Of the faces which have seemed ever-present on our screens for the past 60 years, Christopher Plummer’s was amongst the most fondly regarded. Though he considered the role “awful and sentimental and gooey”, his performance as Captain Von Trapp in 1965’s The Sound Of Music – his big screen breakthrough – made him a paternal presence at countless family Christmases, and his quiet dominance of any screen made him a master of the cinematic authority figure. Be it Oedipus (Oedipus The King, 1967), Sherlock Holmes (Murder By Decree, 1979), J. Paul Getty (All The Money In The World, 2017), the Imaginarium’s own Doctor Parnassus (2009), the head of the scheming Thrombey family in 2019’s Knives Out or all of the dukes, doctors, lords, generals, professors, archbishops and emperors that he lent his dark glower to in between.
Born on December 13, 1929, in Toronto – a descendant of Canadian Prime Minister Sir John Abbott and second cousin to Nigel Bruce, who played Watson…