Live Long And Prosper

Christopher Plummer has been acting for seven decades. He’s just warming up

- Zach Schonfeld

CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER is talking about playing Iago, and I am becoming distracted by a monkey.

Forgive me: There is a magnificent painting in Plummer’s living room, an 18th-century portrait of a mischievous monkey raiding a fruit platter, and it’s on a wall just over his shoulder. The actor must be used to guest distraction, because my wandering gaze produces a benevolent chuckle.

Plummer’s house—a sprawling, century-old former barn hidden in the rolling woods of southwestern Connecticut—is a shrine to the animal kingdom, with creatures painted on walls, embroidered on cushions and set within frames. Dogs clearly dominate. “I really like them better than people,” Plummer confesses. “Also, I love to be loved. I need it. And dogs can give you that in two seconds.”

Humans might not give it up so fast, but there’s plenty of adoration going around, thanks to a late-career renaissance that makes the 88-year-old Plummer’s Sound of Music stardom seem like a prelude from another century (which it was, come to think of it).

His latest film, the dysfunctional family comedy Boundaries, stars Vera Farmiga as a single mom with a troubled son. When her negligent, larger-than life, pot-dealing father (Plummer) is kicked out of his nursing home, the trio road-trip cross-country.

Charismatic, quick-witted, devilishly handsome characters are a sweet spot, perhaps because this is the energy Plummer radiates. When he comes out of the house to greet me, he looks unfailingly dapper in gray slacks and a plaid blazer. The actor has lived here with his third wife, British actress Elaine Taylor, since the early 1980s. (He has a daughter, actress Amanda Plummer, from his first marriage to the late Tammy Grimes.)