Christopher Plummer, the dashing award-winning actor who played Captain von Trapp in the film The Sound of Music, has died. He was 91.
Plummer passed away on Friday morning at his home in Connecticut, with his wife Elaine Taylor by his side, according to his long-time friend and manager Lou Pitt, the Associated Press reported.
Plummer was born Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer in Toronto, Canada, the great-grandson of former Canadian Prime Minister Sir John Abbott. His parents divorced shortly after his birth, and he was raised by his mother and aunts.
Plummer began his career on stage and in radio in Canada in the 1940s and made his Broadway debut in 1954 in The Starcross Story. While still a relative unknown, he was cast as Hamlet in a 1963 performance, co-starring Robert Shaw and Michael Caine. The Emmy Award winning production was taped by the BBC at Elsinore Castle in Denmark, where the play is set, and released in 1964.
In 1956, he married fellow high-profile actress Tammy Grimes, who won two Tonys for Private Lives and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. It was with Grimes that Plummer had his only child, actress Amanda Plummer, in 1957. Like both her parents, she also won a Tony, in 1982 for Agnes of God.
The pair divorced in 1960, and Plummer went on to have a five-year marriage to Patricia Lewis, which also ended in divorce in 1967. Following their parting of ways, Plummer married his third wife, dancer Taylor, in 1970, and credited her with helping him overcome a drinking problem.
He was given Canada’s highest civilian honour, when he was invested as Companion of the Order of Canada by Queen Elizabeth II in 1968. He was later inducted into the American Theatre’s Hall of Fame in 1986.
Over more than 50 years in the industry, Plummer enjoyed varied roles ranging from the film The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, to the voice of the villain in 2009′s Up, and as a canny lawyer in Broadway’s Inherit the Wind.
In 2019, he starred as murdered mystery novelist in Rian Johnson’s whodunnit Knives Out, and in the TV suspense drama series Departure.
But it was opposite Julie Andrews as von Trapp in 1965 that made him a star. He played an Austrian captain who must flee the country with his folk-singing family to escape service in the Nazi navy. Despite the fame he gained as a result of the role, it was one that he lamented was “humourless and one-dimensional”. Plummer spent the rest of his life referring to the film as The Sound of Mucus or, simply, S&M.
“The world has lost a consummate actor today and I have lost a cherished friend,” Andrews said in a statement, “I treasure the memories of our work together and all the humour and fun we shared through the years.”
“He was a mighty force both as a man and actor,” Helen Mirren, his co-star in The Last Station, said in a statement on Friday, “He was fearless, energetic, courageous, knowledgeable, professional, and a monument to what an actor can be.”
In 2017, Plummer replaced Kevin Spacey as J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World just six weeks before the film was set to hit theatres. That choice that was officially validated in the best possible way for the film, a supporting Oscar nomination for Plummer, his third.
“I was just hopeful that at my age, my memory would serve me,” he said at the time, “I had to learn my lines very quickly.”
Director Ridley Scott said he had “a wonderful experience” with Plummer on the film, saying in a statement, “What a guy. What a talent. What a life.”
There were fallow periods in his career, a Pink Panther film here, a Dracula 2000 there, and even a Star Trek — as a Klingon, no less. But Plummer had other reasons than the scripts in mind.
The Canadian-born actor performed most of the major Shakespeare roles, including Hamlet, Iago, Othello, Prospero, Henry V, and a staggering King Lear at the Lincoln Center in 2004. He was also a frequent star at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada.
During his long and illustrious career, Plummer won two Tony Awards, the first of which was awarded in 1974 for Best Actor in a musical for playing the title role in Cyrano. His second came in 1997 for his portrayal of John Barrymore in Barrymore. Aside from also winning two Emmy Awards, Plummer became the oldest Academy Award winner in history at 82.
