Christopher Plummer, the prolific and versatile Canadian-born actor who rose to global fame post the success of Sound of Music, died on Friday, at his residence in Weston, Conn. He was 91. During his career as an actor, he had won two Tony Awards, two Emmy Awards and one Oscar. His spouse, Elaine Taylor, informed that the cause of his death was due to a blow on his head, which resulted to a fall.
It wouldn't be completely incorrect to say that Christopher Plummer was born with many natural gifts. In one of the shot sequences of The Sound of Music, Frauline Maria gasps at the sight of the Captain and is unable to take his eyes off him. It wasn't just his physical features, but the supreme confidence, grace and exquisite diction, which gave his characters a spiritual glow.
The actor also had charm and arrogance, a few qualities he had acknowledged later in his life. In 1971, he had been replaced by Anthony Hopkins for a lead role in Coriolanus at the National Theatre of London, for his outrageous behaviour. By then, he had reached the pinnacle of success as an on-screen actor for his performance in The Sound of Music.
He played the role of Captain George Von Trapp and his stern, and romantic mannerism became the best kind of family entertainment, where children and parents wouldn't feel awkward at the sight of Maria and the Captain expressing their love in a Gazebo. The same location where the famous song, 'You're 16 Going On 17' had been shot, according to the tour website, had become a popular tourist destination, but was later enclosed since tourists kept on disrupting the quietness of the place.
Plummer: Plays and Television
In the realm of Shakespearean plays, he played Hamlet, Macbeth, Mark Anthony, and various other protagonists. He had also accepted roles which weren't particularly prominent. Apart from Shakespearean dramas, Plummer had played Sherlock Holmes, Mike Wallace, John Barrymore, Leo Tolstoy, Aristotle, F. Lee Bailey, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alfred Stieglitz, Rudyard Kipling, Cyrano de Bergerac.
He played the role of the archbishop in the mini-series The Thorn Birds (1983), and had appeared regularly as an industrialist in the 1990s action-adventure series named Counterstrike. Those had won him the Emmy Awards.
In the year 2012, Christopher Plummer won an Oscar for his role of Hal, a man who excitedly declared himself as homosexual after wrongly being a part of a decade long marriage. In 2017, he had been on the news again for replacing Kevin Spacey in All The Money In The World after the House of Cards actor had been accused in the Me Too movement.
In his personal life, Christopher Plummer had been married thrice. To actress Tammy Grimes, journalist Patricia Lewis, both of which ended in divorce. Later he was married to Elaine Taylor. He is survived by his daughter Amanda Plummer, child of Tammy Grimes.
Amanda and Christopher Plummer became friends after she became an adult. In an interview with TIME magazine, Plummer had explained that he is bad at his responsibilities as a parent and therefore, didn't want anything to do with the upbringing of his daughter. In his Oscar acceptance speech in 2012, he had credited Elaine for coming to his rescue every day of his life and shared that he believed she deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts.
