Christopher Plummer Is Just Getting Started
Christopher Plummer is talking about playing Iago, and I am becoming distracted by a monkey.
Forgive me: There is a magnificent painting in Plummer’s living room, an 18th-century portrait of a mischievous monkey raiding a fruit platter, and it’s on a wall just over his shoulder. The 88-year-old actor must be used to the distraction of his guests, because my wandering gaze produces a benevolent chuckle.
In fact, Plummer’s house—a sprawling, century-old former barn hidden in the rolling woods of southwestern Connecticut—resembles a shrine to the animal kingdom, with monkeys, birds and other creatures painted on walls, embroidered on cushions and set within frames. Dogs, however, win: There's a painting of a pooch, and photos of Plummer’s own now-deceased dogs. He’s crazy for them. “I really like them better than people,” Plummer confesses. “Also, I love to be loved. I need to be loved. And dogs can give you that in two seconds.”
Humans might not give it up quite so fast, but there’s plenty of adoration going around thanks to a late-career renaissance that makes Plummer’s Sound of Music stardom seem like a distant prelude from another century (which it was, come to think of it).
Dogs, it turns out, are also abundant in his latest film, the dysfunctional-family comedy , co-starring Vera Farmiga. She plays a struggling single mom who 1989 movie (in which Sean Connery plays the lawbreaking grandfather of Matthew Broderick), which is a neat coincidence since Plummer made his film debut in another Lumet movie, 1958’s , and starred alongside Connery in the 1975 gem .
