By: Christopher Plummer Publisher: Knopf Average Rating: Binding: Roughcut Label: Knopf Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 656 Publication Date: November 04, 2008 Release Date: November 04, 2008
Product Description: A rollicking, rich portrait of a life. And what a life! By one of today’s greatest living actors.
He was born a Canadian on a Friday the thirteenth in 1929—the year of the Crash. His boyhood was one of privilege: an ancestor was a Governor General; his great-grandfather Sir John Abbott was Canada’s third prime minister and owned railroads. There were steam yachts, mansions, and a life of Victorian gentility and somewhat cluttered splendor.
Plummer tells how “this young bilingual wastrel, incurably romantic, spoiled rotten, tore himself away from the ski slopes to break into the big bad world of theatre, not from the streets up but from an Edwardian living room down,” and writes of his early acting days as an eighteen-year-old playing the lead in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, directed by the legendary Komisarjevsky of Moscow’s Imperial Theatre.
We see his glorious New York of the fifties, where life began at midnight, with the likes of Arthur Miller, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, and Paddy Chayefsky, and how Plummer’s own Broadway world developed and swept him along through the last Golden Age the American Theatre would ever remember . . . how the sublime Ruth Chatterton (“she might have been created by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis”) introduced him to the right people in New York . . . how Miss Eva Le Gallienne gave Plummer his Broadway debut at twenty-five in The Starcross Story (“It opened and closed in one night! One solitary night! But what a night!”). He writes about Miss Katherine Cornell (the last stage star to travel by private train), who, with her husband, Guthrie McClintic, added to what experience Plummer had the necessary gloss, spit, and polish to take him to the next level. Guthrie bundled Plummer off to Paris for a production of Medea, opposite Dame Judith Anderson (“a little Tasmanian devil . . . who with one look could turn an audience to stone”).
Plummer writes about the great producers with whom he worked—Kermit Bloomgarden, Robert Whitehead, and Roger Stevens—about Lillian Hellman, Leonard Bernstein, Elia Kazan (“If you weren’t careful, this chameleon of chameleons might change into you, wear your skin, steal your soul”), and the miracle that was the new Stratford Festival in Canada, where Plummer blossomed in the classics under the extraordinary Tyrone Guthrie. He writes about his (too brief) encounters with his favorite geniuses, Orson Welles and Jonathan Miller. He writes about his lifelong friendships with Raymond Massey and the wild Kate Reid, and with that fugitive from the Navy, “that reprobate and staunch drinking buddy, the true reincarnation of Eugene O’Neill, whose blood was mixed with firewater,” Jason Robards, Jr.
Plummer writes about his affairs and his marriages, and about his daughter, Amanda, who “despite her slim looks and tiny bones could raise tempests, guaranteed to loosen the foundation of any theatre in which she chose to rage.”
We see him becoming a leading actor for Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre, with a company of young talented players, each destined for stardom—Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Peter O’Toole, et al., collectively the future of the English stage. The old guard was brilliantly represented by Dames Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft and Sir John Gielgud. Plummer, the only fugitive from the New World, played Richard III, Benedick, and Henry II in Becket.
He writes about his film career: The Sound of Music (affectionately dubbed “S&M”) . . . Inside Daisy Clover, which brought him together with the beautiful Natalie Wood . . . John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (Plummer was Rudyard Kipling). He tells the story of accepting Sir Laurence Olivier’s invitation to join the National Theatre Company, playing in Amphytron directed by Olivier himself (“a great actor but lousy director”), and writes about falling deeply in love with and eventually marrying a young actress and dancer, Elaine Taylor—to this day, his “one true strength.”
Seamlessly written, with stories that make us laugh out loud and that make real the fascinating, complex, exuberant adventure that is the actor’s (at least this actor’s) life.
For theatre buffs only This book will only be enjoyable to theatre buffs. And, I'm not kidding. It's like reading up on twentieth century theatrical history. Obviously, Mr. Plumber is very proud of his career and that's what this book is all about. I'm an actor...so I understand where he's coming from, but the average person might find it all a little boring.
Entertaining, but what a crock! I read Christopher Plummer's interview in Cineaste and was intrigued by his brief recollection of his film career. So I picked up Plummer's autobiography, In Spite of Myself.
I have to admit I did read most of the book. But I hated myself for being so entertained by Plummer's impression of the great bad boy actors of the past, like John Barrymore (who Plummer plays in a one-man show), Errol Flynn, and his close friend Jason Robards.
Plummer is quite the "luvvie" in his writing style, mixing French into his English sentences when he wants to be naughty and insult (or sometimes compliment) someone. I doubt anyone else has ever called George Schultz (Ronald Reagan's secretary of state) "flirty and amusing."
I could have done without the racist remark in the middle of a story where he wants us to believe he believes his house was haunted by a dead child: "However we said nothing--we did not want to lose our Mexican help who were superstitious at the best of times." Who's the one who says he believes in ghosts? Then a cop supposedly connected him with a psychic who told the dead little girl to leave, that Plummer and his wife were not her parents. It sounds like the movie Poltergeist. He tells another story that left a bad impression about Cameroonian royal guards who used the floor instead of the toilets in a hotel suite. I suppose it might have happened.
Plummer either kept a meticulous diary or has a near-perfect memory, because he seems to recall every play and film he was ever in. Unfortunately, he often doesn't give the date, so while you can figure out the decade from the piece of work (if it's The Sound of Music, this must be the sixties), you don't know when exactly some events take place.
Plummer's autobiography is a connection to great actors of the past, like Raymond Massey, Lawrence Olivier and Judith Evans. It was interesting to read about Plummer's work in live TV and to learn more about the dramatic work of actors I remember from the 1960s like Joseph Wiseman, Madeleine Sherwood (Mother Superior in Sally Fields' TV show The Flying Nun), and comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.
Plummer admires the old movie moguls like David O. Selznick and Samuel Bronston. (Bronston's would-be epic The Fall of the Roman Empire, with Plummer as the emperor Commodus, was such a financial flop it was the last of the sword and sandal pictures until Gladiator, which concerned the same historical period.)
There are a lot of photographs, some of which (like that of Plummer's fellow Canadian William Shatner) are almost impossible to recognize because they were taken when these famous actors were so young.
I don't know if was the length of the book (648 pp.) or cheapness that kept them from providing one, but the publishers should have paid for an index. A one hundred-page book about Disney's latest teen idol doesn't require an index, but a thirty-dollar, six-hundred page history of theater and film that covers half a century should have one.
Plummer, along with almost everyone he writes about, is drunk most of the time (which makes it even more remarkable he can recall so much), but he wants us to indulge him. He insists his divorces were his fault, but he tells us just enough of his wives' problems so we don't judge him too harshly.
However, the intelligent, personal style of writing that appealed to me when I read his interview in Cineaste is there in his book, and the anecdotes are short and usually centered on the person Plummer is describing.
The book is sometimes infuriating, but often fun, to read, in spite of Christopher Plummer himself.
A crackling good autobiography What a writer he is. You really live the periods he writes about. You share is views and life style. What you thought was going on from 1940 in the theater and film is not what was going on. What an amazing period of time he lived in. A perfectly candid story of his life. You will be hard put to stop reading this book.
Treasure Trove of Trivia This book is a goldmine of trivia! I am half-way through. The most interesting trivia so far is: 1 Raymond Massey came from the Massey's of Massey-Ferguson 2 Robert Helpmann had a Hard-drinking Brother named Max who acted Shakespeare in Canada 3 Jason Robards liked to recite Banjo Patterson when drunk 4 The Gilbert & Sullivan star Martyn Greene lost a leg in a freak accident in a parking garage in New York I'm sure there's more good stuff to come!
What a great life! To have been a fly on the wall in the exciting and privileged life of the actor Christopher Plummer is to reach into a world of advantaged living very few of us are allowed access to....Plummer admits his many problems...drinking, womanizing, underwhelming husband and father...yet the excellent writing of this talented performer acqaints us with the exotic lifestyles in the real celebrity world of the recent past....Loved this book!
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
