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Title details for In Spite of Myself by Christopher Plummer - Available

In Spite of Myself

by Christopher Plummer
Christopher Plummer
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
A rollicking, rich portrait of a life. And what a life! By one of our greatest actors.
Plummer tells how “this young bilingual wastrel, incurably romantic, spoiled rotten, tore himself away from the ski slopes to break into the big bad world of theatre, not from the streets up but from an Edwardian living room down,” and writes of his early acting days as an eighteen-year-old playing the lead in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.
We see his glorious New York of the fifties, where life began at midnight, with the likes of Arthur Miller, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, and Paddy Chayefsky, and how Plummer’s own Broadway world developed and swept him along through the last Golden Age the American Theatre would ever remember . . . how the sublime Ruth Chatterton (“she might have been created by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis”) introduced him to the right people in New York . . . how Miss Eva Le Gallienne gave Plummer his Broadway debut at twenty-five in The Starcross Story (“It opened and closed in one night! One solitary night! But what a night!”).
He writes about his film career: The Sound of Music (affectionately dubbed “S&M”) . . . Inside Daisy Clover, which brought him together with the beautiful Natalie Wood . . . John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King (Plummer was Rudyard Kipling). He tells the story of accepting Sir Laurence Olivier’s invitation to join the National Theatre Company, playing in Amphytron directed by Olivier himself (“a great actor but lousy director”), and writes about falling deeply in love with and eventually marrying a young actress and dancer, Elaine Taylor—to this day, his “one true strength.”
Seamlessly written, with stories that make us laugh out loud and that make real the fascinating, complex, exuberant adventure that is the actor’s (at least this actor’s) life.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 13, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780385359702
      • File size: 479123 KB
      • Duration: 16:38:10

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This work is more of a full-fledged autobiography than a memoir as actor Plummer offers a highly entertaining, well-connected series of adventures and anecdotes of his long and successful life and career. The content is made all the more enjoyable by Plummer's affable, highly conversational narration. His skilled performance features his resonant voice as he discusses matters as diverse as his family's role in the political and business leadership of Canada and his well-known role in the film THE SOUND OF MUSIC. It seems that none of his life is off-limits. Listeners will feel they come to know more of this charming individual. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 8, 2008
      Fans of Plummer's acclaimed Shakespearean performances or his stately film roles, from Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music
      to the Klingon General Chang in Star Trek VI
      , may not recognize him in this breezy, bawdy memoir. Plummer drinks and parties his way through a six-decade career; beds starlets, prompters and wardrobe girls; and endures countless mid-performance indignities and pratfalls. (Lesson repeatedly learned: actors and stagehands should not get drunk right before the show.) Plummer is ebullient, a bit hammy (“I cried myself to sleep for weeks,” he sobs, after his dog Toadie dies), full of canny insights into the actor's craft and prone to occasional stabs of self-reproach over his own failed marriages, aloof parenting and unjustified tantrums. Throughout, he's an enchanting observer of the showbiz cavalcade, drawing vivid thumbnails of everyone from Laurence Olivier to Lenny Bruce and tossing off witty anecdotes (“George C. Scott turned up at our doorstep one morning at 4:30 a.m. looking most sinister and as usual dripping blood from head to toe”) like the most effortless ad libs. The result is a sparkling star turn from a born raconteur for whom all the world is indeed a stage. Photos.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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