Christopher Plummer was a Canadian actor.
Plummer is best known for starring as Captain Georg Von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews' Maria in the 1965 classic The Sound of Music. The musical won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Plummer spent 70 years as a stalwart of stage and screen, including more than 200 films and TV shows. He has received dozens of award nominations for his work in stage, film, and television, as well as an Oscar win for his role in 2010's Beginners, making him, at age 82, the oldest winner of a competitive Oscar in an acting category at that time.
Plummer began his professional career in his native Canada on stage and radio in both French and English. After his New York debut in 1954, the actor went on to star in many celebrated productions on Broadway and London's West End, winning accolades on both sides of the Atlantic.
Plummer made his Broadway debut in The Starcross Story and already had built his New York stage presence when he starred in Archibald MacLeish's J.B., the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning modern retelling of the Book of Job, directed by Elia Kazan. The performance brought Plummer his first Tony nomination. Other notable performances in his five-decade Broadway career included roles in 1963's Arturo Ui and the title role in the 1988 production of Shakespeare's Macbeth. He won two Best Actor Tony Awards, for the musical Cyrano and the play Barrymore, among seven career nominations spanning 38 years. His most recent nominations were for his lead in King Lear in 2004 and for playing Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind three years later.
The actor's notable films includes Stage Struck, Battle of Britain, Waterloo, Fall of The Roman Empire, The Man Who Would Be King, Star Trek VI, Twelve Monkeys, The Insider, A Beautiful Mind, National Treasure, Must Love Dogs, Syriana, Inside Man, Man in the Chair, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Hector and the Search for Happiness, Danny Collins, The Forger, Remember, The Exception, The Man Who Invented Christmas, Boundaries, and The Last Full Measure. Plummer most recently co-starred in the ensemble of the Rian Johnson-directed Knives Out.
Plummer's TV appearances, which number close to 100, include the Emmy-winning BBC Hamlet at Elsinore playing the title role; the Emmy-winning productions The Thorn Birds, Nuremberg, Little Moon of Alban and HBO's Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight. He earned seven career Emmy nominations, taking home awards for lead actor in Arthur Hailey's The Moneychangers in 1977 and his voice role in The New Adventures of Madeline in 1994. Other television appearances include a 2001 revisiting of On Golden Pond in which he was paired with his The Sound of Music co-star Julie Andrews, as well as The Dinosaur Hunter, Possessed, Leo's Journey, Night Flight, Agent of Influence and 2000's American Tragedy, CBS' recounting of the O.J. Simpson trial in which he played F. Lee Bailey. He was most recently seen as a regular in the Canadian series Departures.
Plummer died February 5, 2021, in Weston, Connecticut. He was 91.
