Most Men Are Not Christopher Plummer

Hands in his pockets, Christopher Plummer stands on a balcony high above the 17th-century splendour of Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt square. With a blue scarf around his neck and a bold fuchsia hankie peeking out of the breast pocket of his sleek black jacket, Plummer could easily pass for an aging boulevardier nonchalantly waiting for his morning Milchkaffee – or, perhaps, his late-afternoon Gewürztraminer. His piercing blue eyes and his voice – a pleasing, plummy growl – give him the flair of a mischief-maker. He seems a bit tired, perhaps from his 60-plus years of acting, or perhaps from the 12-hour days he has been working on the set of The Last Station, a film in which he plays the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in his final years.

“I rely on my instincts as an actor. Instinct and imagination, those are the two weapons we use.”

It befits an aging legend to play aging legends. In the last decade, Plummer has played many, from venerated 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace in The Insider to Aristotle in Alexander – but Tolstoy is a bit of a stretch. In his old age, Tolstoy abandoned his once-hedonistic lifestyle (he had 13 children) and became profoundly, darkly introspective, giving up meat, tobacco, alcohol and sex. Not for Plummer the hairshirted life: At age 78, his sole stated abstinence this morning is caffeine, opting for a decaf cappuccino; he prefers to get his stimulation through his work. “I love my profession,” he says. “It keeps me young. It’s my hobby as well as my profession.” Shortly after wrapping The Last Station, Plummer heads off to Stratford for a role that seems, on the surface, far better suited to him – as an overripe but still-virile Julius Caesar in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. But it’s a role that he describes as particularly challenging: “Far more concentration is needed to play light comedy than to do a tragedy.”

Born into a prominent Montreal family in 1929 – he’s the great-grandson of former prime minister Sir John Abbott – Plummer began doing theatre in his late teens. He made his name at the Stratford Festival and then in London with the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. At Stratford in 1956, he inadvertently gave William Shatner his big break. When a kidney stone put Plummer out of commission in his role as Henry V, his understudy, Shatner, stepped in and never looked back. (As Plummer told Entertainment Weekly, “We knew from that, he was going to be a star, the son of a...”) Plummer broke into cinema in the late 1950s, when it was still fashionable for a serious stage actor to look down his nose at film.

On the set of the enRoute photo shoot, an Austrian assistant deadpans, “You know Austria a little bit, don’t you?” Plummer laughs. “Well, let’s just say that I liked the place more than I liked the film.” In 1965, he beat out Sean Connery and Bing Crosby for the role of Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music. At the time, the single-minded torrent of fame brought about by the film seemed more a bane than a blessing, as if “all the work I’d already done was forgotten.” But he remembers the experience fondly. “I ate so much schnitzel and drank so much beer and schnapps that halfway through, they had to remake my entire wardrobe. I was like Orson Welles or something,” he says, forming an exaggerated tummy shape with his hands.

“I ate so much schnitzel and drank so much beer and schnapps that halfway through, they had to remake my entire wardrobe.”

That was during the wild years, the 1950s and ’60s, when he and “those fast-living guys” – Oliver Reed, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Richard Burton – strove manfully to out-drink one another. They were their own Rat Pack, a London flipside to the lady-killing Las Vegas song-and-dance pals that included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.

“All of us grew up in the bar,” he says of his Shakespearean-trained peers. But while O’Toole and Harris saw their work and health badly hobbled by booze in the 1970s and ’80s, Plummer’s moderation preserved his career – and his ravishing good looks. That face has now appeared in more than 100 films, including one unforgettably kitschy performance. Reunited with Shatner, he went over the top in his portrayal of the eye-patched, Shakespeare-quoting Klingon General Chang in 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. (From the look in Kirk’s eyes as he blows Chang to smithereens, you’d think Shatner has held a grudge against Plummer for decades. Plummer says they remain great friends.) Unlike his London cohorts, who received multiple Academy Award nominations, Plummer has never made the cut. His revenge, though, is his endurance. The key to his longevity? “I love my food. You know, most drunks don’t eat. But food saved me.”

“To do the great roles in front of an audience that enjoys them - nothing can replace that.”

Plummer relishes the lifestyle acting affords; he delights in constant travelling. Though he lives in Connecticut (and proudly refers to Montreal as his “first home”), he loves London. It is, he says, “terrifically alive; it is always living on the fringe.” The Last Station elicited this visit to Berlin, Plummer’s first. The city’s “artistic drive” fascinated him, as did its obsession with reconstruction. Throughout the shoot, he travelled from the moneyed modernity of Potsdamer Platz to the grinding poverty of outlying villages in the east. “A businessman goes to a city, stays for two days, then leaves again, and he hasn’t seen anything,” he says. “On a film – and in the theatre too – you go to a place and stay for a few months. You work with the people who live there. Really, the only way to get to know a country is to get to know the people.”

Life is quiet now for Plummer and his third wife, Elaine. “We married in 1970,” he says, “so I’ll let you do the math. It’s been a very happy marriage.” They watch tennis. (“‘Artist’ is the right word for Federer.”) They listen to the Berliner Philharmoniker. (“I always wanted to be a concert pianist.”) They eat out, stay in. But the temptation to keep “in the swim” remains irresistible. Retirement is out of the question. It is, he believes, the point at which a person becomes a vegetable.

Plummer’s autobiography, In Spite of Myself, will be released in October. Or you can just wait for the movie. Next year, he will star in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus as the 1,000-year-old leader of a travelling theatre troupe. It’s a fitting part, but also ironic, given Plummer’s admission that the stage remains his first love. “To do the great roles in front of an audience that enjoys them,” he says, “nothing can replace that.”

On the soaring balcony at the Regent Berlin, Plummer suppresses his confessed fear of heights, posing bravely as the photographer snaps away. “Hey, you’re a good actor,” teases the photographer. “Oh, you get used to it,” Plummer says, eyes trained carefully on the camera. “You get used to anything.” 

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