Icon: enlarge
Christopher Plummer
Photo: Mario Anzuoni / REUTERS
It was always a pleasure to see him.
Christopher Plummer can be called a not so great actor in film history.
He was still loved for his poker face and villain face, poetically furrowed in old age.
And for his dry and probably typically Canadian humor.
"You should have cast me from the start," Plummer allegedly snarled at master director Ridley Scott when he got him in 2017 as an emergency nail.
At Scott's behest, 88-year-old Plummer portrayed millionaire John P. Getty for nine days of shooting for the kidnapping drama "Alles Geld der Welt" (All Money in the World), who was not a nice guy in the film.
Plummer was the substitute for Kevin Spacey, whom the director had rudely cut out of the already finished film, because of Spacey
partly admitted abuse allegations.
When he took the job, Plummer didn't look seriously offended.
That he tended to be second choice in the cinema was something he had in his long, incredibly adventurous
Experienced acting life often enough.
Icon: enlarge
Plummer (left) as millionaire Getty 2017 in "All the money in the world"
Photo: ZUMA Press / imago images
Actually, Christopher Plummer, who has now died at the age of 91 as a result of a fall, wanted to make it big as a pianist.
He was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal.
In his early 20s, despite his enthusiasm for classical music and jazz, he came to the theater as an actor and played all kinds of classical hero roles.
He was married to a colleague for a short first marriage and had a daughter named Amanda, who then became enthusiastic about acting.
"Sound of Music" found Plummer "lousy"
He was allowed to celebrate in the theaters of Broadway in New York and got his most important film role at a young age as Captain Georg von Trapp in "Sound of Music" from 1965.
On the one hand, it makes you shake your head that this particular appearance is still sticking to him postmortem, on the other hand it's a reason to smile.
Plummer himself called the shamelessly stupid, puzzling musical about the Trapp family, adored by many residents of the United States and hardly anyone else, in which blooming mountain meadows and the threat from the Nazis play the leading roles, as "lousy" and hollow.
"This cursed film haunts me like an albatross all my life," he once complained of his "Sound of Music" fame as a stiff-legged, widowed, tenacious family man in a traditional jacket who was converted to a new love.
He repeatedly speculated that Robert Wise's musical film work had condemned him to a mediocre film career.
Well, on Plummer's death, the Trapp role pops up again in all obituaries, including this one.
Anyway, when he got his first Oscar at the age of 82, he himself exclaimed on the stage in Los Angeles: "Where have you been all my life?"
As befits his film career, Plummer received the Oscar for best supporting actor
Of course, an Oscar award has next to nothing to do with artistic quality.
This Basic Law, which applies to all cultural prizes, is sometimes forgotten by critics, but it can easily be proven with "Beginners".
That was the name of the memorably cheaply constructed film by director Mike Mills from 2010, in which Plummer played a gnarled old man who came out as gay late in life to his son, played by Ewan McGregor.
The man portrayed by Plummer then has to experience that it is not the revelation of his decades of pleasure and soul torment that becomes the subject of a family drama, but the really insignificant astonishment of his son.
As befits his film career, Plummer received the Oscar for best supporting actor.
After all, he is still the oldest Oscar winner in history.
"Don't suffer for your art, try to have fun with it": Plummer left this motto for his colleagues.
In the course of his career he has played the general and so-called desert fox Erwin Rommel, the writer Rudyard Kipling and the Aztec prince Atahualpa.
He also played away all kinds of other offers: the poet Leo Tolstoy, for example, or the detective Sherlock Holmes.
In his case, it is no empty phrase to say that he grew in shape and magic with age.
He was the gloomy General Chang in the crowd pleaser "Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Land" (1991), in Ron Howard's mathematical genius "A Beautiful Mind" (2001) as well as in David Fincher's terrific thriller "Verblendung" (2011).
He always incarnated a secondary part, the type of the mysterious, vile, compassionate, and sometimes owl-eyed generous type.
In Michael Mann's "The Insider," Plummer devotedly portrayed a television news man famous in the USA and played Al Pacino and Russell Crowe on the wall.
Icon: enlarge
Plummer 1999 as a TV newsman in "The Insider"
Photo: imago stock & people / United Archives / imago images
Plummer drew his considerable self-confidence from the recognition he received as a theater actor.
Among his stage hits on Broadway were Bertolt Brecht's "The Stopping Rise of Arturo Ui" in the 1960s and the unfortunate Cyrano de Bergerac in the musical "Cyrano" based on Edmond Rostand in the 1970s.
Above all, however, Plummer triumphed in many great Shakespeare roles in New York and London.
In photos you can admire him as an eel Iago and the terrifying Macbeth as well as the thoroughly disheveled King Lear.
At the age of 80 he played Duke Prospero in Shakespeare's "Tempest".
Seldom refused a drink, partied through many nights
In his private life, Plummer, who worked tirelessly and always understood acting as a service, was married for more than 50 years to his third wife, Elaine Taylor, who herself worked as an actress and dancer.
As he reported in his autobiography "In Spite of Myself", published in 2008, he rarely turned down a drink and partied for many nights.
Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer, great-grandson of a Canadian Prime Minister, described his origins in a good family as a cheerful burden.
“Most good actors come down the drain with a natural anger.
I had to spend a lot of time and energy teaching myself that anger. "
Icon: The mirror