Christopher Plummer: The Last Great Leading Man

Christopher Plummer is playing Prospero at Stratford, and although he’s 80 years old, he wants you to know this isn’t his swan song  By Alec Scott

Act your age: Plummer at the opening night of Stratford’s As You Like It in June. “Learning great roles really helps your memory when you’re old,” he says (Image: Christopher Wahl)

At the Oscars last March, Christopher Plummer waited for Penélope Cruz, up on the glittery stage, to open the big white envelope. He was nominated in the best supporting actor category—his first nomination after appearing in nearly 120 movies over a six-decade-long career. He’d played an elderly, crazily bearded Tolstoy opposite his long-time friend Helen Mirren in The Last Station. He is 80, and although his face is drawn, he still projects the look he did at 35, when he portrayed Baron von Trapp in The Sound of Music, a face that seemed to be saying of the feel-good family show unfolding around him, “Can you believe this shit?”

Cruz announced the award would go to Christoph Waltz, the Austrian actor who played the ruthless SS colonel in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Though Plummer smiled the requisite smile when the camera flashed on him, that face still retained its imperious mien. So Oscar voters preferred Nazi scum to a literary lion. Plummer was philosophical about the loss—a nomination at 80 was something. Most of his old acting comrades were dead. At least he was here, a survivor from another age—a coup, given how hard he’d lived his first 40 years.

See a slideshow of Christopher Plummer’s life and times »

Lately he’s worked with the fever of a man facing an immutable deadline. In addition to The Last Station, he was the voice of the villainous Charles Muntz in last year’s animated hit Up; he lent heft to the director Terry Gilliam’s latest, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus; and he’s just wrapped an indie family drama, Mike Mills’s Beginners, in which he plays Ewan McGregor’s father.

A month after the Oscars, I met Plummer in New York at the famous oak-panelled bar of the Algonquin Hotel, an old haunt of his, to talk to him about his next role. He wore a resplendent camel blazer and a festively striped shirt, every inch the archetypal grand old man of the stage. He was a few weeks away from beginning rehearsals for The Tempest at the Stratford Festival. Playing Prospero—a deposed duke who uses his magical powers to take revenge on his enemies and manipulate his beloved daughter—is considered one of the greatest challenges in theatre and often the cap to long, illustrious careers.

Plummer will arrive (as he always does) at the first rehearsal with his lines memorized. His preparations also have him thinking of his age. “The thing about learning all these great roles—it really does help your memory when you’re old like I am,” he told me. “The terror of losing your memory—I don’t think there’s anything more terrifying in life.” He’s been mulling over some of his lines and is casually rewriting where he sees fit. “There are some awful ones,” he said, “that sound like some bad French-Canadian English.”

He is the star of Stratford this year, no question—his is the face on all the brochures. Sales to the Shakespeare plays are up 27 per cent compared to last season. He’ll appear four times a week for the duration—that’s almost 50 performances. It’s a long play (five acts, as much as two and a half hours), and Prospero is onstage for most of it. It’s difficult and exhausting. “I detest the life of the theatre—Jesus, the energy it takes,” he says. “But there’s nothing like that immediate response. I need assurance as a person; I need the audience’s affection.”

Playing Prospero is also a test. Although he doesn’t want this to be his swan song, he does want to do the definitive Prospero—nothing less will satisfy him. He’s hoping to bring this Tempest to London or New York, having taken the King Lear he did at Stratford in 2002 to the Lincoln Center, where he garnered rave reviews. Plummer portrayed Lear as the victim of a stroke. “I made him slur his speech,” he says, “and this sort of monster patriarch gradually gets shorter and shorter.” His performance wasn’t as full of grand gestures as the late William Hutt’s last Lear—Plummer is a subtle actor, a minimalist—but his monarch had more authority.

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