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
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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