At age 82, Christopher Plummer won his first Academy Award (Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role) for his portrayal of Hal Fields, the elderly father of Oliver Fields (Ewan McGregor) in Beginners. After spending the majority of his life married to a woman, Hal comes out as gay and starts to have the time of his life. This late beginning inspires his son to try to change his ways. It's a simple idea for a story that's complicated as much by the characters themselves as by any plot twist. Beginners could have been sentimentally saccharine or cloying, but the cast keeps the audience interested, and Plummer is responsible for most of what's best about this small, lovely film.
Plummer has been a busy actor for his entire career, and some of his films have become classics (even if his opinion of a given film is lower than the audience's). Here are some of his films:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Last Station
Up
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Syriana
Nicholas Nickleby
A Beautiful Mind
Twelve Monkeys
Malcolm X
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Somewhere in Time
The Man Who Would Be King
The Return of the Pink Panther
The Sound of Music
According to imdb.com, Plummer has two films in pre-production:
Muhammed Ali's Greatest Fight
Five Good Years
This post was written by LR Simon as part of our ongoing series on the 84th Academy Awards.
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