Christopher plummer biography book

Seamlessly written, with laugh-out-loud stories, In Spite of Myself is an absorbing account of the fascinating, complex, exuberant adventure that has been.

A rollicking, rich portrait of a life.

A collection of delicious anecdotes of a life spent on stages and film sets across the world—from Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre to The Sound of Music—from one of our greatest opher.

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Photo: Pix/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

When Christopher Plummer died on February 5, the world mourned him. Those who worked with him paid tribute to his warmth, his talent, and his Renaissance flexibility — director Des McAnuff (who was to direct him in a King Lear film after the pandemic abated) remembered him sketching little masterpieces in rehearsal; co-star Chris Evans recalled his piano improvisations on set. And for critics, the year-old was a fallen redwood. Matt Zoller Seitz wrote movingly about Plummer’s capacity for reinvention and collaboration onscreen, and Jesse Green recalled his forceful, graceful work onstage.

But there was yet another string to Plummer’s bow: world-class dish. Although his gossipy autobiography In Spite of Myselfends in a rather quiet cul-de-sac, the rip-roaring center of the book details every variety of mayhem a gorgeous actor could get up to in the 20th century. In obituaries and reminiscences, writers tend to focus on Plum

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In Spite of Myself: A Memoir

September 4,

A brilliant diamond with a hollow core – is how I must describe the man behind this memoir. Sadly, I came to this conclusion in spite of myself. His soul speaks loud and clear in his memoir – what vestige of it there may be, that is!

One cannot discount his acting abilities. He now adds a good grasp of the English language to his repertoire for he writes beautifully, if not structurally. That, and his love of dogs, is all that I can find to recommend both the essence of the memoir and the man’s character. The rest, to my great shock and horror, depicts an empty shell of a man, who learnt nothing from his life except how to mark notches in his belt – names who hit the spotlight (hundreds of them); empty associations made in drunken stupors with males and females alike; pretty ladies who could ‘supposedly’ act or who looked delectable enough to eat, who tended to distract his prose long enough to digress; boys-will-be-boys late nights with b

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“As T.S. Eliot measures his life with coffee spoons, so inom measure mine by the plays I’ve been in,” Christopher Plummer writes in his memoir, In Spite of Myself: A Memoir.

The legendary actor, forever immortalized as Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, also appears to have measured life in the number of barstools he sat on. Clocking in at an overwhelming pages, In Spite of Myself fryst vatten a garrulous travelogue of drunken revelry, exotic locales and Shakespeare’s prose. Plummer is a man with a head filled with such beautiful verse that he gets carried away—often leaving the reader scratching her head about what exactly he is talking about.

But within the verbosity and pomposity—call him a second string Errol Flynn, except with a conscience—are numerous brilliant passages that reveal an expert listener and a citizen of the world who knew everyone, and deemed many of them better than he. As Plummer wrote after working with the gentlemanly, humble Boris Karloff: “It came to me li