OLD SCHOOL (REMEMBERING CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER)

  

Few actors have enjoyed the longevity that Christopher Plummer achieved in his career.

From a Broadway debut in 1954 in 'Cyrano de Bergerac' to a box office hit as the murder victim in Rian Johnson's 'Knives Out,' the Canadian aged like a great whiskey - scooping an Oscar along the way.

It was a career rooted in critically lauded theatre career performances, with a particular focus on the classics.

And while he did his fare share of popular TV and film roles, it was also marked by iconic screen performances that have remained popular through the generations.

Born in Toronto in 1929, his parents divorced not long after his birth and he was raised mostly by his mum, who was a granddaughter  of the Canadian Prime Minister Sir John Abbott, in Quebec, in a town called Senneville, just outside of Montreal. 

Fluent in both English and French, his first ambition was to be a concert pianist but confessed to Playbill he changed his mind after realising it "was very lonely  and very hard work."

Luckily, his mother him exposed him to a range of arts at an early age, including many plays, and he developed a love of theatre.

Plummer dabbled in acting while studying in the High School of Montreal but was finally convinced to forge a career after watching Laurence Olivier's classic movie of 'Henry V' in 1944 - a role he would later master to great acclaim.

He would eventually end up working at the English icon's National Theatre.

Acting was also in the blood, with the English actor Nigel Bruce, who played Doctor Watson to Basil Rathbone, a second cousin of his father.

Instead of  going to university, he sought out an apprenticeship at the Montreal Repertory Theatre where William Shatner also learned his craft.

Herbert Whittaker, the theatre critic at the Montreal Gazette, was an amateur stage director at the Rep and had previously seen Plummer in a high school production of 'Pride and Prejudice,' playing Mr D'Arcy.

Whittaker was instrumental in getting him cast as Oedipus in Jean Cocteau's 'La Machine Infernale' at age of 18.

The American character actor Edward Everett Horton cast him as Gerald, a role made famous by David Niven, in a 1953 touring production of Andre Roussin's 'Nina'.

That year he also made his TV debut in a CBC production of 'Othello' with Lorne Greene in the title role. 

It wasn't long before he was heading south of the border, appearing on WOR-TV in New York in a 1953 single camera production of George Brewer and Bertram Bloch's 'Dark Victory' in a role Humphrey Bogart played in the 1939 version with Bette Davis, Ronald  Reagan and Geraldine Fitzgerald. 

Plummer made his Broadway debut in 1953 in 'The Starcross Story' - a production that rather infamously closed after its opening night.

He told the Broadway magazine 'Playbill' in 2012: "I thought it was the end of my career.

"But at least I got there and soon afterward I was working again. I never looked back."

Plummer persevered and appeared in 1955 in a supporting role to Tyrone Power and Katharine Cornell in Christopher Fry's 'The Dark Is Light Enough' in a production which toured US cities.

Later that year, he scored first real Broadway success opposite Julie Harris in Jean Anouilh's 'The Lark'.

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Plummer also dabbled in television, appearing  in productions on NBC's 'Kraft Television Theatre,' 'The Alcoa Hour' and 'Producer's Showcase' CBS's General Electric Theatre and ABC's 'Omnibus'.

In 1956, he wed the actress Tammy Grimes in what would be the first of three marriages.

The marriage last four years and they had a daughter, Amanda together who would earn recognition as an actress for her roles in Terry Gilliam's 'The Fisher King' and Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction'.

He married the journalist Patricia Lewis in 1962 but they divorced five years later.

In 1970, he wed the actress Elaine Taylor, settling in Weston, Connecticut who he remained with for the rest of his life.

His first film role came in 1958 in Sidney Lumet's 'Stage Struck' with Henry Fonda and Susan Strasberg in a tale about Broadway, earning decent reviews for his big screen debut.

There was also a first starring role in Nicholas Ray's Florida game warden drama 'Wind Across The Everglades' with Burl Ives which turned out to be a troubled production.

Ray got fired before production wrapped out and critics bemoaned the way the film, which also featured Peter Falk and Gypsy Rose Lee, had been subsequently edited.

in 1959, Plummer earned his first Tony nomination for Archibald MacLeish's Pulitzer Prize winning play 'JB' which was directed by Elia Kazan.

He took on the role of Mike Connor in s US TV version of 'The Philadelphia Story' with Gig Young, Mary Astor and Diana Lynn. 

However, his performances on Broadway soon started to catch the eye of directors across the Atlantic.

After notching up roles in Broadway productions of 'Medea' and 'Julius Caesar,' he found himself making his debut as 'Henry V' in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and would hoover up more experience of the Bard in productions of 'The Winter's Tale,' 'Henry IV, Part I' and 'Much Ado About Nothing'.

Coaxed over to London, he performed for both Olivier's National Theatre and Sir Peter Hall's Royal Shakespeare Company.

This meant a bit of a hiatus from making movies but in Britain, he earned rave reviews for his performance in a 1964 BBC production 'Hamlet at Elsinore' which saw Shakespeare's play performed in the Danish Castle with Robert Shaw, Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland.

His performance as Hamlet earned him first Emmy nomination.

That year, he returned to cinema as the Roman Emperor Commodus in Anthony Mann's star studded epic 'The Fall of the Roman Empire' with James Mason, Sophia Loren, Stephen Boyd, Alec Guinness, Mel Ferrer, Anthony Quayle and Omar Sharif.

Mann's movie flopped at the box office and took a bit of a critical hammering.

However the following year, Plummer landed one of his best loved roles in the Robert Wise directed Rogers and Hammerstein musical 'The Sound of Music'.

Plummer said he took on the role of Captain Von Trapp because of the opportunity to sing but much to his chagrin, his voice ended up being dubbed by another singer, Bill Lee.

The film was a phenomenal success for 20th Century Fox, scooping almost 30 times its $9 million budget at the box office and also five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.

It remains a TV favourite to this day but Plummer was less enthusiastic about the huge fandom around it, calling it "The Sound of Mucus".

He later played down the sense that he resented being in it and forged a close friendship with his co-star Julie Andrews.

The film certainly catapulted Plummer onto the radar of Hollywood casting directors.

He appeared alongside Natalie Wood as a film studio executive in Robert Mulligan's 1965 Hollywood tale 'Inside Daisy Clover' with Robert Redford, Roddy McDowall and Ruth Gordon but it stuttered at the box office and with critics.

There were mixed reviews for his lead performance as a safecracker in Terence Young's Second World War romp 'Triple Cross' with Tony Schneider, Yul Brynner and Trevor Howard which didn't draw filmgoers.

He played the German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in Anatole Litvak's 1967 Second World War tale 'The Night of the Generals' with Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Donald Pleasance, Tom Courtenay and Philippe Noiret.

Plummer was Oedipus in Philip Saville's 1968 flop 'Oedipus, the King' with Orson Welles, Lilli Palmer, Richard Johnson, Cyril Cusack and Donald Sutherland.

He teamed up again with Palmer as a corrupt Australian High Commissioner in Ralph Thomas's flawed 1968 neo-noir espionage thriller 'Nobody Runs Forever' with Rod Taylor which underwhelmed audiences.

However there was an eye catching performance as a Canadian Air Force squadron leader in Guy Hamilton's 1969 Second World War epic 'Battle of Britain' with Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine, Robert Shaw, Trevor Howard, Susannah York, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, Kenneth More and Ian McShane.

During the 1960s, Plummer would impress audiences in productions of Berthold Brecht's 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui' and Peter Shaffer's 'The Royal Hunt of the Sun,' with David Carradine.

He co-starred with Robert Shaw in a well received 1969 film version of Shaffer's play, directed by Irving Lerner.

Peter Coe directed Plummer, Susannah York, Ian Bannen and Glynnis Johns in the 1969 British period comedy 'Lock Up Your Daughters' but while critics raved about its production design, they were less impressed by the plot.

Plummer portrayed the Duke of Wellington in an episode of a 1974 CBC historical docudrama 'Witness to Yesterday' which imagined TV interviews with famous historical figures.

He had his first screen outing as the Duke of Wellington in Sergei Bondarchuk's lavish 1970 epic 'Napoleon' with Rod Steiger as the French General, Orson Welles, Jack Hawkins, Virginia McKenna and Dan O'Herlihy.

The film was a critical success, with Plummer coming in for particular praise but failed to recoup its budget.

Plummer returned to Canada to play a Montreal detective investigating the deaths of prostitutes in Harvey Hart's supernatural horror film 'The Pyx' with Karen Black which drew mixed reviews from audiences and critics.

In 1974, he also captured a Tony for Best Actor for his performance in a musical version of 'Cyrano De Bergerac' - having previously performed it on US TV in 1962.

Plummer lent his voice to a Canadian animated film of 'The Happy Prince' in 1974 which aired on the BBC and CTV in Canada.

There was a shift by Plummer into comedy in Blake Edwards' 1975 sequel 'The Return of the Pink Panther' with Peter Sellers in which he took over the role of the Phantom from David Niven in the critically and commercial success.

He joined Jacqueline Bisset in Peter Collinson's 'The Spiral Staircase' - a British remake of a 1945 horror mystery film of the same name.

Michael Anderson directed him in the Indian set drama 'Conduct Unbecoming' in which he played an Army Major alongside Michael York, Susannah York, Stacy Keach, Trevor Howard and Richard Attenborough which earned good reviews.

Plummer was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Veljko Bulajic's acclaimed 'The Day That Shook The World' about the assassination that triggered the First World War with Maximilian Schell.

As the writer Rudyard Kipling, Plummer earned enthusiastic reviews as he anchored John Huston's thrilling Indian tale 'The Man Who Would Be King' with Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Saeed Jaffrey.

He joined Joan Collins and Kirk Douglas in a 1976 NBC miniseries of Arthur Hailey's banking novel 'The Moneychangers'.

In Jack Gold's First World War fighter pilot movie 'Aces High,' he was a Captain alongside Malcolm McDowell and Simon Ward in a film that also starred John Geilgud, Ray Milland and Trevor Howard which did well in British cinemas but did not secure a release in North America.

There was a box office failure with Stuart Cooper's critically mauled 1977 British Canadian thriller 'The Disappearance' with Donald Sutherland.

The critically championed 1978 Canadian heist movie 'The Silent Partner,' directed by Daryl Duke, in which he co-starred with Elliott Gould and Susannah York saw him earn praise for his performance as a psychopath.

He was also in Bryan Forbes' Olympics three day event drama 'International Velvet' with Tatum O'Neal, Anthony Hopkins and Nanette Newman which fared well with audiences.

Plummer got the chance to play Sherlock Holmes in s Welsh and Canadian TV co-production 'Silver Blaze' in 1977 which was based on an Arthur Conan Doyle short story.

There was also an eye catching performance that year as Herod Antipas in Franco Zeffirelli's star studded epic miniseries 'Jesus of Nazareth'.

Plummer portrayed Canadian Prime Minister John A MacDonald in a 1979 CBC TV movie 'Riel' about the 19th Century indigenous Metis leader, Louis Riel which also starred Raymond Cloutier, William Shatner, Barry Morse, Leslie Nielsen and John Neville.

Harrison Ford and Lesley-Anne Down were his co-stars in Peter Hyams' Second World War romantic drama in which he played the betrayed husband but it received mixed reviews and failure to draw cinemagoers. 

The 1970s also saw him perform on Broadway in Neil Simon's Chekhov adaptation 'The Good Doctor' with René Auberjonois, Marsha Mason and Barnard Hughes and EL Doctorow's 'Drinks Before Dinner,'.

He also joined Elizabeth Montgomery and Eileen Brennan in a 1981 Boris Sagal CBS TV movie 'When The Circus Came To Town'.

Peter Yates directed Plummer, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver and James Woods in the 1981 neo-noir thriller about a janitor and TV reporter who team up to investigate a murder but it failed to cause ripples at the box office.

NBC's 1982 miniseries 'Little Gloria.. Happy At Last' saw Plummer join screen legends Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Glynnis Johns and Martin Balsam in an Emmy nominated story about the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt.

He was Archbishop Vertese in ABC's hugely successful 1983 miniseries of Colleen McCullough's candestine Catholic romance story 'The Thornton Birds' with Rachel Ward, Richard Chamberlain, Barbara Stanwyck, Bryan Brown, Piper Laurie and Jean Simmons.

David Greene directed him in the role of a Nobel winning scientist who build David Morse's Android in the critically lauded CBS TV movie 'Prototype'.

There was a chance to play an SS Lieutenant Colonel opposite Gregory Peck and John Geilgud in Jerry London's well received 1984 CBS TV movie 'The Scarlet and The Black' about the Irish priest Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty's successful efforts to help thousands of Jewish people and Allied soldiers evade capture by the Nazis.

In Karoly Makk's Hungarian American movie of Ferenc Molnar's 'Lily in Love,' he played an over satisfied actor opposite Maggie Smith.

Plummer scored a box office hit as a government agent in Joseph Ruben's sci-fi adventure film 'Dreamscape' with Dennis Quaid, Kate Capshaw and Max Von Sydow which also earned enthusiastic reviews.

There were decent reviews too for Desmond Davis's 'Ordeal By Innocence' with Donald Sutherland and Faye Dunaway, an adaptation of Agatha Christie's 1958 novel.

He was the narrator in a 1985 Canadian CTV production of 'Rumplestiltskin' which was syndicated across the US.

Danielle Steel's 'Crossings' saw him act in a US TV miniseries in 1986 in a cast that included Cheryl Ladd, Jane Seymour, Horst Buchholz, Joanna Pacula, Joan Fontaine and Stewart Granger.

He played a professor in August Caminitio's disjointed 1986 Italian horror film 'Vampire in Venice' with Klaus Kinski.

There was a rare sitcom appearance in an episode of NBC's top rated show 'The Cosby Show' in 1987.

Plummer was the villain in Tom Mankiewicz's humourous 1987 buddy cop movie reboot of the TV series 'Dragnet' with Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks which proved popular with audiences.

On Broadway, Plummer appeared during the decade as Iago in a 1982 production of 'Othello' and as 'Macbeth' in 1988.

In 1990, he took on a regular TV series with 'Counterstrike,' a hit Canadian French crime fighting/espionage series from CTV and TF1 with Simon McCorkindale in which he played an industrialist who, after the kidnapping of his wife, assembles an elite unit to combat terrorism around the world.

It ran for three seasons between 1990 and 1993, securing a US audience on the USA Network.

John Boorman cast him as a homeless magician called Shitty in the 1990 romcom dud 'Where the Heart Is' with Dabney Coleman, Joanna Cassidy, Suzy Amis, Uma Thurman and Crispin Glover.

Plummer played the Welsh diplomat Sir Charles Williams in TNT's British made, three part, Emmy nominated miniseries 'Young Catherine' in 1991 about Catherine II of Russia with Julia Ormond, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell and Franco Nero.

He was General Chang in Nicholas Meyer's 1991 sci-fi franchise success 'Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country' with cast regulars William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and Kim Cattral and David Warner.

In Peter S Hunt's 1992 NBC TV movie of Danielle Steel's 'Secrets,' he played a grieving TV producer in a drama which featured Stephanie Beacham and Linda Purl.

In 1992, Plummer popped up in Spike Lee's 'Malcolm X' as a pompous, racist prison chaplain and two years later, Mike Nichols directed him as a publishing tycoon in the romantic horror drama 'Wolf' with Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, James Spader, Kate Nelligan, Richard Jenkins and David Hyde-Pierce.

A French TV film adaptation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 'The First Circle' saw him join Victor Garber, F Murray Abraham and Robert Powell in a Genie Award nominated drama about a gulag of researchers and developers working in a lab during the reign of Joseph Stalin.

In 1994, he was Tony nominated for his performance as Spooner in a Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's 'No Man's Land' with Jason Robards.

Plummer played a detective in Taylor Hackford's critically acclaimed hit 1995 movie of Stephen King's 'Dolores Claiborne' with Kathy Bates, Jennifer Jason Leigh and David Strathairn.

There was also a memorable role as Brad Pitt's father in Terry Gilliam's wonderful thriller 'Twelve Monkeys' with Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe.

A remake of Chris Marker's 1962 short 'La Jetee,' it delighted audiences and critics.

He acted alongside Sean Astin, Eugene Levy and Howie Mandel in the 1995 Showtime sci-fi TV movie 'Harrison Bergeron' which loosely adapted a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

In CBC's highly acclaimed 1997 miniseries 'The Arrow' with Dan Aykroyd, Michael Ironside and Michael Moriarty, Plummer appeared in a cameo role as the Canadian Transport Minister George Hees in a true story about the development in Canada of a supersonic jet during World War II.

There was second Tony in 1997 for his performance as John Barrymore in a one-man show about the actor, 'Barrymore'.

Eric Canuel directed him in a 2011 Canadian movie version of the play which drew mixed reviews, even though Plummer's performance was praised.

He was Franklin D Roosevelt in a 1998 Paul Mazursky directed HBO biographical TV movie 'Winchell' in which Stanley Tucci played the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell in a Golden Globe winning performance alongside Paul Giamatti, Megan Mulally and Glenne Headley.

The decade ended with a critically lauded performance as the CBS '60 Minutes' journalist Mike Wallace in Michael Mann's hugely admired tobacco industry whistleblower tale 'The Insider' with Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, Diane Venora and Philip Baker Hall.

His performance earned him Best Supporting Actor awards from the Boston and Los Angeles Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics but was inexplicably ignored by the Golden Globes and at the Oscars.

In the 2000 TNT miniseries 'Nuremberg,' he played the British Conservative politician Sir David Maxwell Fyfe in a well received, Emmy nominated drama about the post-Second World War Nuremberg Trials, with Alec Baldwin, Brian Cox, Jill Hennessy, Colm George, Michael Ironside and Max Von Sydow among the cast.

Plummer portrayed Abraham Van Hesling in Patrick Lusseir's 'Dracula 2000' - a disappointing contemporary reworking of Bram Stoker's horror tale with Gerard Butler, Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell and Omar Epps.

He was reunited with Julie Andrews in an acclaimed 2001 CBS filmed performance of Ernest Thompson's 'On Golden Pond' with Glenne Headley and Sam Robards.

There was an amusing turn as a theatre loving prisoner governor and amateur playwright in Peter Cattaneo's 2001 British comedy 'Lucky Break' with James Nesbitt, Lennie James, Olivia Williams, Timothy Spall and Ron Cook but with mixed reviews it failed to replicate the box office success of 'The Full Monty'.

In Ron Howard's Oscar winning drama 'A Beautiful Mind,' he played a psychiatrist who Russell Crowe's schizophrenic mathematical genius believes is a Soviet agent.

Douglas McGrath directed him in a well received 2002 movie of Charles Dickens' 'Nicholas Nickleby' with Charlie Hunnam, Nathan Lane, Anne Hathaway, Jamie Bell and Jim Broadbent that struggled to find an audience.

He featured in Mike Figgis' disappointing 2003 horror thriller 'Cold Creek Manor' with Sharon Stone, Dennis Quaid, Kristen Stewart, Juliette Lewis and Stephen Dorff.

In 2004, he sealed a glorious Shakespearean career by playing 'King Lear' on Broadway and three years later took on another great US theatre role as Henry Drummond in a revival of 'Inherit the Wind'.

There was an appearance as a character called Magnus the Maker in a 2003 episode of the Canadian animated comedy 'Odd Job Jack' on CTV.

He also turned up as Nicolas Cage's character's influential grandfather in Jon Turteltaub's 2004 Disney adventure film smash hit 'National Treasure' with Jon Voight, Diane Kruger, Harvey Keitel and Sean Bean.

Plummer was nominated for an Emmy for his performance as Cardinal Bernard Law, who covered up child molestation in the Archdiocese of Boston, in Dan Curtis's acclaimed 2005 Showtime TV movie 'Our Fathers' with Brian Dennehy, Ted Danson and Ellen Burstyn.

In Oliver Stone's much maligned epic 'Alexander' with Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Jared Leto and Val Kilmer, he played Aristotle.

But while the film unleashed critical brickbats, it somehow managed to scrape a small profit.

Playing Diane Lane and Elizabeth Perkins' father in Gary David Goldberg's 2005 romcom 'Must Love Dogs' with John Cusack, he notched up another modest box office success in spite of reviewers finding it too predictable.

He impressed as the head of a Washington DC law firm in Steven Gaghan's gripping Middle East geopolitical thriller 'Syriana' with George Clooney, Matt Damon, Chris Cooper, Amanda Peet, Greta Scaachi, Mazar Munhir and Jeffrey Wright.

Plummer narrated in 2005 a six episode natural history series 'Miracle Planet' which was made by the Japanese broadcaster NHK in conjunction with the National Film Board of Canada.

He worked again with Spike Lee on his positively received, commercially successful 2006 bank siege thriller 'Inside Man' with Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Willem Dafoe, playing the chairman of the fictional Manhattan Trust Bank.

In Alejandro Agresti's 'The Lake Houae' with Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, Plummer was the latter's egocentric Chicago architect father in a romantic film which divided critics but did well in cinemas.

Plummer was Shirley MacLaine's close friend who travels to Belfast to be with her as she tries to understand how her World War II pilot boyfriend died in Richard Attenborough's uneven 2007 romantic drama 'Closing the Ring' with Mischa Barton, Pete Postlethwaite, Neve Campbell, Brenda Fricker, Ian McElhinney and Martin McCann.

2009 saw Plummer lend his voice to the explorer Charles F Muntz in Pete Docter's brilliant computer animated box office smash 'Up' for Disney-Pixar, which featured the talents of Ed Asner, Jordan Mahal and Bob Petersen.

At the age of 79, he finally secured his first Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Leo Tolstoy in Michael Hoffman's critically acclaimed arthouse hit drama 'The Last Station' with James McEvoy and Helen Mirren.

While he lost out to Christoph Waltz for 'Inglorious Basterds', he won the Best Supporting Actor in 2010 statuette at the second time of asking for Mike Mills' 'Beginners' in which he played Ewan McGregor's elderly father who comes out as a gay man.

Plummer won just about every major award going including the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and the SAG for his performance in Mills' poignant film which also starred Goran Visnij.

In David Fincher's ice cold 2011 remake of Stieg Larson's grisly Scandi-thriller 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,' he played a businessman asking for his family's affairs to be investigated in a box office success that featured Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Joely Richardson and Stellan Skarsgard.

He donned clerical garb once more as a Monsignor in Scott Stewart's action horror film 'Priest' with Paul Bettany, Lily Collins and Karl Urban.

In 2013, Stephen Frears directed him, Ed Begley Jr, Danny Glover, Barry Levinson, Frank Langella, Fritz Weaver, Harris Yulim and Peter Gerety in the HBO film  'Muhammad Ali"s Greatest Fight' about the US Supreme Court deliberations in 1971 over the boxer's refusal to report for duty to fight in Vietnam.

The film got mixed reviews, with some critics feeling the absence of Ali and the focus on legal arguments meant a drama that was simply too flat.

Shirley MacLaine teamed up with him again on Michael Radford's gentle 2014 comedy drama 'Elsa and Fred' with Marcia Gay Harden and Chris Noth, which traded on its stars' screen chemistry but did not set the box office alight. 

He was Al Pacino's ageing rocker's manager in Dan Fogelman's uneven 2015 family drama 'Danny Collins' with Annette Bening, Bobby Cannavale and Jennifer Garner but was one of the best things about the film and was the voice of the Pixie King in Sean O'Reilly's Arcana Studio animation 'Pixies'.

The opportunity to play Kaiser Wilhelm II was too good to pass up in David Leveaux's well received 2016 period drama 'The Exception' with Lily James, Jai Courtenay and Janet McTeer which flew under the radar in arthouse cinemas.

Plummer was Ebeneezer Scrooge, however, in Bharat Nalluri's charming 2017 film 'The Man Who Invented Christmas' with Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens, Jonathan Pryce, Miriam Margoyles, Simon Callow and Bill Paterson.

He made Oscar history by becoming thevoldest ever acting nominee at the age of 88 for his performance as the billionaire John Paul Getty in Ridley Scott's kidnapping drama 'All the Money in the World' with Romain Duris, Michelle Williams and Mark Whalberg.

The nomination for Best Supporting Actor was all the more remarkable because he had to be drafted in to reshoot scenes that had already been filmed with Kevin Spacey in the part after allegations about his personal life forced him to quit.

Plummer, who in most critics' minds stole the film and earned Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations too, ended up losing out on the Academy Awards to Sam Rockwell for his performance in 'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri'.

He scored a pre-Coronavirus lockdown hit as the murder victim in Rian Johnson's deliciously entertaining whodunnit 'Knives Out' with Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon and Chris Evans.

In 2019, he joined Archie Panjabi, Peter Mensah and Claire Forlani in Universal's transport investigation TV drama series 'Departure'.

The Canadian British show was renewed for second series and, after the easing of Coronavirus restrictions, production began in September 2020.

Plummer's last live action movie role was as the father of a missing Vietnam War hero in Todd Robinson's 'The Last Full Measure' with Jeremy Irvine, Samuel L Jackson, Ed Harris, William Hurt, Peter Fonda and Diane Ladd.

Along with Patton Odwalt and Ron Perlman, he recorded a vocal role for Sean O'Reilly's forthcoming animated film 'Heroes of the Golden Mask' about an American teenager transported back in time to the Lost City of Saxingdui.

Plummer very much saw himself in the mould of the British classical actor but he respected the craft of actors who followed "the Method".

It was this devotion to the old school of learning your craft in productions of the theatre classics that resulted in him receiving the Companion of the Order of Canada and the Queen's Silver, Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals for Canada.

His love for the arts also led to him becoming a patron of Canada's Theatre Museum.

As his career entered its final act, Plummer believed his devotion to the classics influenced some film and television directors' decision to cast him - particularly in patriarchal roles.

And while he joined a stellar career as a screen actor, particularly in his latter years, he remained a theatre actor at heart.

Plummer told the Boston Globe: "When I make movies, I immediately go back to the theatre.

"It not only keeps you alive but it keeps your craft in order "

That unwaivering dedication to the craft kept him working right to the end and also at the top of his profession.

(Christopher Plummer passed away at the age of 91 on February 5, 2021)