Canadian theatre, film and television actor. In a career that spans over five decades and includes substantial roles in each of the dramatic arts, Plummer is probably best known to audiences as the autocratic widower Captain Georg Ludwig von Trapp in the hit 1965 musical movie The Sound of Music opposite Julie Andrews.
Plummer has played most of the great roles in classic repertoire. In 1953, Plummer was the understudy to Tyrone Power in The Dark is Light Enough, in a production by Katharine Cornell in which she also starred. In his biography, Plummer states that Cornell was his ‘sponsor.’In 1973, he appeared on Broadway as the swordsman and poet Cyrano de Bergerac in Cyrano, a musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac by Anthony Burgess (libretto and lyrics) and Michael J. Lewis (music). For that performance, Plummer won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance. In 1971 he appeared at the National Theatre in the play Amphitryon 38, directed by Sir Laurence Olivier.In 2002, he appeared in a lauded production of King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller and performed at the Stratford (Canada) Shakespeare Festival. The production came to New York City’s Lincoln Center in 2004, where Plummer’s performance as Lear garnered him his sixth Tony nomination. He returned to Broadway in 2007 as Henry Drummond in a revival of Inherit the Wind, winning a Drama Desk Award nomination as well as his seventh Tony nomination. Plummer returned to the stage at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in August 2008 in a critically acclaimed performance as Julius Caesar in George Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” directed by Tony winner Des McAnuff; this production was videotaped and shown in high-definition in Canadian cinemas on January 31, 2009 (with an encore presentation on February 23, 2009) and broadcast on April 4, 2009 on Bravo! in Canada. Plummer once again returned to the Stratford Festival in the summer of 2010 in The Tempest as the lead character, Prospero.
Plummer’s eclectic career on screen began in 1957 when Sidney Lumet cast him as a young writer in Stage Struck. Since then he has appeared in a vast number of notable films which include Oedipus the King, The Man Who Would Be King, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Jesus of Nazareth, The Return of the Pink Panther, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Battle of Britain, Waterloo, The Silent Partner, Dragnet, Shadow Dancing, Inside Daisy Clover, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,Malcolm X, Dolores Claiborne, Wolf, 12 Monkeys, The Insider, Murder by Decree, Somewhere in Time, Syriana, The New World, The Lake House and International Velvet. One of Plummer’s most critically acclaimed roles was that of television journalist Mike Wallace in Michael Mann’s Oscar-nominated The Insider, for which he won Boston, Los Angeles, and National Society of Film Critics Awards for ‘Best Supporting Actor’; he was also nominated for Chicago and Las Vegas Film Critics Awards, as well as a Satellite Award. Predictions of an Oscar nomination circulated, but such recognition only came in January 2010 when Plummer received his first Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of author Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station. Other recent successes include his roles as Dr. Rosen in Ron Howard’s Academy Award winning A Beautiful Mind, Arthur Case in Spike Lee’s 2006 film Inside Man, and the philosopher Aristotle in Alexander, alongside Colin Farrell. In 2004, Plummer played John Adams Gates in National Treasure.
Plummer has also done some voice work, such as his role of Henri the pigeon in An American Tail, the villainous Grand Duke of Owls in Rock-a-Doodle, the antagonistic Charles Muntz in Up and the elder leader 1 in the Tim Burton-produced action/science fiction film 9.
In 1963, he was the subject of a short National Film Board of Canada documentary, 30 Minutes, Mister Plummer, directed by Anne Claire Poirier. In 2011, Plummer appeared in the feature length documentary The Captains. The film, which was written and directed by William Shatner sees Shatner interview Plummer at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival Theatre where they talk about their young careers, long lasting friendship, and Plummer’s role as General Chang in Star Trek VI. The film also mentions how Shatner was Plummer’s understudy for a production of Henry V at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and that after Plummer had fell ill Shatner was forced to take the stage and thus earned his first big break.
Among his television appearances, which number almost a hundred, are the Emmy-nominated BBC production Hamlet at Elsinore, the five-time Emmy winning The Thorn Birds, the Emmy-winning Nuremberg, the Emmy-winning Little Moon of Alban and the Emmy-winning Moneychangers. In 1956, he appeared with Jason Robards and Constance Ford in an episode entitled “A Thief There Was” of CBS’s anthology series Appointment with Adventure. He co-starred in American Tragedy as F. Lee Bailey (for which he received a Golden Globe Nomination), and appeared in Four Minute Mile, Miracle Planet, and a documentary by Ric Burns about Eugene O’Neill. He received an Emmy nomination for his performance in Our Fathers and reunited with Julie Andrews for a television production of On Golden Pond. He also played Herod Antipas in the miniseries, Jesus of Nazareth and was the narrator for The Gospel of John. He also co-starred with Gregory Peck in The Scarlet and The Black. He narrated the animated television series Madeline, for which he received an Emmy, as well as the animated television series David the Gnome.
Plummer has also written for the stage, television and the concert-hall. Plummer and Sir Neville Marriner rearranged Shakespeare’s Henry V with Sir William Walton’s music as a concert piece. They recorded the work with Marriner’s chamber orchestra the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. He performed it and other works with the New York Philharmonic and symphony orchestras of London, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Ohio, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax. With Marriner he made his Carnegie Hall debut in his own arrangements of Mendelssohn’sincidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Plummer has won many honours in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Austria. He was the first winner of Canada’s Genie Award, for Best Actor in Murder by Decree (1980) and has received three other Genie nominations. Plummer has won two Tony Awards (from seven nominations), and two Emmy Awards (six nominations) in the United States, and Great Britain’s Evening Standard Award.
In 1968, he was invested as Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest civilian honour. In 2001, he received the Canadian Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He was made an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts at New York’sJuilliard School and has received honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, McGill University, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Ottawa, and most recently the University of Guelph. Plummer was inducted into the American Theatre’s Hall of Fame in 1986 and into Canada’s Walk of Fame in Toronto in 1997.
READ CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER’S LETTER OF SUPPORT
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