Christopher Plummer, R.I.P.

 

If you've followed the news at all this week, you've no doubt seen/read about the death of the great actor Christopher Plummer. (Link to an article.) 

I've loved his work--on stage and screen. Just by coincidence I happened to stream, a couple of weeks ago, the  English version of that 2005 bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2011, by the late Stieg Larsson, a Swedish writer who died before his trilogy "took off." (A Swedish film version  of the entire trilogy preceded this one. Also great.)

Anyway, Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara played the leads; Plummer played an important character who hired Craig to find out how his grandniece had disappeared twenty years earlier. He was great.

As he almost always--no always--was.

As I look at his filmography, I see that he was in so many films I loved: The Sound of Music, The Return of the Pink Panther, The Last Station, The Man Who Would Be King, Star Trek VI, A Beautiful Mind, The Man Who Invented Christmas, Knives Out, and so many, many more.

Joyce and I also had the privilege of seeing him onstage up at the Stratford (Ontario) Theatre Festival: Lear in King Lear (2002), Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra (2008), and Prospero in The Tempest (2010).

He also wrote a memoir (In Spite of Myself, 2008) that I got to review.

And one summer, wandering through the Stratford bookstores, we saw that Plummer was going to be doing a signing. We hurried over there: No one was there but Plummer. I bought another copy of his book (not a first printing--sigh), but I got him to sign it, and, later, I carefully removed the title page, which he'd signed, and we had it framed. 

I cannot for the life of me find what year that was. I do remember that we talked about Jay Parini, whom I’d gotten to know and who wrote the novel The Last Station, a novel about Tolstoy, whom Plummer had played in the film.

The signed title page still hangs on a wall in our house. (See pic at the top of the page.)

The world of performers and audiences will greatly miss Plummer--and I will, as long as I can breathe, and remember--recall that summer day in Stratford—even though I can’t remember the date!