Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer CC (December 13, 1929 – February 5, 2021) was a Canadian actor. His career spanned seven decades, gaining recognition for his performances in film, television, and theatre. Plummer made his Broadway debut in 1954, and continued to act in leading roles on stage playing Cyrano de Bergerac in Cyrano (1974), Iago in Othello, as well as playing the titular roles in Macbeth, King Lear, and Barrymore. Plummer also performed in stage productions J.B., No Man's Land, and Inherit the Wind.
Plummer was born in Toronto and grew up
in Senneville, Quebec. After appearing on stage, he made his film debut in
Sidney Lumet's Stage Struck (1958), and won great acclaim with audiences for
his performance as Captain Georg von Trapp in the musical film The Sound of
Music (1965) alongside Julie Andrews.[1] Plummer portrayed numerous major
historical figures, including Roman emperor Commodus in The Fall of the Roman
Empire (1964), Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington in Waterloo (1970),
Rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Mike Wallace in The
Insider (1999), Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009), Kaiser Wilhelm II in
The Exception (2016), and J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World (2017).
Plummer also appeared in such films as Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992), Ron
Howard's A Beautiful Mind (2001), Terrence Malick's The New World (2005), David
Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Mike Mills's Beginners
(2011), Rian Johnson's Knives Out (2019), and Todd Robinson's The Last Full
Measure (2019).
Plummer received various accolades for his work, including an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a British Academy Film Award. He is one of the few performers to have received the Triple Crown of Acting, and the only Canadian. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor at the age of 82 for Beginners (2010), becoming the oldest person to win an acting award, and he received a nomination at the age of 88 for All the Money in the World, making him the oldest person to be nominated in an acting category.
Other Artistic Accomplishments
Plummer also wrote for the stage,
television and the concert-hall. He and Sir Neville Marriner rearranged Shakespeare's
Henry V with Sir William Walton's music as a concert piece. They recorded the work with Marriner's
chamber orchestra the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. He performed it and other works with the New
York Philharmonic and symphony orchestras of London, Washington, D.C., Cleveland,
Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax. With Marriner he made his Carnegie Hall debut
in his own arrangements of Mendelssohn's incidental music to A Midsummer
Night's Dream.
Plummer's memoir, In Spite of
Myself, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 2008. Plummer was a patron of Theatre Museum Canada.
Death
Plummer died on February 5, 2021, in his
home in Weston, Connecticut, aged 91, after suffering complications from a
fall.
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