EW How did the bartender know?
CP Because they all know their history there! And he was absolutely
right. That was a moment of absolute horror for me.
EW So did you want to change the character?
CP Terry [and the producers] didn't want to do that. I bought their
argument, which was that people know who I am and they would wonder,
What happened to Christopher Plummer's arm? So, they put me at rest. I
don't think it matters, because Newport wasn't born with one arm. And
I'm very glad, really, because it would've been a terrible bore to go
around with one arm hanging every day. It teaches a very important
lesson. The whole point of my story. Which is that when you're
researching a character, you must go straight to the nearest bartender
to find out what the hell your character is all about!
EW Was it fun shooting with a party boy as hardcore as Colin Farrell?
CP God bless him. He's a real guy, a real man. There are not an awful
lot of real men on the screen today. In leading parts, they're boys, not
men. But not Colin. He's one of the men. He's got that wonderful Irish
free-spirit thing. He reminds me of me when I was young, because I was
just as much of a rebel.
EW Will you ever retire from acting?
CP I think retirement is death. People who retire are checking out of
life. Old Johnny Gielgud went on till he was 95 or 96, acting away. And
Johnny Mills was 92, 93. So there's hope for us all.
EW What's left that you want to play?
CP I'd like to do Volpone on the stage. The great sort of comic roles,
which I love to do. I've done King Lear, so it's time to do something
funny. I guess one day, when you run out of parts, there's always
Methuselah. And maybe God. And then that's about it.
STAGE FLIGHT
Sadly, some of Plummer's greatest theatrical performances can never be seen again
HAMLET Plummer played the great Dane in Ontario in 1957, then again for a BBC TV version in 1964, shot in a castle in Elsinore. You can see the latter at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York or L.A., but there's no video release. Says Plummer, ''I had a terrible time getting a copy for myself. The BBC is very mean. They use it for lectures and so forth, but they don't show it again.''
CYRANO DE BERGERAC Long before Steve Martin made Roxanne, Plummer embodied Edmond Rostand's big-nosed romantic, on stage and for TV in 1962, then in a 1973 Broadway musical. He learned a lot playing Christian to José Ferrer's Cyrano in a 1955 TV take: ''Joe was wonderful, but he cried so goddamn much at his own death, there were no tears required from anybody else.'' So, Plummer's Cyrano died smiling.
KING HENRY II Plummer won a U.K. award for the 1961 London stage production of Becket — a role he landed, he says, only because Peter O'Toole, the leading candidate for the part, had to do Lawrence of Arabia. ''But then Peter, with perfect poetic justice, got to play it in the movie.''
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