(13 December 1929 - 5 February 2021)
The Canadian actor Christopher Plummer will always be associated with The Sound of Music. He played Captain von Trapp, the father of seven children he treated with military discipline. He was born in Toronto and, inspired by Olivier’s Henry V, he began acting in high school. He toured in theatre from 1953 and also made his TV debut. In 1956 he joined the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival before entering films in 1958 with Sidney Lumet’s Stage Struck. Then came Nicholas Ray’s Wind Across the Everglades, Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire - in which he played the emperor Commodus - and The Sound of Music (1965). The same year saw him in Inside Daisy Clover, Robert Mulligan’s adaptation of Gavin Lambert’s novel in which Plummer played a Hollywood studio head. His film career continued with roles as a Nazi spy in Triple Cross, Field Marshall Rommel in The Night of the Generals, the title role in Oedipus the King, a high commissioner in Nobody Runs Forever, a squadron leader in Battle of Britain, and the Inca leader Atahualpa in The Royal Hunt of the Sun. He played Rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King and also played an archduke, an emperor, a grand duke, a monsignor and even Sherlock Holmes in Murder By Decree. He was Aristotle, Herod, Tolstoy, the Kaiser, John Barrymore and took over from Kevin Spacey as J. Paul Getty in Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World, for which he received an Academy Award nomination, the oldest actor to be so honoured, aged 88. Two of his best parts were in Beginners (2010), playing a man coming out of the closet at 75, for which he won an Oscar (at 82 the oldest actor to do so), and his voice-over on My Dog Tulip (2009), a beautifully animated tale of a gay man and his dog. His last films were Rian Johnson's critically acclaimed whodunit Knives Out and The Last Full Measure, a real-life war drama (2019). Christopher Plummer, who has died aged 91 following a fall, married the actress Tammy Grimes in 1956 and they have a daughter, the successful actress Amanda Plummer. Then he married the journalist Patricia Lewis in 1962, and finally the actress Elaine Taylor in 1970. He wrote a memoir, In Spite of Myself, in 2008.
MICHAEL DARVELL
