Christopher Plummer. THR. Variety.
He also had charm and arrogance in equal measure, and a streak both bibulous and promiscuous, all of which he acknowledged in later life as his manner softened and his habits waned. In one notorious incident in 1971, he was replaced by Anthony Hopkins in the lead role of “Coriolanus” at the National Theater in London; according to the critic Kenneth Tynan, who at the time was the literary manager of the National, Mr. Plummer was dismissed in a vote by the cast for crude and outrageous behavior.
For years, until he came to share the widely held opinion of his best-known film — the beloved 1965 musical “The Sound of Music,” in which he starred as the Austrian naval officer Georg von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews — as a pinnacle of warmhearted family entertainment, Mr. Plummer disparaged it as saccharine claptrap, famously referring to it as “S&M” or “The Sound of Mucus.”
“That sentimental stuff is the most difficult for me to play, especially because I’m trained vocally and physically for Shakespeare,” Mr. Plummer said in a People magazine interview in 1982. “To do a lousy part like von Trapp, you have to use every trick you know to fill the empty carcass of the role. That damn movie follows me around like an albatross.”
To be fair:
Despite all the recognition he received as an octogenarian, Plummer is probably most widely recognized for his performance as Captain Von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965), the syrupy family classic that he once referred to as “The Sound of Mucous.”
“It was so awful and sentimental and gooey,” he told THR in 2011. “You had to work terribly hard to try to infuse some minuscule bit of humor into it.” He also said most of his singing parts in the movie were performed by someone else.
Plummer, however, had changed his tune when he appeared with Andrews before a screening of the musical at the 2015 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood and added his hand- and footprints to the collection outside the TCL Chinese Theatre.
“The world has lost a consummate actor today and I have lost a cherished friend,” Andrews said Friday in a statement. “I treasure the memories of our work together and all the humor and fun we shared through the years.”
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He played Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Mark Antony and others of Shakespeare’s towering protagonists on prominent stages to consistent acclaim, and he starred in “Hamlet at Elsinore,” a critically praised 1964 television production, directed by Philip Saville and filmed at Kronborg Castle in Denmark, where (under the name Elsinore) the play is set.
But he also accepted roles in a fair share of clinkers, in which he made vivid sport of some hoary clichés — as the evil bigot hiding behind religiosity in “Skeletons” (1997), for example, one of his more than 40 television movies, or as the somber emperor of the galaxy who appears as a hologram in “Starcrash,” a 1978 rip-off of “Star Wars.”
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I enthusiastically recommend “The Man Who Would Be King”. I have not seen “Star Trek VI”, but I know some other readers of this blog have and may be able to comment upon that film.
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Mr. Plummer made notable Broadway appearances in works by Archibald MacLeish (the Devil-like Nickels in “J.B.” in 1958), Bertolt Brecht (the Hitler-like title role in “Arturo Ui” in 1963), Peter Shaffer (the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” in 1965), Neil Simon (the Chekhov-like narrator in “The Good Doctor” in 1973) and Harold Pinter (“No Man’s Land,” opposite Jason Robards, in 1994).
He won a Tony in the title role of “Cyrano,” a 1973 musical version of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” and in 2007 he was nominated for a Tony for the Clarence Darrow-like role of Henry Drummond, opposite Brian Dennehy, in “Inherit the Wind,” his final Broadway appearance.
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“The performance of a lifetime,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times of Mr. Plummer’s “King Lear,” which arrived on Broadway in 2004 after first being produced at the festival. “He delivers a Lear both deeply personal and universal: a distinctly individual man whose face becomes a mirror for every man’s mortality.”
Ms. Taylor, his wife, said that at his death Mr. Plummer had been preparing to appear as Lear on film for the first time, under the direction of Des McAnuff.
But it was his portrayal of Iago in a 1981 Connecticut production of “Othello,” which starred James Earl Jones in the title role and came to Broadway in 1982, that defined his reputation as a Shakespearean of profound depth, worthy of comparison to the likes of Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud.
“He gives us evil so pure — and so bottomless — that it can induce tears,” Frank Rich wrote in The Times. “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.”
The praise was amplified by the senior Times critic of the day, Walter Kerr, who wrote, “It is quite possibly the best single Shakespearean performance to have originated on this continent in our time.”
Noted: THR claims he was a die-hard “Star Trek” fan, even before doing “Star Trek VI”. The THR story includes a clip from “The Captains” with Mr. Plummer and William Shatner talking.