Arts & Entertainment
An Evening with Christopher Plummer
The Tony Award-winning actor graces the stage at the Wilton Library.
All the world remains a stage for Christopher Plummer, who has played Iago and King Lear, Mike Wallace and Star Trek’s General Chang.
“If someone said I can only do one thing, between film and theater, it would be the theater,” said Plummer, elegantly dressed in gray flannel slacks and a sharp blue blazer. “Nothing can replace the live response of the audience. It’s a tonic.”
It’s a tonic that has invigorated Plummer, 80, since he first stepped on a stage as a teen. Thursday the Oscar nominated actor graced the stage at Wilton Library to discuss his memoir “In Spite of Myself.” Telling tales of the theater and friendships forged on set, Plummer answered audience questions with aplomb.
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“I knew I’d love meeting Christopher Plummer when I saw that four out of five of the names in his dedication were to his dogs,” said Zelie Pforzheimer, director of the Wilton Playshop.
In the manner of James Lipton of “Inside the Actors Studio," Pforzheimer facilitated the discussion. Five hundred people filled the library, which closed at 5 p.m. to prepare for the event. Many in the crowd whispered how they fell in love with Plummer as children.
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Plummer’s memoir, published in 2008, received good reviews. A review of the Kindle edition said it is “an immensely satisfying memoir, of rare grace, good humor, and unapologetic self-honesty…. as rich as a Christmas pudding.”
Indeed the Weston resident talked about Broadway in the 1950s, a time when drinking was fashionable and theater was king.
“I liked the camaraderie of it,” Plummer said. “Sitting around a table with Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole; men dedicated to drinking. And they’d say ‘If you can stay up all night drinking and do Hamlet the next day you’d be a man.’”
He talked about his close friendship with Jason Robards whom he described as the reincarnation of playwright Eugene O’Neill. And he lamented the decline of the straight play on Broadway .
“Theater hasn’t retained its prominence in this country. Broadway in the 1950s was the Golden Age,” Plummer said. “I was lucky to have grown up in that.”
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Plummer, grew up in Montreal. He is the great-grandson of former Canadian Prime Minister Sir John Abbott.
“I grew up in a wonderfully rarefied existence,” said Plummer, who received the Companion of the Order of Canada in 1968. “But then suddenly, our family lost all our money and we were kind of skating on disastrous ground. My mom went to work and I was impressed with her guts.”
Strong women guided Plummer throughout his life, teaching him the value of hard work and the magic of the written word.
“They instilled a love of words in me,” Plummer said. “I spent my entire life with words. Words have seduced me sine I was very young.”
He quipped that he left Canada to make sure he wasn’t “guaranteed maximum obscurity.” Yet, Plummer said he believes one has a duty to travel and live outside their country for a time.
“One must run away from home. It’s an absolute rule,” Plummer said. "Otherwise how are you going to learn anything?”
Plummer learned to live life richly.
He once traveled in a private train car with actress-stage manager Katherine Cornell across America. He and some fellow actors once coaxed a police officer and his horse into a New York City bar for a drink. And he spent time in Russia during Leonid Brezhnev’s regime to shoot the film “Waterloo.”
He has acted in more than one hundred feature films, including voicing the character of Christopher Muntz in Disney’s “Up” and the narrator in the television series “Madeline.”
Plummer has starred in Great Britain’s National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Stratford Festival of Canada and 16 Broadway plays.
Pforzheimer spoke about a passage in the book she found both amusing and sad. Plummer described acting in Hamlet before busloads of school children. In Act 5, as Hamlet died, the children howled in laughter and threw things.
“So how does one bring children up to love Shakespeare?” Pforzheimer asked the actor.
“They should come at night with their parents so it’s an occasion,” Plummer said. “Schools push them too young and if they see the wrong play they can kill it [love of theater].
He received two Tony Awards for Best Actor and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his 2009 film the ‘Last Station."
Plummer recently completed work on two films scheduled for a 2011 release. He may also write another book. This summer Plummer heads to Stratford, Canada to play Prospero, a role no one should interpret as Plummer’s farewell to theater.
“I ain’t done yet,” he said, as a twinkling smile illuminated his face.
