Adieu, Christopher Plummer!

I became a Sound Of Music addict a bit late. I was 13 when I saw it for the first time in Trinidad (West Indies) with an appreciative  audience which knew every line before the characters  spoke, the favourite being, for reasons unknown, “This  pink drink tastes very….pink!”

No one looked at Christopher  Plummer in The Sound Of Music. Handsome as he was we only had eyes for Julie Andrews. It was like noticing Rishi Kapor in Damini  or Prem Rog. That  wasn’t the way the roles were written. The male lead  must shine in the shadows. Plummer proceeded to make a big name for himself as an actor who could play almost anything, and  that too right till The End,  his end. From the mother-fixated Oedipus (in Oedipus The King)  to miserly  billionaire  J Paul Getty  in All The Money In The World.

Towards the winter of his life he even played a 70-year  old man coming  out of  the closet in  Mike Mills’ Beginners where he had lot of fun with his camp clothes and  ditsy mannerisms. More than  anything, Plummer played his parts  with  great  gusto. He enjoyed acting and  wasn’t squeamish about  playing deviant characters.

In All The Money In The World he  stepped in at the eleventh hour to play the  part vacated by Kevin Spacey after the sex scandals. In an unprecedented replacement manoeuvre Plummer was asked to play a part in a film that had already been completed. I don’t know how Spacey  would have played Getty.  But  Mr Plummer  owned Getty.

As far as  playing a character convincingly  goes, he was  next to none. In movie after movie Mr Plummer created characters that were likeable warm and  connectible  in spite of often being churlish and nasty. The wealthy sly patriarch in Knives Out,  the  hard drinking  insufferable grand father in Boundaries , the German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm 2  in The Exception, the late  homosexual bloomer in Beginners, Leo Tolstoy  in The Last Station….I think I enjoyed Plummer’s performances  in his twilight years  much more than his earlier work.

Chistopher Plummer enjoyed his parts till the very end. In that sense he  is akin to Judi Dench  who won’t hang up her  boots until God wills it. He willed it  for Plummer after a  long satisfying  innings.  Way to go!