In his immensely entertaining new memoir, Christopher Plummer describes 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.” A Canadian (not English, as is often assumed) born on Friday the 13th, the great-grandson of a PM, Plummer made his stage debut at 18 in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline over 60 years ago and, apart from his new book, hasn’t looked back. As a super-star of the Broadway and London stage (as well as the three Stratfords: Ontario, Connecticut, and -on-Avon), Plummer has played most of the great classic roles: Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Iago, Cyrano, Oedipus, you name it... not to mention King Henry in Becket, Shaw’s Caesar, John Barrymore, Sherlock Holmes, and Inherit the Wind’s “Henry Drummond,” et al. His film career began with back-to-back roles for Sidney Lumet and Nicholas Ray, and over 50 years and 150 films later, is still going strong — he voiced the villain in Pixar’s Up and has the title role in Terry Gilliam’s upcoming The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus — with a propensity for essaying real people: The Emperor Commodus (Fall of the Roman Empire), Aristotle, Wellington, Rommel, Kipling, FDR, F. Lee Bailey, Mike Wallace (The Insider), and, perhaps his most celebrated cinema role, Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music (which Plummer has nicknamed “S & M,” but grudgingly admits liking). Tonight, John Martello, executive director of The Players (which bestowed our guest with its coveted Edwin Booth Award in 1997) will interview the multiple Tony and Emmy-winning Mr. Plummer onstage about his storied career in theater, film and the golden age of live television, and the extraordinary cast of characters that has peopled this most extraordinary life — one of our greatest actors… and a world-class raconteur to boot.
7:30

Mr. Plummer’s new memoir, In Spite of Myself (published by Knopf), will be available for sale at Film Forum on the day of the event,
with a book signing following the interview. Special thanks to Kathryn Zuckerman, Lena K. Litle (Knopf).