il vincitore di diversi Oscar Tutti insieme appassionatamente, L'uomo che volle farsi re, I lunghi giorni delle aquile, Waterloo, L'amico sconosciuto, La retata, Daisy Clover, Star Trek: IV, Malcolm X , L'ultima eclissi, Wolf, L'esercito delle dodici scimmie, Assassinio su commissione, Ovunque nel tempo, nel Nicholas Nickleby di Douglas McGrath, e come ospite in altri. I recenti successi di Plummer comprendono il film candidato all'Oscar, diretto da Michael Mann, The Insider, in cui ha interpretato il ruolo del giornalista televisivo Mike Wallace, per il quale ha vinto il National Critics' Awards di Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago e Las Vegas; oltre al film premiato con l'Oscar A Beautiful Mind di Ron Howard e al film di Etom Egoyani Ararat.

In his rich and riotous new memoir, Christopher Plummer recalls a youthful night spent sitting at the feet of Edith Evans, sipping whiskey as she told him “wonderful stories of the theater and the extraordinary people and places she'd known.” When his turn came, he “began to regale her with some endless histoire,” only to turn and notice that “by God, if the old lady wasn't slumped in her chair fast asleep.”
Mr. Plummer does tend to go on, but he's clearly learned something about raconteuring since then, as this long but rarely dull book suggests. A child of Montreal's waning Anglo aristocracy who was entranced by the footlights at an early age, Mr. Plummer is a true believer in the transcendent magic of “the Theeahtah” (as he calls it). But he's hardly pious.
Of “Macbeth,” he declares: “Our author has put into the mouth of his unwashed Highland jock some of the greatest, most soaring poetry ever written. The combo I don't buy — sorry!” Hitler, at least as rewritten by Brecht in “Arturo Ui,” is “an absolute lark to act — funny and outrageous,” while Captain von Trapp from “The Sound of Music” (or “S&M,” as he prefers) is “humorless and one-dimensional.” Mr. Plummer attributes his “unconscionable” behavior on and off set filming that beloved classic — moping and drinking up several sizes of lederhosen — to “the old-fashioned stage actor's snobbism toward moviemaking.”

He seems to have been everywhere — including inside almost every room of the Hotel du Cap on the French Riviera — and known everyone. And just about everyone is “transcendent” (Geraldine Page), “wonderful” (Peter Falk), “exquisite” (Rosemary Harris), “exceptional” (Tony Richardson), “like being hit by a warm sirocco” (Katharine Hepburn), or capable of igniting a forest fire (Natalie Wood in a bathing suit).
He does throw some darts at his old chum Kenneth Tynan, who traded his critic's chastity for a job at the National Theater and the chance to rub shoulders with Mick Jagger and “curry favor” with Princess Margaret. “Apart from some entertaining pastiches on bullfighting and haute cuisine” — two of Mr. Plummer's own obsessions, it turns out — Tynan's “only contribution to society was ‘O! Calcutta!,' an inferior sexical performed by numerous unknowns in the altogether, exposing their shriveled parts in frigid London theaters.”
Mr. Plummer didn't much like John Huston either, but he credits the old man with the two best pieces of movie direction he ever received, including the suggestion, during a scene in “The Man Who Would Be King” that Mr. Plummer wanted to make “touching”: “Ah — ah — Chris, just take the music out of your voice.” For a man armed with “gargantuan and repellent confidence” in his youth, Mr. Plummer comes across as charmingly (if not quite sincerely) self-deprecating, relishing the memory of his inauspicious Broadway debut in “The Starcross Story,” with Eva Le Gallienne, which “opened and closed in one night! One solitary night! But what a night!”
For all his hints at lost weekends with leggy beauties (“Oh, those Austrian girls!”), that action remains mostly offstage. So too with momentous personal events. While his first wife, Tammy Grimes, is in labor, Mr. Plummer goes out to steel his nerves with a drink and finds himself sitting next to Budd Schulberg, who offers to cast him as the lead in his film about illegal egret hunting in the Everglades. (Mr. Plummer takes the role, and misses the delivery.) The day after he marries his second wife, Patricia Lewis, a London journalist, he jets off to his beloved Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario.
In general he dwells more on gaudy nights with the less fair sex. It seems that every time Lauren Bacall calls him up in his room at the Algonquin to ask, “Where's Jason?,” Mr. Plummer dutifully goes hunting for his old friend Jason Robards, only to help him stay out another night or two.
The carousing mostly stops when Mr. Plummer meets his third wife, the actress Elaine Taylor, “an angel of mercy” who persuades him to give up “the giant martinis, stingers, old-fashioneds, boilermakers, rum scorpions, moscow mules, all that nectar that had been my sustenance.” (As for wine, “I still drank gallons of that, but then so did she!”) The Plummers live it up, but after British tax law drives them back to America (“What a boring P.M. was Harold Wilson!”) a hundred pages from the end, the book collapses in a heap of charming old houses, lovable new dogs, briefly recounted roles (including Lear and that other wrecked patriarch, John Barrymore), and quasi-valedictory summing up.
For all Mr. Plummer's eloquence, the book rarely touches any emotional bottom. Toward the end he pays brief tribute to his “neglected daughter,” Amanda, who exits stage left after her birth only to reappear 20 years and 300 pages later in “Agnes of God,” which won her a Tony. Amanda has a “most original personality” and “the rare and inexplicable gift known only as pathos.” (Even Olivier, Mr. Plummer writes, knew only how to fake it.)
“I shall never forget” is Mr. Plummer's refrain, and boy, does he mean it. He writes with the nostalgia of a man who has seen the passing of more than one golden age: of Montreal cafe society, of theatrical New York of the '50s, of live television, of London's swinging '60s, of the out-of-control period epics of the jet-set '70s. (He recalls the day when a regiment of Soviet Army extras in Sergei Bondarchuk's “Waterloo” galloped off set to put down a real border skirmish, still in costume.) To Mr. Plummer it's all part of one “unidentifiable golden age when the actor reigned supreme.” In the pages of this fine book, it's still not over.
IN SPITE OF MYSELF
A Memoir
By Christopher Plummer
Illustrated. 648 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95.
Da The New York Times Book Review, 19 dicembre 2008

In the spring of 1997, soon after Christopher Plummer opened on Broadway in “Barrymore,” the one-man play based on the life of John Barrymore, I was at a dinner party with Al Hirschfeld, the great artist and caricaturist. Then 93, he had seen most of what had opened — and closed — on Broadway for most of the last century, so his fellow diners eagerly awaited his opinion of Plummer's portrayal of the legendary actor.
“He's a much better Barrymore than Barrymore,” Hirschfeld proclaimed. “Barrymore was so hammy!”
Hirschfeld was right, of course: Plummer won the Tony Award for best actor, and Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote that he “confirms his reputation as the finest classical actor of North America.”
Now that Plummer has published “In Spite of Myself: A Memoir,” it is the most welcome of surprises to discover that this actor writes and reports almost as well as he acts. No kidding. To be sure, in his writing he is a bit hammy, often playing fast and loose with time frames, tone and details, not to mention exercising profligate use of exclamation points — the man thinks in soliloquies. But the result for anyone who loves, loves, loves the theater, not to mention the vanished New York of the 1950s and '60s, is a finely observed, deeply felt (and deeply dishy) time-traveling escape worthy of a long stormy weekend. Just grab a quilt and a stack of pillows. No need for a delectable assortment of bonbons. They're in the book.
Plummer begins at the beginning. He grows up in Montreal, something of a poor little rich boy, the great-grandson of the Right Honorable Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott, who was president of the Canada Central Railway and the country's first native-born prime minister.

Plummer's parents divorce early, and his father disappears. As older relatives die, the money falls away and his mother holds down two jobs while her teenage son, bound up in “a web of good manners and suppressed emotions,” finds release in the worlds of jazz, theater and night life. That also means drinking: “At an embarrassingly early age, I began to hit the sauce. Booze was a national sport up north. It was essential! — (a) to keep you warm, (b) to keep you from going mad, (c) to keep your madness going.”
At 15, already a decent pianist himself, he hangs out at the Ritz-Carlton listening to Fats Waller and Art Tatum. At 16, he begins his professional acting career, and by 18 he is playing a highly praised Oedipus in Cocteau's “Infernal Machine” at the Montreal Repertory Theater. He collects more great reviews and moves on to Canadian radio. He is catnip for women, and his description of having sex at a party with his leading lady, all the while conversing with her husband, is a classic.
After his mother dies, he leaves Canada to spend a season in Bermuda at a repertory theater, along with Marian Seldes and Kate Reid, that plays host to traveling stars. This is in the early 1950s (somewhat irritatingly, if predictably, Plummer never divulges his birth date, though imdb.com gives it as Dec. 13, 1929). His account of working there with Edward Everett Horton, who later takes Plummer with him on the road, in “Nina,” is vivid and endearing. When Horton, then in his 70s, hauls his own luggage from a New York cab while the driver watches, Plummer is chagrined on his behalf. “Oh, you won't get that here,” Horton tells him. “Oh, dear me, no. This is New York, sonny; this is New York.” More than 50 years later, Plummer's ear is pitch perfect.
As it is in his report of attending the final run-through of Tennessee Williams's “Sweet Bird of Youth,” starring Geraldine Page, whom Plummer describes as “transcendent”: “When it was over you could hear a pin drop. . . . Just then from the balcony in that rasping voice of his, Tennessee started shouting. . . . ‘She's ruined mah play! She's ruined mah play!' . . . No one seemed to take much notice, or pretended not to.” Plummer asks Elia Kazan, the director, what's wrong. “ ‘Oh, don't worry,' Gadge replied, ‘she's just taken his play away from him. It's hers now — it doesn't belong to him anymore and he knows it.' ”
Make no mistake, Plummer's master storytelling is also a master diversionary tactic. There is little introspection here, though every once in a while he looks at himself with eyes wide open and tells nothing but the truth. After cutting a swath through the female population of New York, he finds himself in an ill-fated marriage to a pregnant Tammy Grimes: “We were two fans observing and admiring each other at 40 paces — hardly the stuff to secure a union; we were having too much fun enjoying our separate ascendancies — much too immature to take on the twin responsibilities of marriage and raising a child.”
Plummer's ascendancy has quite the pedigree. He plays in “Medea” with Judith Anderson in Paris, tours America in “The Constant Wife” with Katharine Cornell and at 24 makes his Broadway debut with Eva Le Gallienne in “The Starcross Story.” “It opened and closed in one night!” he writes. “But what a night!” In his mid-20s, he plays Henry V at Stratford, Ontario, and tours again with Cornell and Tyrone Power. His drinking almost gets him fired, although when he — and Power — contract infectious hepatitis, the tour is suspended until they recover.
His liver rebounds in time for him to join forces with Jason Robards Jr.: “Huge, hurt eyes gave him his vulnerability and his popularity. Every woman within wooing distance wanted to coddle him, convert him (from what they knew not) or, at the very least, spare his life, even if it wasn't in any particular danger.”
Except, perhaps, for Robards's long-suffering paramour at the time, Lauren Bacall, whose recurrent line becomes an offstage Greek chorus. No sooner does Plummer open his door at the Algonquin, his New York base, than the phone rings: “Where's Jason?” Plummer invariably promises to find him and send him home. Once he sets out, though, he promptly forgets his mission and bellies up to the bar alongside Robards and a diverse cast of nocturnal characters, including a horse with a taste for Jack Daniel's. (That's right, at the bar.)
By this point, in the '50s, it is the golden age of live television and Plummer is working constantly. Along with Jane Fonda, he catches the eye of David O. Selznick, who wants to lock him into a seven-year movie contract: “Jane . . . would rise like a phoenix to the top of the class with a will that exceeded Eva Perón's; as opposed to my subplot of a career born of self-inflicted doubts, and strange loyalties, which up to now could be simply described as an ‘Enigma Variation.' ” He rejects Selznick's offer, playing Hamlet at Stratford instead.
By the time Plummer turns 30, Grimes has kicked him to the curb. He decamps for London to work at the Royal Shakespeare Company, then wins the Evening Standard Award for best actor in Jean Anouilh's “Becket.” Though he has never sung before, he decides to do a movie musical — yes, that one. “The Sound of Music,” or “S & M,” as he calls it, is not a positive experience, and for that he takes full responsibility: “I was . . . a pampered, arrogant young bastard, spoiled by too many great theater roles. Ludicrous though it may seem, I still harbored the old-fashioned stage actor's snobbism toward moviemaking. The moment we arrived in Austria to shoot the exteriors I was determined to present myself as a victim of circumstance — that I was doing the picture under duress, that it had been forced upon me and that I certainly deserved better. My behavior was unconscionable.”
You see where the book gets its title. By the end of the '60s, his second marriage, to a British journalist, has failed, and when he meets the actress Elaine Taylor, who will become his third — and present — wife, you're glad he has found a home. But this last section is the only place the book drags. In his later years Plummer would become a prolific character actor in film and television even as he remained a theatrical star; his 2004 Lear was greatly acclaimed. That's all well and good, but 40 years of domestic bliss, with its attendant descriptions of interior decoration and praise for his wife's cooking, tempted me to call him myself: “Where's Jason?”
One character who lives around the edges of the book is Plummer's daughter, the gifted actress Amanda Plummer. From the time he and Grimes split in 1960 until 1981, he saw the child only once, during a visit to London when she was 8. Though he says she “has become more of a friend now,” the relationship raises all sorts of questions, none of them happy.
Then again, if your stock in trade is feeling for a living — think about that — you are required to make some messes along the way. In spite of himself — his relentlessly high artistic principles; his penchant for playing the underdog, even when he was the star; his keen ear, equally attuned to the precision of Elizabethan verse and to what passes as truth across a whiskey at 5 a.m. — this man has experienced a life rich in textures, and he is able to give most of them glorious voice. His is a life in the theater lived hard and true, in the grand tradition of those distinguished players who went before, whom he has surely made proud.
Good sir! I raise my glass to you.
ALEX WITCHEL
IN SPITE OF MYSELF.
A Memoir
By Christopher Plummer
Illustrated. 648 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95
Da The New York Times, 21 dicembre 2008

Può vantare quasi sessanta anni di carriera come uno dei più rispettati attori teatrali e veterano di oltre cento pellicole. Cresciuto a Montreal, ha incominciato la sua carriera professionale sul palcoscenico e in radio sia in francese che in inglese. Dopo che Eva Le Gallienne lo ha fatto esordire a New York nel 1954, è stato protagonista di tante celebrate produzioni a Broadway e al West End di Londra, ottenendo grandi consensi su entrambe le sponde dell’Atlantico. Ha vinto due Tony Award per il musical Cyrano e per Barrymore, oltre a conquistare altre sette candidature allo stesso premio, le ultime per Re Lear (King Lear, 2004) e per il ruolo di Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind (2007). Ha anche conquistato tre Drama Desk Awards e la National Arts Club Medal.

E’ stato un membro importante del Royal National Theatre sotto la direzione di Sir Laurence Olivier e della Royal Shakespeare Company con Sir Peter Hall, che gli ha consentito di vincere il London’s Evening Standard Award per il miglior attore protagonista grazie a Becket. E’ anche stato protagonista allo Stratford Festival in Canada durante gli anni della sua formazione sotto Sir Tyrone Gutherie e Michael Langham. E’ unanimemente considerato come uno dei migliori attori classici della sua epoca.
Dopo che Sidney Lumet lo ha fatto esordire sul grande schermo in Fascino del palcoscenico (Stage Struck, 1958), ha lavorato a film importanti come L'uomo che volle farsi re (The Man Who Would Be King), I lunghi giorni delle aquile (Battle of Britain), Waterloo, La caduta dell'impero romano (Fall of the Roman Empire), Star trek VI: rotta verso l'ignoto (Star Trek VI), L’esercito delle dodici scimmie (Twelve Monkeys) e il vincitore dell’Oscar del 1965 Tutti insieme appassionatamente (The Sound of Music). Recentemente, è apparso nella pellicola candidata agli Oscar Insider - Dietro la verità (The Insider, nei panni di Mike Wallace, vincendo il National Film Critics Award), il film che ha ottenuto l’Oscar A Beautiful Mind, Man in the Chair, Partnerperfetto.com (Must Love Dogs), Il mistero dei templari (National Treasure), Syriana e Inside Man. Le sue apparizioni televisive, quasi un centinaio, comprendono la produzione della BBC, vincitrice dell’Emmy, Hamlet at Elsinore nel ruolo principale; i prodotti che hanno ottenuto l’Emmy The Thornbirds, Nuremberg e Little Moon of Alban, così come tanti altri lavori. Ha ottenuto due Emmy, oltre a sei candidature allo stesso premio. Plummer ha anche scritto per il palcoscenico, per la televisione e per le sale da concerti.
Oltre ai riconoscimenti ottenuto nel Regno Unito, negli Stati Uniti, in Austria e in Canada, è stato il primo attore a vincere il Jason Robards Award in memoria del suo grande amico, aggiudicandosi anche l’Edwin Booth Award e il Sir John Gielgud Quill Award. Nel 1968, grazie a Elisabetta II, è stato nominato Companion of the Order of Canada (diventando cavaliere onorario). Una laurea in belle arti ad honorem gli è stata conferita dalla Juilliard, mentre nel 2000 ha anche ricevuto il premio alla carriera Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Nel 1986, è stato ammesso alla Theatre’s Hall of Fame, mentre nel 2000 alla Walk of Fame canadese. La sua recente autobiografia, In Spite of Myself (edita da Afred A. Knopf Publishers) è stata molto apprezzata dalla critica e dal pubblico.
Tra i suoi prossimi progetti figurano 9 e My Dog Tulip, entrambe pellicole d’animazione; il ruolo da protagonista di Parnassus - L'uomo che voleva ingannare il diavolo (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), per la regia di Terry Gilliam; e The Last Station, in cui interpreta il grande romanziere Tolstoj, lavorando assieme a Helen Mirren in una pellicola scritta e diretta da Michael Hoffman.