As Inspector Mackey, Christopher Plummer is Dolores Claiborne's nemesis, a dog with a bone, on a personal crusade to bring justice to Little Tall Island by convicting her of the murder of Vera Donovan and, in doing so, clearing his own conscience of Dolores' unmistakable involvement in the officially "accidental" death of her husband 20 years ago, a case he could never make stick.
Christopher Plummer was in his early twenties when Brooks Atkinson of "The New York Times" hailed him as "a Shakespearean actor of the first rank," and the legendary British critic Kenneth Tynan wrote: "one salutes a great actor in embryo." He has since gone on to become, as Broadway critic John Simon put it, "one of the most incisive and exciting actors of the English-speaking world -- versatile to the point of mercurial unpredictability."
Mr. Plummer was born in Montreal, Canada. It was here, as a youngster, that he played Posthumus in Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" in a production directed by that guru of the Old Vic and Moscow's Imperial Theatre, the late, great Russian Teodor Komisarjevsky. He made his professional debut in his native Canada during the late forties on stage and radio in both French and English. Soon thereafter, the comedian Edward Everett Horton brought him to the United States to co-star in the national tour of Andre Roussin's "Nina," and three formidable ladies -- Ruth Chatterton, Katherine Cornell and the legendary agent Jane Broder -- helped shape his early Broadway career. It was Miss Eva le Gallienne, however, who gave him his Broadway debut in "The Starcross Story."
Just two or three years later, he represented Canada playing "Henry V" at the Edinburgh Festival and, in the same season, played Jason to Dame Judith Anderson's "Medea" at the Theatre Sara Bernhardt in Paris. Also in 1955, he was Marc Antony to his friend Raymond Massey's Brutus in "Julius Caesar," the American Shakespeare Theatre's inaugural production.
Over the ensuing years he became a star of the commercial theatres of Broadway and London's West End in many a celebrated production including Anouilh's "The Lark," Brecht's "Arturo UI," MacLeish's Pulitzer Prize-winning "J.B." (Elia Kazan's production), Peter Shaffer's "The Royal Hunt of the Sun," Neil Simon's "The Good Doctor," Anthony Burgess' musical version of "Cyrano," Buchner's "Danton's Death," Giraudoux's "Amphytrion" and many others. His last Broadway appearances were as Iago to James Earl Jones' "Othello" in the 1981-82 Tony Award-winning production, as Macbeth opposite Glenda Jackson's Lady Macbeth in 1987-88. For last year's (1994) revival of Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land," co-starring with his friend Jason Robards; Plummer has been honored with a Tony Award nomination as Best Actor in a Drama in addition to accolades from the Outer Critics' Circle and the New York Drama Desk.
He has also been a leading actor at Great Britain's National Theatre (under Sir Laurence Olivier), The Royal Shakespeare Company (Sir Peter Hall) and, in its formative years, The Stratford Festival of Canada (under Sir Tyrone Guthrie and Michael Langham).
On both sides of the Atlantic, he has portrayed most of the great classic roles, from Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago, Henry V, Benedic, Richard III and the two Marc Antonys to Lord Foppington, Danton, Cyrano, Oedipus Rex, Orestes and Agamemnon.
Christopher Plummer has also gained international renown as a veteran of over 50 motion pictures, from the Academy Award-winning films "The Sound of Music" and "The Man Who Would Be King" to "The Silent Partner," "The Battle of Britain," "Waterloo," "The Pink Panther," "Lily in Love," "Souvenir," "Somewhere in Time," "Murder by Decree," "The Royal Hunt of the Sun," "Eyewitness" and a host of others from "Star Trek VI" to "Malcolm X." He recently starred in Mike Nichols' "Wolf" opposite Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer.
On film, his character portraits range from Archduke Franz Ferdinand, General Rommel, the Inca god Atahualpa, Oedipus the King, to Rudyard Kipling, the Duke of Wellington, Sherlock Holmes and a character called The Shit in John Boorman's "Where the Heart Is." Since television's golden live years, his portrayals have ranged from Hamlet in "Hamlet at Elsinore," the Emmy Award-winning first outdoor epic (BBC, Radio Denmark), Don Juan in Shaw's "Man and Superman" and Quentin in Arthur Miller's "After the Fall" to the Cardinal in "The Thornbirds," King Herod in Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth," Vladimir Nabokov (a one-man show he co-authored) and the great humorist Stephen Leacock (also a one-man show he co-authored). For the past three seasons, he portrayed Alexander Addington, an eccentric billionaire in the Alliance Canada/France/US co-production "Counterstrike" for both the CTV and USA Television Networks and France's TF-1.
He has also conceived and directed for the stage a two-person show embracing the cycle of Shakespeare's love themes for Miss Zoe Caldwell and himself, entitled "Lovers and Madmen." They opened it to great acclaim at Washington's Kennedy Center in the '70s and are planning an extensive tour through North America and Australia for the '90s.
Most recently, he completed a one-man evening called "A Word or Two, Before You Go," which he wrote and arranged. It concerns all the literature, great and less great, that has inspired him since youth, and he has already performed it to raise money for World Literacy, the Stratford Festival of Canada and the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Plummer has made many recordings of famous works, including Lewis Carroll's complete "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," T.H. White's "The Once and Future King," Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days," Edgar Allan Poe's "Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and Mordecai Richler's Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang."
In the concert hall, he has performed a version of Shakespeare's "Henry V" (featuring music by William Walton) with his friend Sir Neville Marriner conducting the Symphony Orchestras of London, Minneapolis and the National Symphony of Washington, D.C. In England, Plummer and Marriner have just completed a recording of the piece on Chandos Records with the Academy of St. Martin s-in-the-Fields and the Westminister Boys Choir. He has also recorded and performed the new Michael Lankester version of Prokofiev's "Ivan the Terrible" with the London Symphony under Rostropovitch for Sony Classical Records. With Lankester, he has written and performed the world premiere of a new "Peer Gynt." In November of 1993, he performed a new version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on which he collaborated again with his friend Lankester to the music of Mendelsohn.
Christopher Plummer is the recipient of Great Britain's Best Actor Evening Standard Award ("Beckett," 1961-62, Royal Shakespeare Theatre) plus an Evening Standard nomination ("Danton's Death," 1970-71, National Theatre); Broadway's Tony Award for his "Cyrano" (1973-74) plus three nominations ("J.B.," 1958-59; "Othello," 1981-82, and "No Man's Land," 1993-94); television's Emmy Award ("The Moneychangers," 1975) plus four nominations ("Hamlet at Elsinore," "Little Moon of Alban," "Oedipus Rex," "The Thornbirds"). He has won two New York Drama Desk Awards, the Theatre World Award, the New York Drama League Award and the Outer Critics' Circle Award. In Canada, he has won a Genie Award for "Murder By Decree," a Genie nomination for "The Amateur" and a Gemini nomination for "Counterstrike."
In addition, the country of Austria presented him with its Golden Badge of Honor. In his native country, he was the first to receive the Maple Leaf Award for Arts and Letters (1982) and, in 1968, he was the first English-speaking actor to be invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, an honorary knighthood. For his work in the classical theatre, he was presented with the coveted William Shakespeare Prize at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C. (1990). In 1989, the New York Public Library made him a "Literary Lion," and, in 1986 in New York City, he was elected into the Theatre's Hall of Fame.
In 1992, the Governor General conferred on him Canada's Commemorative Medal, and in May of 1993, he was made an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts at New York's famous Juilliard School of Performing Arts.
Apart from his work for World Literacy, Plummer is on the board of directors (in both Canada and the U.S.) of the Globe Theatre Restoration in Southwark, London, England.
