Christopher Plummer

Biography

Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was born in Toronto, Ontario, the only child of Isabella Mary (Abbott) and John Orme Plummer, a secretary to the Dean of Sciences at McGill University. He is a great-grandson of Canadian Prime Minister John Abbott (who served from 1891 to 1892), and a great-great-great-grandson of Anglican clergyman John Bethune. He has English, Scottish, and Anglo-Irish ancestry. Plummer was raised in Senneville, Quebec, by Montreal.Until the 2009 Academy Awards were announced, it could be said about Plummer that he was the finest actor of the post-World War II period to fail to get an Academy Award. In that, he was following in the footsteps of the late great John Barrymore, whom Plummer so memorably portrayed on Broadway in a one-man show that brought him his second Tony Award.In 2010, Plummer finally got an Oscar nod for his portrayal of another legend, Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009). Two years later, the first paragraph of his obituary was written when the 82-year-old Plummer became the oldest person in Academy history to win an Oscar. He won for playing a senior citizen who comes out as gay after the death of his wife in the movie Beginners (2010). As he clutched his statuette, the debonaire thespian addressed it thusly: "You're only two years older than me darling, where have you been all of my life?"Plummer then told the audience that at birth, "I was already rehearsing my Academy acceptance speech, but it was so long ago mercifully for you I've forgotten it."The Academy Award was a long time in coming and richly deserved.Aside from the youngest member of the Barrymore siblings (which counted Oscar-winners Ethel Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore in their number), Christopher Plummer is the premier Shakespearean actor to come out of North…