Today's Birthday 13/12
Today's Birthday, December 13: Canadian Actor Christopher Plummer (1929 - )
Christopher Plummer has made a career out of playing historical figures so it seems fitting he forge some history of his own, becoming the oldest nominee for an acting Oscar.
The classically trained performer was 88 when tapped for his role in Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World (2017).
Plummer had just nine days to capture US billionaire J Paul Getty after he was brought in to replace actor Kevin Spacey following accusations of sexual assault.
"At my age, which is enormous, you get worried that your memory won't hold up," he told the Australian Financial Review in January.
"But this was too damn good to pass up."
Born Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer in the Canadian city of Toronto in 1929, he is the great-great grandson of Canadian Prime Minister Sir John Abbott.
He was raised at his mother's family home in Quebec following his parent's divorce.
As a child Plummer desired to be a classical pianist before falling in love with acting as a teenager.
Apprenticed straight out of high school, he joined the Canadian Repertory Theatre in 1950 and quickly became known as one of the finest stage actors of his generation.
But like his contemporaries Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, he developed a reputation for living hard, and drinking harder.
He would also find film a much harder medium to crack.
He was married to his second wife, journalist Patricia Lewis, when he donned grey highlights at 34 to play Captain Von Trapp in the film version of The Sound of Music (1962).
Plummer hated the film, christening it "The Sound of Mucus".
But he told Vanity Fair in 2015 he understands why audiences still adore the Oscar-winning musical.
"I do respect that it is a bit of relief from all the gunfire and car chases you see these days. It's sort of wonderfully, old-fashionedly universal."
Plummer would finally earn the respect of movie critics in his fifties, as Rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King (1975).
He also gave up drinking on the behest of his third wife, English actor Elaine Taylor, whom he married in 1970.
The pair are still together.
It would take another three decades before he was nominated for an Academy Award, aged 80, for his portrayal of author Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009).
He finally received his Oscar, aged 82, for playing an octogenarian who comes out as gay in Beginners (2011).
"You're only two years older than me, darling," he said in his acceptance speech.
Where have you been all my life?"
