I haven’t posted much recently… busy working at The Times by day and writing screenplays by night… but the death of Christopher Plummer leads me to repost an entertaining interview I did with him in 2009 for The Times, on the occasion of Pixar’s Up!. I’d forgotten almost everything about it till re-reading it just now (even the bits about William Shatner and Peter O’Toole), except for Plummer’s insistence on donning a neckerchief for the photographer — “It’s the neck that really shows your age,” he confided. A fellow Canadian, a great actor, an entertaining raconteur, and a true gent.
In the storybook town of Weston, Connecticut, 50 miles north of New York, Christopher Plummer is holding court. The white farmhouse he shares with his wife of 39 years is only a little older than he (nearly 80). The manicured lawns are exquisitely maintained. But when he unleashes the first of many F-words, giving it as much welly as any Shakespearean soliloquy, it’s evident that The Sound of Music star has little in common with the stuffy prig he played in the film.
Plummer, it turns out, is a hedonist of the first order. The scion of a distinguished Canadian family (his great-grandfather was Prime Minister), he was drinking wine with his meals from the age of 12. By his teens he’d taken up the bottle in earnest. Stumbling home as usual one winter night, he passed out in a snowdrift. Had his mother not come to find him he would have frozen to death. His recent autobiography, not yet out in England, is called In Spite of Myself to commemorate his attempts at career suicide. He was nearly fired from a couple of early stage roles after drunkenly missing the matinee.
By the time of The Sound of Music (1965) — which Plummer famously refers to as “the sound of mucus” — he was a fully fledged hellraiser. In a break of a few weeks from filming he went on a bar crawl around Austria, Bavaria and Hungary, cut short only by crippling back pain. He was laid up in his hotel for days with sciatica, but still managed to have his needs attended to by a local beauty. When he returned to the film they had to let out his costumes to accommodate his ballooning frame.
“If you were playing Captain Von Trapp,” Plummer exclaims, “you would have done exactly the same. What an empty carcass of a part. I asked his [real-life] nephew once, and he said Von Trapp was the biggest bore in the world.”
The theatre, Plummer says, you do for love; films you frequently do for money. This helps to explain why, out of 100-plus Plummer movies, none has eclipsed The Sound of Music in the public imagination. And though he was lucky to live in Montreal in the Forties, New York in the Fifties and London in the Sixties — fine decades for all of those cities — he then lost his way. His autobiography devotes 500 pages to his life up until then; only 100 pages to the four decades thereafter. “The Seventies,” Plummer reflects wryly, “I wanted to put in my book and outline in black, and simply say, ‘F*** the Seventies!’ I honestly don’t remember them at all.”
And yet now Plummer’s time has finally come again. He has three big movies out within a month of each other: Up, the tenth and arguably finest Pixar animation; The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, Terry Gilliam’s latest piece of flawed genius; and 9, a quirky animation set in a dystopian future, produced by Tim Burton.
Plummer is splendid in Up as the voice of the explorer Charles Muntz, who devotes his life to finding a rare bird in the Venezuelan mountains. At first Muntz welcomes the arrival of an elderly widower and a 12-year-old Boy Scout in a floating house carried by 10,000 balloons. But solitude breeds paranoia, and it’s not long before he’s trying to kill them both.
Plummer is often at his best playing villains: he has that patrician bearing and slightly sardonic smile that suggests he’s mocking the world. “That sardonic thing is mostly when the dialogue is puerile,” he laughs. “You want to let the audience in on the fact that, ‘Yes, I know this is shit.’
“Villains can be great fun to play, but you need to find the good in them, then they’re all the more horrible. That’s the only way to play evil, I think — to play against it.”
His Muntz is strangely sympathetic, even when trying to toss an innocent 12-year-old from an airship at 20,000ft. “I thought it was a terrific film,” enthuses Plummer, who is by no means shy of knocking his own movies when they fall short. “Terribly clever. And not cute. I was so relieved, no Disney sentimentality there, thank God. Pixar are wonderful.”
The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus gives Plummer his first lead in a major film since, perhaps, playing Sherlock Holmes in Murder by Decree (1979). He’s worked with Terry Gilliam before, in Twelve Monkeys, so knew to expect the unexpected. “He’s half genius and half madman. I’m crazy about him. But I did say: ‘For God’s sake, Terry, don’t give us too many plots or too many characters. You’re always putting in someone you’ve fallen in love with on the street and the audience can’t follow it!’ And he’d say: ‘I know, I know, I will.’ And then introduce five or six other people as if he hadn’t listened to you at all.”
This time, ironically, Gilliam had no choice. He had to bring in Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to complete Heath Ledger’s role after the actor died of an accidental overdose. “None of us could believe it,” Plummer, says. “Terry least of all. He’s a very dear soul underneath all that wacky stuff, a very emotional man, and he was shocked to the core, saying: ‘It’s my fault, it’s me, everyone who comes into contact with me, I’m a jinx’ — because of course his film Don Quixote had to be abandoned halfway through filming.
“Heath was a very good actor and a real sweetheart. At the Christmas break he flew all the way out to Australia and back the next day, just to surprise his parents! As to the press [reports implied that he committed suicide] … f*** ’em. Heath was dying to direct and he was dying to play great parts. He loved his daughter [Matilda Rose, now 4] and she worshipped him. He had everything to live for.”
Then there’s 9, which he hasn’t yet seen but knows will be “very original to look at”, and he’s more recently filmed The Last Station, in which he plays Tolstoy opposite Helen Mirren as the writer’s wife, Sophia. But his real love is still the stage. He hopes to do something in London in a year or so, and is never more animated than when the talk turns to Shakespeare.
He’s a mine of tales. Playing Henry V in Stratford, Canada, he was hospitalised with gall stones. His understudy won raves and launched his career by playing it the exact opposite of Plummer. The plucky young man in question? William Shatner. Captain Kirk was to return the favour by casting Plummer in Star Trek VI, which explains the many Shakespearean digressions in this otherwise turgid blockbuster.
Conversely, Plummer played Henry V in Stratford-upon-Avon — for which he won the Evening Standard Actor of the Year award — because Peter O’Toole gave up the role to be in Lawrence of Arabia. O’Toole later burst into Plummer’s dressing room, where a group of rather proper well-wishers had gathered. “Look at this,” O’Toole screamed. “It’s all your fault, you colonial p***k. You’re playing my part and this is the thanks I get” — and O’Toole dropped his trousers to show off a behind that was raw after riding camels bareback.
Plummer’s wife, a former actress and dancer named Elaine (he calls her “Fuff”, rhyming with “pouffe”), wafts in to offer more coffee. Plummer had two marriages before her, and an actress daughter, Amanda Plummer, whom he seldom saw. His memoirs don’t stint on his sexual exploits. Was it hard on Fuff to read the details? “She’s too secure for that,” he says. “Anyway, that was all before I met her.”
Also, the impression shines through that he was promiscuous, not through chauvinism, but because he loves women. “And I needed them! One found oneself getting terribly involved, and vulnerable, about a relationship that you thought you were just going to toss off.”
His mother died when he was 25. She haunts his memoirs. “I always felt frustrated that I hadn’t shown her the right courtesy, the right affection. I’d like to have done something for her, but it was too late. So you create that … not necessarily guilt, but longing, for something, that you find in other people.”
We wrap it up there. He dons a jaunty little neckerchief for the Times photographer. Outside, the September sun still shines like summer. The cicadas sound like water sprinklers. Two young bucks have been locking antlers in the nature reserve beyond his 25 acres. The Plummers don’t entertain much, why should they? They have each other. Whatever it is Plummer once looked for at the bottom of a bottle, he seems to have found it now.
London, Hollywood 