Christopher Plummer

Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was born on December 13, 1929, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and died on February 5, 2021. The only child of John Orme Plummer, a securities salesman, and Isabella Mary Abbott, whose grandmother was the granddaughter of Canadian prime minister Sir John Abbott, Plummer grew up primarily in Senneville, Quebec, after his parents separated shortly after his birth. His mother worked as secretary to the Dean of Sciences at McGill University, an institution with which the family had strong ties, though Plummer himself never attended university. Among his notable relatives were Canadian classical pianist Janina Fialkowska, his cousin, and British actor Nigel Bruce, his second cousin. On his father's side, patent lawyer F. B. Fetherstonhaugh was his great-uncle.

Plummer spoke both English and French fluently and began studying piano as a schoolboy before developing a passion for theatre while attending the High School of Montreal. Watching Laurence Olivier's film Henry V in 1944 drew him toward acting. He trained as an apprentice with the Montreal Repertory Theatre, where William Shatner was also an apprenticing actor, and Herbert Whittaker, theatre critic for the Montreal Gazette and an amateur stage director, cast him at age 18 as Oedipus in Jean Cocteau's La Machine infernale after noticing his performance as Mr. Darcy in a school production of Pride and Prejudice in 1946.

Plummer made his professional acting debut in September 1948 with Ottawa's Stage Society in The Rivals, performing a new production every two weeks across a full season. In 1952, he appeared in productions at the Bermudiana Theatre in Hamilton, Bermuda, where an American producer recruited him. Edward Everett Horton subsequently hired him to play Gerard in the 1953 road show of André Roussin's Nina. His Broadway debut came in January 1953 in Diana Morgan's The Starcross Story, opposite Mary Astor and Margaret Bannerman, though the production closed on opening night following a plagiarism lawsuit. His next Broadway appearance, Home is the Hero, ran for 30 performances between September and October 1954. He then appeared alongside Katharine Cornell and Tyrone Power in The Dark Is Light Enough, which ran for 69 performances from February to April 1955, with Plummer serving as Power's understudy during its subsequent tour.

Later in 1955, Plummer appeared in his first Broadway hit, Jean Anouilh's The Lark, opposite Julie Harris, playing Warwick. That same year he portrayed Jason opposite Dame Judith Anderson in Robinson Jeffers' adaptation of Medea at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris as part of Le Festival International, and played Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and Ferdinand in The Tempest at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. He returned to the American Shakespeare Festival in 1981 to play the title role in Henry V. His Stratford Shakespeare Festival debut came in 1956, when he played the title role in Henry V, a production later performed at the Edinburgh Festival. At Stratford in 1957 he played Hamlet and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, and the following year took on Leontes in The Winter's Tale, Bardolph in Henry IV, Part 1, and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.

In 1959, Plummer appeared in Elia Kazan's Broadway production of Archibald MacLeish's Pulitzer Prize-winning play J.B., earning his first Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play. His subsequent Tony-nominated Broadway roles included Othello in 1982, No Man's Land in 1994, King Lear in 2004, and Inherit the Wind in 2007, in which he played Henry Drummond. His Broadway career, which spanned from 1954 to 2007, also included productions of Macbeth, The Good Doctor, and Cyrano, among others.

Plummer received two Tony Awards during his career. The first came in 1974 for Best Actor in a Musical for his portrayal of Cyrano de Bergerac in Cyrano. The second came in 1997 for Best Actor in a Play for his portrayal of John Barrymore in Barrymore, a win that was also recognized with a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play that same year. He also received two Primetime Emmy Awards and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as an elderly gay man in the 2011 comedy-drama Beginners, making him the only Canadian recipient of the Triple Crown of Acting. He received additional Academy Award nominations for his portrayals of Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009) and J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World (2017), as well as a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Grammy Award nomination.

Plummer made his film debut in Stage Struck in 1958 and his first starring film role the same year in Wind Across the Everglades. He became widely recognized for playing Captain Georg von Trapp in the 1965 musical film The Sound of Music alongside Julie Andrews. His extensive film work included The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Waterloo (1970), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), Somewhere in Time (1980), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), Malcolm X (1992), The Insider (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), The New World (2005), Syriana (2005), Inside Man (2006), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and Knives Out (2019). He also narrated The Man Who Planted Trees (1987).

His television career began with his Canadian television debut in a February 1953 CBC production of Othello, starring Lorne Greene, and his American television debut the same year on a Studio One episode. Throughout the 1950s he appeared on programs including The Alcoa Hour, General Electric Theater, Kraft Television Theatre, and Omnibus, as well as in television adaptations of The Philadelphia Story (1959), Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1960), and Cyrano de Bergerac (1962). His television work with Julie Harris included Little Moon of Alban, which earned him his first Emmy Award nomination, a 1958 adaptation of Johnny Belinda, and a 1959 version of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House in which he played Torvald Helmer.