Modern Master Award: Christopher Plummer (2012): USA

Reviewed by Luke Catena. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2012.

Six decades of acting and over 100 films, with characters ranging from Captain Von Trapp and Sherlock Holmes, to Aristotle and General Chang, Christopher Plummer is truly a Modern Master. And Saturday nights award ceremony proved nothing less. Gracious, charismatic and down right hilarious, Plummer watched his acting career flash before his eyes in front of a packed Arlington Theater.

It was easy to see how painful it was for this humble man to sit through clips of his extraordinary career, while moderator Peter Hammond gushed and quizzed him on his least favorite of movies, The Sound of Music. However, Plummer gracefully answered the questions before adding, “and let’s move on”, to laughs from the audience.

Plummer’s outstanding career started in 1958 when Sidney Lumet introduced him to the world in Stage Struck, as Joe Sheridan. He also starred in The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and Oedipus The King (1968) early in his career. Later on he played the likes of journalist Mike Wallace in The Insider (1999) and Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009).

When a clip of the 1978 film The Silent Partner showed a cross-dressing Plummer getting gunned down after attempting to rob a bank, the actor chuckled and admittedly remembered being “quite comfortable in those leggings”.

Two of his films shown at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival were Barrymore (2011) in which he portrays actor John Barrymore, whose lustrous career is comparable to Plummer’s; as well as Beginners (2011) for which he is nominated for an Academy Award for best-supporting actor.

Beginners director and Santa Barbara local, Mike Mills was on hand to award Plummer with his much deserved Modern Master Award, giving a wonderful speech about the man who portrayed his own father in this film.

A night of laughs, excellent stories of days past, and celebration of a career spanning three of my lifetimes, Christopher Plummer is truly a master of his craft, and still in the prime of his career.