lummer is a Janus figure, looking forward and back — on his own behalf, on the Stratford Festival’s, and on Canada’s. When he first came to Stratford, he was the spearhead and symbol of a generation, Canada’s new wave of actors in its first approximation of a national theatre. Internationally, he became associated with a generation of British and American actors who were first tagged as angry young men and later, after achieving success and accumulating its trappings, as — well, good two-fisted drinkers. They included Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and (an especially close friend) Jason Robards Jr. But Plummer was also a throwback. His peers, the British ones anyway, were hailed for bringing a revolutionary, proletarian energy to theatre and movies, and especially to the classics. Plummer, born into the Canadian upper-middle class, didn’t have the advantages of their disadvantages. Breathing fire and gleaming with irony, he was a new traditionalist, a neo-romantic, Canada’s — and ultimately North America’s — own Laurence Olivier. Indeed, when he first appeared in Britain, in the ’60s, he was widely regarded as an imitation Olivier, and it took him some time to live that down; arguably, it’s only in the past ten to fifteen years that he’s finally done so. He had some of the Olivier mannerisms (and, offstage, can do a shattering impression of Olivier’s barking call-to-arms delivery that is part parody, part nostalgic homage).

When Plummer made his Stratford debut as Henry V, he was taking on one of the two iconic Olivier Shakespearean roles. The other is Richard III. Their status derives not from their being kings but from Olivier’s having recreated his stage performances of them in famous self-directed films. Plummer was to play Richard as well, in 1961, at the British Stratford. That’s worth contemplating: just five years after his Stratford, Ontario, debut, he was the leading man at the most prestigious Shakespearean theatre in the world, on the playwright’s own turf. An English theatrical magazine of the time ran extracts from the diary of a small-part actor in the company, who wondered nervously how he was expected to behave toward a) Dame Edith Evans and b) Chris Plummer. Local boy had really made good.

The 1956 Canadian Stratford season made history in many ways. It was the festival’s fourth season, its last under canvas (the present concrete structure went up in 1957), and the first with Michael Langham as artistic director; Tyrone Guthrie had brought him to Stratford the previous year as a guest director. As well as being the festival’s artistic founder, Guthrie was Langham’s mentor and father figure, as Langham — who had also grown up fatherless — was to become Plummer’s. It was also (after three seasons in which the company had been led in succession by Alec Guinness, James Mason, and the expatriate Czech tragedian Frederick Valk) the first Stratford season without a visiting star.

But then, by some lights, it had a visiting star. Plummer had played Broadway — maybe not in star roles, but in substantial ones. Most important, he’d been the Earl of Warwick in The Lark, Jean Anouilh’s play about Joan of Arc, opposite — all right, supporting — Julie Harris. (Five decades later, Plummer’s daughter, Amanda, would play the Anouilh Maid at Stratford, with her father — again an absentee for most of her life — sitting in the audience and marvelling.) It was seeing Plummer’s Warwick that prompted Langham to cast him as Henry V. He had, said Langham, “the chemistry of a romantic classical actor — a lot of sex, great charm, a natural comedic gift.” Plummer himself, in a 1997 interview with the New York Times, said that playing Henry “zapped my career. From that time on, my name was above the title.”

In In Spite of Myself, Plummer writes of playing Henry that “I had some of the best times of my life in it — it was like quaffing gallons of champagne.” The book’s approach to acting, particularly its author’s own, is less analytical than anecdotal, but he does try to place the production historically, calling it “the tale of an angry young rebel reluctant to shed his youthful debauchery for a throne he didn’t particularly cherish, only to discover...he had grown up, not just a brawling soldier, but a king — and a king with some conscience...it was...raw and very right for the mid-fifties.” Plummer’s reverence for theatrical and movie history — for older actors and most especially for older American actors — leaps off the pages, but he isn’t always trustworthy on the details. He writes of his Henry that “a considerable amount of time had gone by since Laurence Olivier’s mighty motion picture,” and that “Richard Burton at the Old Vic had soon thereafter made a sonorous, rough and ruthless brawler out of the young king, but no other major production of the work had since been given.” In fact, Burton, the closest in type to Plummer of all the two-fisted fraternity, played the part at the Vic just a few months before Plummer did it at Stratford — they all but overlapped — and the two performances seem to have been on similar lines. They even look alike in the photographs, although the young Burton possessed a mystical, driven quality to which the younger, more practical Plummer never aspired. The production, though, had its own mystique, in Langham’s casting of Québécois actors as the French court. When England and France joined in marital league at the end of the play, it seemed to speak to Canada in a way that made it one of the key productions in Stratford’s history. Plummer, an anglophone from Montreal, found himself cast, fleetingly but imperishably, as a symbol of Canadian unity. The following year, Stratford mounted its first Hamlet, with Plummer, for a multitude of reasons, the unchallenged choice to play the Prince.

This was another role in which he followed Burton and, at a longer distance, Olivier. All three were romantic adventurer Hamlets, and all three elicited the same critical incredulity that they could have delayed so long in sweeping to their revenge. Olivier was certainly aware of the resemblance, and of the implied competition. He once told an interviewer, with presumably mock indignation, how “Dickie Burton” had had “the sauce” to play exactly the same line of roles in the 1950s that Olivier himself had done in the ’30s. He isn’t on record as saying anything similar about “Kit Plummer” (he seems to have been the only person in Plummer’s life ever to address him by that Elizabethan diminutive for “Christopher”), but the two men came to know one another in the London of the ’60s, enjoying a relationship that was admiring but uneasy. Plummer even acted, not too happily, under Olivier’s direction in the waning days of his regime at Britain’s National Theatre. “I have this image,” Plummer wrote about Olivier, “of a giant Othello, like a great oak about to be felled, trying to remain upright while swarms of nasty Iagos keep snapping at its trunk and gnawing away at its bark until, at last, weakened at the base, it can stand no longer and comes crashing down to earth.” It’s a fate that has never seemed likely for Plummer himself. He has stayed independent. He has never run a theatre or directed a company. Remarkably for an actor of his stature, he has never even directed a play.

He might reasonably, when he first appeared at Stratford, have been accused of queue jumping. There were other talented young actors of his generation, still playing supporting roles, who’d been at Stratford since the opening season in 1953. Plummer had wanted to be one of them. Sitting in a New York bar and reading about the revolutionary new open stage and the ecstatic night of its first unveiling, he suddenly felt culturally homesick. He had tried. He’d auditioned for Guthrie for that season — and for the two following — and been turned down: not for lack of talent, but because Guthrie felt he wouldn’t be a good company member. Guthrie had been told that Plummer was “a womanizer, a libertine, a drunk, totally irresponsible, undisciplined and a black influence on any company. This all sounded most exciting. Under other circumstances, I only wished it had been true.” That’s what Plummer says in the book. Ten years earlier, talking to the New York Times, he had said Guthrie “thought me a bit of a playboy, and he was absolutely right.”

It turned out that Stratford could use a playboy, or at least a swashbuckler. In his youthful Stratford prime, which was also the festival’s, Plummer’s star roles included blade-flashing wisecrackers like Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, the Bastard in King John, and — the acme of all stage swashbucklers — Cyrano de Bergerac (the part he was to do much later in a musical in New York). He also played just one small role, Bardolph, Falstaff’s sozzled henchman, in Henry IV, Part One : an unexpected bit of emphatically unheroic low-life casting that goes unmentioned in the memoir but seems still to arouse delighted memories in those who saw it.

Langham persuaded Plummer to play that role because a good company man needed to play small parts as well as leads. But he also knew that no company was going to hold Plummer indefinitely: “Chris had a kind of wildness, a passionate desire to live like a ’30s film star.” When Plummer returned to Stratford in 1967, it was to play Antony, opposite Zoe Caldwell’s Cleopatra. Antony was a role that Olivier, who hadn’t done too well in it, had disparaged to Plummer as “such a bad part; he’s just a failed movie star.” Plummer disagrees — “Antony’s a marvellous part...a crumbling noble creature” — but it wasn’t one of his big successes either. (He has said that, at thirty-seven, he was too young for it; he hadn’t, so to speak, reached full crumble. “The libertine with his wenching, drinking, gourmandising was fairly familiar territory for me and not too tough an assignment. What I didn’t get at all were the flashes of the once great conqueror...” To be fair, few actors have; the problem is that by the time the play starts, all that is in the past.) Still, he made his first entrance like a movie star — his first entrance at rehearsals, anyway. He arrived a couple of weeks after everyone else; he had, fittingly enough, been making a film. As Cimolino tells it (it was before his time at Stratford, but he’d been told the stories), “The door at the back of the auditorium swung open, the light flooded in from outside. Chris walked in, in a rolled-up T-shirt, walked up to Zoe and gave her a long, deep kiss. He made it clear who the alpha male was.”

“Chris,” says Langham, “had many demons,” and in the ’60s he was either exercising or exorcising them in London and New York. He was living much of the time at the Connaught or the Algonquin, spending a lot of money, much of it in bars and restaurants. He’s always loved food, and some of the most relishing parts of his autobiography are concerned with it. It’s been good for him, too, and not just in the sense of keeping him from starvation: it’s saved him from the excesses of his more self-destructive peers (let alone those of John Barrymore); he’s said that he always got too hungry to be a really serious drinker.

His first two marriages both ended in divorce. The first, contracted during his first Stratford season, while he was essentially commuting between there and New York, was to the American actress, singer, and all-around throaty charmer Tammy Grimes, who, according to Langham, “looked as if she had just woken up and found the world surprisingly wonderful. But that marriage was so wild.” They were both, as Plummer quickly came to recognize, too young, too immature, too focused on their own careers, of which hers was at the time the more successful and certainly the more lucrative. (She was headlining on Broadway and in nightclubs; he was in classical Canadian rep.) Amanda is the child of that marriage. Plummer never felt he was much of a father, perhaps because he had never had one himself, and he hardly saw his daughter when she was growing up; for much of the time, they were rarely even on the same continent. They have reconnected in recent years, and he admires her talent inordinately. But when he describes her, especially in his book, it’s as if she were some kind of extraordinary stranger: “an immensely talented, strangely spiritual recluse.” Watching her in an obscure and brutal British movie called Butterfly Kiss, “stark naked as a mad serial killer” and affecting a perfect Liverpool accent, he “felt suddenly terribly old-fashioned, conventional and cautious...I couldn’t help admiring her and her fearless courage more than ever.”

His second marriage, contracted during his swinging London phase in the ’60s, was to a British journalist, Patricia Lewis, who, as he tells it, seems to sum up the time and place: another woman with fearless courage, and a heavy drinker whose condition was greatly exacerbated by a near-fatal car accident. In 1969, he was in Ireland, filming what was supposed to be a Restoration romp entitled Lock Up Your Daughters, based on a successful British musical but minus its songs; Plummer played a fop called Foppington who’d been inserted from another play altogether. (He was actually very funny in it.) Also in the cast, as Susannah York’s maid, was a twenty-two-year-old Anglo-Irish actress named Elaine Taylor. “Oh, yes,” she said (or he says she said), when he was at work on his book and asked her to contribute her memories of their first meeting, “we tumbled into bed and all that, but I didn’t like you very much. I thought you were the most conceited prig — the way you ponced about in that big convertible of yours. And you drank far too much — but there was something, I suppose...” The “something” has lasted; by Plummer’s own account and those of his friends, she changed, maybe even saved, his life. Langham says that, as an actor and as a man, “Chris has matured in the last thirty years remarkably. He’s been blessed by a wonderful partner, who’s understood his demons...I admire very much what he’s done with his home in Connecticut. It’s a glorious place.”