Acting in the grand manner: an interview with Christopher Plummer.(Interview)

Memoirs of actors are one of the least esteemed literary genres. Usually ghostwritten farragoes of gossip and untrammeled self-promotion, they often turn up on remaindered tables mere months after publication. A rare "star" memoir written with both wit and flair (and without any outside assistance), Christopher Plummer's consistently entertaining In Spite of Myself is as much a whirlwind history of twentieth-century theater and film as a collection of personal revelations. His anecdotes are never merely self-referential and often illuminate key moments in the history of twentieth-century acting, especially the heyday of North American repertory theater--accompanied by finely etched portraits of legendary, if faintly remembered, figures such as Katharine Cornell and Kate Reid. Plummer also recounts, with a requisite combination of wistfulness and sardonicism, the last gasps of the Hollywood studio system and the industry's inept attempts to shape a classical actor into an all-purpose leading man.

The scion of a distinguished Canadian family (his great-grandfather Sir John Abbott served as Canada's third prime minister; the left-wing doctor Norman Bethune was also a distant relative), Plummer caught the theatrical bug early on after viewing a school play in Montreal and becoming entranced with Good Night, Sweet Prince, Gene Fowler's biography of John Barrymore. While still a very young man, he escorted Barrymore's daughter Diana around town. Sadly dissolute and only in her twenties, she let her breasts fell blithely out of her dress during a disastrous nightclub act--a mishap that Plummer relates with considerable relish. Years later, Plummer's 1996 one-man Broadway show, Barrymore, featured his masterful impersonation of Barrymore himself, a performance that captured his idol's boozy, hyperhistrionic grandeur.

By the time we've reached page 200, less than a third of the book, Plummer, having worked with everyone from Tyrone Guthrie, Guthrie McClintic, and Franchot Tone to Jason Robards, Lillian Hellman, Edward Everett Horton, and Claire Bloom (his rapturous paean to Bloom, his "beauteous" costar in a television version of Cyrano de Bergerac reaches truly lyrical heights), has nearly ascended to the top ranks of the English-speaking classical theater. In an era when a North American actor could switch media with speedy finesse, Plummer made a decisive mark as a young actor in radio drama at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, subsequently established a reputation as a leading interpreter of Shakespearean roles (in the Fifties and early Sixties, his parts included Leontes, Hamlet, Mercutio, Henry V, and Benedick at Ontario's Stratford Shakespeare Festival), and was present at the creation of the so-called "Golden Age" of American television.

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Perhaps because it took years for Hollywood to craft appropriate roles for his outsized talents, Plummer's observations on filmmaking are considerably more melancholic (and occasionally acid-tinged) than his theatrical reminiscences. Or, in certain instances, he regales us with hearty appreciations of his colleague.; while registering discernible disappointment with the film projects under discussion. For example, while writing about his first major film role in Sidney Lumet's Stage Struck, he comments on virtually every aspect of the movie--Lumet's "street-smart" love for shooting on-location in Manhattan, Herbert Marshall's effortless technique, his crush on Susan Strasberg--but skirts around the subject of his own performance. The chapter on Nicholas Ray's Wind Across the Everglades is suffused with a genuine regret that he could not have worked with the mercurial, often drug-addled, Ray at a better moment in his career. Although Plummer certainly enjoyed playing Oedipus to Orson Welles's Tiresias in a now-forgotten adaptation of the Sophocles play, he is much more preoccupied with the gnawing realization that he could have played Prince Hal to Welles's Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight if only his agent, with his eye only on the bottom line, had bothered to report the offer.

Yet Plummer's talent for artfully circumventing discussion of dubious ...