Christopher Plummer, the Canadian actor whose career spanned six decades, died today. He was 91. Plummer was perhaps best known for his role as Captain von Trapp in 1965’s The Sound of Music, though he would, over the scope of his career, portray figures both fictional and historical, including Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington (in 1970’s Waterloo), Rudyard Kipling (in 1975’s The Man Who Would Be King), Mike Wallace (in 1999’s The Insider), Leo Tolstoy (in 2009’s The Last Station), and J. Paul Getty (in All the Money in the World).
Plummer received an Academy Award for Beginners—at age 82, he was the oldest ever recipient—and a nomination for All the Money in the World—then aged 88, he became the oldest ever nominee. With two Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, a Golden Globe, a SAG award, and a British Academy Film Award under his belt, Plummer is one of just 24 actors to have won the “triple crown of acting”: an Academy Award, Emmy Award, and Tony Award.
In his 2008 book, In Spite of Myself: A Memoir, Plummer recalls his early years in Toronto, Canada, where he first began studying as a concert pianist, before changing tack to embrace the life of a stage actor. By 18, he was playing a highly praised Oedipus in Jean Cocteau’s Infernal Machine at the Montreal Repertory Theater, but it would be another seven years until Plummer made his Broadway debut in 1953 in a production of The Starcross Story.
Instantly at home in the “golden days” of Broadway, Plummer “shunned celluloid and adopted toward it a repulsively snobbish disregard,” an attitude he later told an interviewer from TCM that “came from almost everyone in the theater in those days. … The theater was the senior art and the cinema was this kind of brash newcomer that had come in and made a lot of people famous without a hell of a lot of training.” It was John Barrymore’s memoir, Good Night, Sweet Prince that inspired his ascension to the stage, Plummer said. “It was the first book about an actor I had ever read and—my god—I thought that if this guy could look that good and be that good on the stage and still be a drunk— god love him! That was my idea of absolute heaven. To be able to drink, act, look handsome…and get girls!” (Plummer later won the Tony for his portrayal of the stage icon in 1997’s Barrymore.)