Christopher Plummer, famously known for his role in the 1965 musical, ‘The Sound of Music’ and for his diverse acting, television and theatre acting career died Friday at the age of 91.
According to NBC News, Plummer died at his home in Connecticut with his wife of 50 years, Elaine Taylor, by his side, said Lou Pitt, his longtime friend and manager of 46 years.
For those that grew up in the early 80s and 90s, surely remember Christoper Plummer as Captain Georg von Trapp, the role he played in The Sound of Music, which many remember him for.
“Chris was an extraordinary man who deeply loved and respected his profession with great old fashion manners, self-deprecating humour and the music of words. He was a National Treasure who deeply relished his Canadian roots,” Pitt said. “Through his art and humanity, he touched all of our hearts and his legendary life will endure for all generations to come.”
Plummer was known for his icon roles in many cinematic productions such as Macbeth, King Lear, and Barrymore. He also performed in stage productions J.B., No Man’s Land, and Inherit the Wind. However, he captured the hearts of many when he featured in The Sound of Music.
While the film — about a strict single father of seven who falls in love with a nun-in-training before the entire musically talented family has to flee Austria to avoid his serving in the Nazi Navy — is hailed as a classic, he long regarded the role as “humourless and one-dimensional.”
“We tried so hard to put humour into it,” Plummer told The Associated Press in 2007. “It was almost impossible. It was just agony to try to make that guy, not a cardboard figure.”
He also played as the antagonist old man in “Up” and more recently, the wealthy patriarch in the comedic mystery movie “Knives Out.”
Plummer had a remarkable film renaissance late in life, which began with his acclaimed performance as Mike Wallace in Michael Mann’s 1999 film “The Insider” and continued in films such 2001’s “A Beautiful Mind” and 2009′s “The Last Station,” in which he played a deteriorating Leo Tolstoy and was nominated for an Oscar, and 2011’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”
He won a best supporting actor Oscar in 2012, making him the oldest Academy Award acting winner in history at the age of 82, for his role in “Beginners” as Hal Fields, a museum director who becomes openly gay after his wife of 44 years dies.
“Too many people in the world are unhappy with their lot. And then they retire and they become vegetables. I think retirement in any profession is death, so I’m determined to keep crackin’,” he told AP in 2011.
Christopher Plummer was popularly known for his role in The Sound of Music
Plummer was nominated for a third best-supporting actor Oscar in 2017, when he replaced Kevin Spacey as J. Paul Getty in “All the Money in the World,” only six weeks before the film was to be released.
His work also earned him two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
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. It was taped by the BBC at Elsinore Castle in Denmark, where the play is set, and released in 1964. It won an Emmy.
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 and was inducted into the American Theatre’s Hall of Fame in 1986.
The article was initially published by Elisha Fieldstadt from NBC News.
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