The Man who Sticks in a Thumb
And Pulls Out Aplomb:
Christopher Plummer

By Hal Drucker


Photo: Richard Bain

“I think the greatest part ever written was probably Hamlet and the problem is that no one can play it properly at the age that it’s supposed to be played.”

The mellifluously cultured voice that poured through my receiver from Stratford, Ontario, belonged to the finest North American actor who ever trod the boards in my seven decades-plus of theater-going. He phoned between performances of Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra.

I confess I was taken aback by the man’s astonishing contention, in spite of the fact that Hamlet historically has been tackled by nonconformists, including the Divine Sarah Bernhardt. But … a 79 year old? 

“I know I could make a wonderful Hamlet now,” he said as clinically as Louis Pasteur analyzing a Petri Dish, “because I know so much more about things.”  

I told him of my recent interview with Michael Caine, in which Sir Michael who played Horatio to Christopher Plummer’s Melancholy Dane in a 1964 BBC production said, “Plummer was the first Hamlet that I ever understood. He was quite simply the greatest and I had already seen Larry’s [Laurence Olivier].”

“That’s nice. Michael is a fine guy and a fun guy, and I’m grateful to him for his judgment. However my technique is so much improved over the years.  Edwin Booth played Hamlet when he was in his sixties and it didn’t matter. He probably did it beautifully. A few white hairs didn’t deter the audience or distract them from the piece. But what with television and movies, these days you’ve got to be the right age. It’s a shame; it’s a part that needs to be played by an older man.”


Plummer with Claire Julien as Cordelia in the Lincoln Center Theater
production of King Lear (2004). Photo: Joan Marcus

“In a role that incontestably suited your age,” I said, “as King Lear, first at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival,  and later transported to Lincoln Center in New York where I saw it, I was astounded by your physical prowess at 75 when you carried the dead weight of Claire Julien’s Cordelia off the stage in the final scene.”

“Well I didn’t carry her. I dragged her off.  As our director Jonathan Miller said, ‘it looks like you’re bringing in the laundry.’”

“Jonathan [actor, director of theater and opera, raconteur, writer and surgeon] is one of the two true geniuses I have known – the other being Orson Welles.”

Until Plummer’s titanic Lear, I had seen many versions over the years, the best being John Houseman’s production with Louis Calhern in the title role in 1951. Other than Calhern’s doddering performance, it was notable for the extraordinary Joseph Wiseman, as Edmund the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester. Together with Iago, Edmund is in my view, Shakespeare’s most engagingly conniving villain. In Jean Anouilh’s The Lark, translated by Lillian Hellman, Wiseman, who shared a dressing room with Plummer, played the sinister Inquisitor.  


Plummer is Henry Drummond, Brian Dennehy is Matthew Brady in the 2007 revival of Inherit the Wind, based on the infamous Scopes Trial.
Photo: Joan Marcus

Wiseman’s performance as Edmund ranks with such portrayals I have witnessed as JoséFerrer as Cyrano, Lee J. Cobb in Death of a Salesman, Jason Robards in The Iceman Cometh, Frederic March in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Burl Ives in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Paul Muni as Henry Drummond in the original Inherit the Wind and Plummer as Iago opposite James Earl Jones in Othello, and such title roles as  Lear and Caesar in this season’s Caesar and Cleopatra.

Frank Rich, then theater critic of the New York Times, really nailed it, in a 1982 review of that memorable 1982 Othello:

“Mr. Plummer, a sensational actor in peak form, has made something crushing out of Shakespeare's archvillain. He gives us evil so pure - and so bottomless - that it can induce tears. Our tears are not for the dastardly Iago, of course - that would be wrong. No, what Mr. Plummer does is make us weep for a civilization that can produce such a man and allow him to flower.”

“For a long time I was a great big fan of Muni as a movie actor,” said Plummer.

“I thought he was wonderful as Pasteur and wonderful as Emile Zola. But then he overdid it a bit, got rather hammy and terribly sentimental. I worked with Paul Muni on television (Please don’t ask me the name of the show). Muni was the old man. He was extraordinary. He couldn’t remember his lines, so he had to be prompted via earphones from somebody in the control room. So there was always this long, long pause before he spoke and he tried to fill in with this wonderful variety of expressions. It was rather difficult to work with him because the timing was all shot. Muni was Brando's favorite actor when he was on Broadway. He loved how chameleon-like he was.”


Christopher Plummer’s regal bearing has never been more in evidence than when as Caesar, he takes the hand of Nikki M. James as Cleopatra and sweeps her magisterially around the thrust stage of the Festival Theater.
Stratford Shakespeare Festival photo: David Hou

Plummer acknowledged with thanks my review of the Stratford Festival’s present production of Caesar and Cleopatra, which I suggested was even better than the C & C I had seen on Broadway with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 1951.

In addition to Caesar, which stage performances are you proudest of?

“I’m not proud of my performances. I enjoy them. When I enjoy them, then I know I’m fairly good. When I don’t enjoy them, I know I’m bad and miscast.

I’m enjoying Caesar, for example. I’m having a ball with Shaw’s play. And the audience is just adoring it, because they’ve come expecting something else, and they get a strangely modern Shaw, with references to Iraq that are resounding. They laugh and they relax. It’s a sure-fire laugh piece. I knew it was gong to be funny but I didn’t realize it was going to be sure-fire.  Because no matter what kind of audiences we play to, they all laugh at the right time at the right place.    So this I’m enjoying thoroughly. That first opening sequence in which Caesar encounters a frightened girl who happens to be Cleopatra, is such a magical little gem. He really hit it on the head, did Shaw. It is funny and the best-written part of the play… which is a bit unfortunate. I had seen Vivien Leigh play it on the screen and I knew the Oliviers. God knows, I had known Larry for a long time and Vivien slightly. I knew Larry more when he was married to Joan Plowright. Vivien was beautiful, but far too cute and knowing. All the other girls I’ve seen as Cleopatra are too knowing, too soon.  In Nikki [M. James] I’ve got the best Cleopatra ever because she looks the right age, the age that Shaw envisaged her and she doesn’t look knowing. Nikki is an amazing young girl. She is a wild little animal. She developed so quickly as an actress, having been brought up in the musical world [most recently as the lead in The Wiz]. I think it’s quite astounding she could do as well as she does and to get better every day. It’s extraordinary to watch her. They want it in London and they want it in New York. We’ve got five producers snapping at our heels, which is very flattering and very nice. I don’t know yet; I don’t know if I can I have so many other plans. I’m not chasing myself to Broadway. I’m going to Florida and lie down in the sun. Somehow, to put a period on it so it breeds success would be nice. If you have fun with what you’re doing then the audience is going to have fun.” 

Let me ask you about Cyrano the Musical, which I regret not having seen, it having lasted but 49 performances on Broadway, though earning you a Tony. In spite of its early demise, did you have fun?

“Well, of course. I did Cyrano de Bergerac several times, even played Christian to Jo Ferrer’s Cyrano (which he also directed) and Claire Bloom’s Roxane in a 1955  Producer’s Showcase TV production. I always wanted to do a musical of it, but unfortunately we stayed in Boston for eight or nine weeks and we could have stayed for the rest of the year. The people were coming in droves. We opened in the summertime of 1973, which is a disastrous thing to do in New York City. Terrible timing. But the problem with the musical Cyrano is Edmund Rostand. You cannot compete with that play. Very early on I called the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, whom I knew because he was always offering me things I never could sing since I didn’t have the proper voice. Not even for Professor Henry Higgins which Alan and his composer partner Frederic (Fritz) Loewe wanted me to take over for Rex [Harrison] in My Fair Lady in ’56. What’s more, I was too young for the part. Well, I asked him, ‘Al would you and Fritz like to do the book and music for Cyrano de Bergerac?’ He came to see me in Stratford, where I was doing the straight play and very wisely said, ‘no, you can’t fight city hall.’ Nevertheless we did it and Michael J. Lewis’s music was charming, but there was no central big number that would sell it, like, for example, The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha. It needed something as big as that song.  I loved working with director and choreographer Michael Kidd; yes, that was exciting.  And I loved doing the play again.  But, what it was, was the play with incidental music. It put too much on me. They gave me too many numbers to sing, and I am not a singer.”

You may ask, O all-knowing reader, “If not a singer, how is it that Plummer sang Edelweiss so beautifully as Baron von Trapp in The Sound of Music.”


Christopher Plummer’s Memoir is not your usual as-told-to bio. It is 648 pages of entertaining, no-holds-barred accounts of his theater and movie exploits.
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Canada. © Christopher Plummer , Al Hirschfeld drawing, courtesy the Margo Feiden Galleries, Ltd.
Copy and paste: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679421627

For the answer, turn to Chapter 25 entitled, “S & M” of Christopher Plummer’s new memoir, In Spite of Myself.

“I had a secret plan to one day turn Cyrano de Bergerac into a Broadway musical.   ‘S & M’ would therefore be a perfect workout in preparation for such an event. I also had never sung before in my life, not even in the shower … Well, my first punishment was when they insisted I immediately record the guide track with Julie [Andrews] before shooting began. Some of which would be used in the final picture. Hell, I was still struggling with my singing lessons. I appealed and was denied. Twentieth Century-Fox insisted they would get someone else to record. I saw my career as a second Maurice Chevalier dwindling fast.”

After Plummer agreed to record the guide track, Director Robert Wise felt  his singing voice was overshadowed by the singing voice of Julie Andrews.  Plummer agreed with the assessment, so they enlisted Bill Lee to "ghost" his singing.  As for Julie Andrews, in Plummer’s memoir, he writes: “Her optimism, delicious humor and selfless nature were always on parade. It was as if she’d been hired not just to act, sing, and carry the entire film, but to keep everyone’s spirits up but as well. She did. She held us together and made us a team.” As for Plummer as von Trapp, he informed, “Of course, it was impossible to turn von Trapp into Hamlet, but Ernie [screenwriter writer Ernest Lehman] had given the poor-soft-centered Captain some edge to him.”


Plummer as Baron von Trapp and Andrews as Maria and the Trapp family players. 20th Century Fox.

I first saw The Sound of Music in a big movie palace near Piccadilly in London and scores of times since with my children and their children and visited the location near Salzburg where it was filmed. I don’t share actor Doug McCLure’s observation that watching The Sound of Music is like being beaten to death by a Hallmark card.  Singing voice or not, Plummer’s unexpected entrance to the drawing room where his previously regimented children were singing The Sound of Music, never ceases to well me up.

Click here: YouTube - The Sound of Music (1965) -"Sound of Music" Children Reprise
Or Copy and Paste: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGhZ3m8e0p0

Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was born Friday the 13th of December, 1929 in Toronto. He is the great-grandson of the third prime minister of Canada, Sir John Abbott, the first PM to be born on Canadian soil. His parents separated when he was an infant and he was raised in a cultured home in Montreal, by his mother and his aunts.

Do you remember your first appearance on stage in an elementary school assembly? For example that old time favorite from our collective youth, a recitation of Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees?”

“No, thank God.  But I did play Darcy in Pride and Prejudice at Montreal High School. I was a bit of a ham.”

“Oscar Peterson [the immortal jazz pianist] was a school chum of mine.”

I knew that Plummer was a jazz buff, having seen him in a couple of the popular jazz clubs on 52nd Street in Manhattan which I frequented in the ‘50s.

“Oscar led the high school band. Can you believe, on top of it we had Maynard Ferguson, the great jazz trumpeter? Yes, he was Canadian. I guess The Montreal High School Victory Serenaders was the best high school band in the history of high school bands.”

“I studied piano,” Plummer continued. “I wanted to be a classical pianist.  It was Rachmaninoff’s fault I fell for the keyboard. Acting only came when I discovered what a lonely life the piano would give one and how un-gregarious a profession it is. I preferred the wonderful communication that actors have and that the theater has with the audience.  And I opted for that instead. It was really after high school when I realized that acting was going to be my life.”

“Formal training?  I worked with a lot of rather good people. Fyodor Komisarjevsky of Moscow’s Imperial Theater, for one.  Kommie’s favorite was William Shatner. The future Captain Kirk and I ‘beamed up’ in many a production in our hometown of Montreal in French and English. He once understudied me as Henry V. So I had the best formal training, thank you very much.”

Paul Newman had died a couple of days before our interview. I asked Plummer if he knew him.

“Yes, of course, I’d known Paul since the fifties, when I was living in New York, when he and Joanne [Woodward] first got together. And of course, he was down the road from Elaine and me in Connecticut. Paul and Joanne and I have been friends for years. Although, it was expected, it came as a devastating blow. He came up to Stratford, Connecticut to see the plays I appeared in. He was a generous soul you know and God knows how generous he was with his money from Newman’s Own. How he gave the whole thing away to charity was just extraordinary. A remarkable human being.”

Did you act with him professionally?

“I never did. Joanne and I played the leads in Michael Cristofer’s The Shadow Box, a television production which Paul directed. And he directed very well.”


Plummer was uncannily persuasive as 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace in the investigative movie The Insider which co-starred Al Pacino and Russell Crowe as Jeffrey Wigand, the executive who blew the whistle on Big Tobacco.
Photo: Hal Drucker, from HDTV. Touchstone Pictures.

Plummer has been married three times. His first marriage, to Tony-Award-winning actress Tammy Grimes, was in 1956 and lasted for four years. The couple's daughter, Amanda Plummer (born 1957), is an acclaimed actress in her own right. Plummer was married to journalist Patricia Lewis from 1962 until their divorce in 1967. He and former British dancer and actress, Elaine Regina Taylor have been married since 1970 and live in a 100-year-old converted farm house in Connecticut. “Elaine? As Hamlet might say, she has plucked out the heart of my mystery.

“Amanda is always going all over the place, all over the world. She’s an inveterate traveler. She is making a movie in France; don’t ask me about it, I don’t know what it’s about. Then she’s coming back to see me in Caesar hopefully, before she goes home to LA.”

Do you have any other children

“No, one is quite enough. I have lots of dogs, which I almost prefer to children. But Amanda was my pride and joy as a child, she is so talented. Amanda in Agnes of God, that was extraordinary wasn’t it? It frightened the hell out of me. I didn’t feel like a father. I didn’t know who she was.  It was a little demon at work.”


In his book, Plummer states: “ No other film had ever captured Rudyard Kipling’s heart, his style and his essence as had The Man Who Would Be King. He would have been most proud of Sean Connery’s rich performance of Dravot  and Michael Caine’s marvelous Carnehan , one of his best performances ever. “ Plummer as Kipling is flanked by Caine (left) and Connery. Allied Artists Pictures Corp.

I informed Plummer, that in addition to Michael Caine, people in the theater and movie community whom I have interviewed invariably rate him at the top of their profession for his acting skills on the screen and/or stage.

Max Von Sydow, for instance, one of the greatest film actors of our generation, who did the award-worthy The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The Swedish born actor did a movie in Canada with Plummer, directed by the Canadian filmmaker Paolo Barzman  Emotional Arithmetic. “A lovely man, absolutely. I’m crazy about Max. I’ve been a fan of his since I was very young, watching him in all the [Ingmar] Bergman movies.” The movie which also stars Susan Sarandon and Gabriel Byrne deals with holocaust survivors who are reunited at a farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.


Henry Fonda’s  Clarence Darrow, and Plummer’s Barrymore are the finest solo performances I have  seen.  The elegant Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. , who according to Plummer knew Jack Barrymore well, “happily endorsed my performance.” “I resolutely refuse to thank my mother,” Plummer announced as he  received a 1997 Tony Best Actor Award for his performance. PLAYBILL® Used by permission.

Playwright A. R. told me when they began casting for his marvelous two-character play Love Letters  Elaine Stritch wanted to do it.  “If you know Elaine, she’s very frank. ‘I’d love to do that play of yours,’ she said.  ‘Well who would you do it with?’  She said, ‘I’m thinking of Chris Plummer.’   Plummer said, ‘I don’t want to do something that other actors are doing.’”

Plummer in turn said to me, “ I love Elaine and I remember my reaction to that – it was quite funny. I said to Gurney, ‘I’d love to do it with Elaine, thank you very much. We might have a great future for us on Broadway.’   Then I learned it was to be done by a succession of actors – a lot of other couples – ‘What the hell is this anyway? Am I working in Communist Russia?’ He then told me that Jason Robards agreed to do it with Elaine Stritch. I know, I know. My old pal. But I’d be damned if I would do it, knowing that somebody else would be hot on my heels.’

“At the time of our first meeting, Jason had just made a phenomenal success of Hickey in The Iceman Cometh in one of the most dynamic and shattering performances I have ever seen. His explosive combustion of pain and laughter hit  me with such force … I utterly forgot I was in a theater. Jason was probably my best actor friend that I ever had. I adored him and we were so bad together. I tell lots of stories in my book about Jason and me.”

“He was great to work with, great to watch and great to drink with. What better friend could you have, for God’s sake?”