From One Beloved Rogue to Another

Christopher Plummer admits to having been a little uneasy when John Barrymore’s widow came to see his portrayal of her late husband in William Luce’s play “Barrymore.” “I laid it on with a trowel in the beginning and then relaxed,” Plummer says of his performance that evening.

But he needn’t have worried. Elaine Barrymore came back a second time, shared with Plummer some private love letters from her husband “and said she closed her eyes and heard him. That was the nicest thing anyone could possibly say.”

She was neither the first nor last to say nice things about Plummer’s Broadway performance, a tour de force that won him a 1997 Tony Award. Now touring the country in a production of “Barrymore” that opens at the Ahmanson Theatre on Wednesday, Plummer could not have received better notices if he’d written them himself.

Reviewing “Barrymore” in New York magazine, hard-to-please critic John Simon referred to Canadian-born Plummer as “the greatest living actor in the English language.” The Times’ Laurie Winer called him “a great actor playing a great actor--the accumulated richness of theatrical history on stage is truly breathtaking.”

Even offstage, the casually dressed, 68-year-old actor commands the lobby of a Nob Hill hotel much as he commands the Herbst Theatre stage here. Heads turn, and service people appear instantly. The voice that, critic Simon says, “in its chamois mode, can polish mirrors,” sounds just as mellifluous simply ordering coffee.

“I’ve always had a dislike of playing actors, but Barrymore was such a rich character that he transcends being an actor,” Plummer says. “He did hit the heights, and his last great role was himself. He never sustained that level of discipline or strength and technique to go on playing other parts. So he created his own Falstaff at the end of his life--a very rich and riddled character it was, too.”

Barrymore was already a matinee idol when he performed both “Richard III” and “Hamlet” onstage, succeeding grandly in both. But victimized by his drinking and high life offstage, he was, at the end of his life, back in Hollywood reading lines off cue cards and parodying himself on Rudy Vallee’s radio show and in films like 1940’s “The Great Profile.”

Given its inherent drama, Barrymore’s life has been chronicled again and again in books and onstage, most recently in Nicol Williamson’s solo vehicle “Jack: A Night on the Town With John Barrymore.” All the ingredients for a play are there, remarks playwright Luce: John Barrymore “was vainglorious and eloquent, ridiculous and terribly intelligent.”

Luce’s device is to imagine Barrymore a month before his 1942 death, renting a theater to try to recapture the glory of his “Richard III.” He has hired a prompter--the show’s unseen second actor, played here by John Plumpis--to help him with lines he can’t remember and deal with demons he remembers only too well. He’s armed with a medicine bag full of booze and plenty of good stories.

This Barrymore drifts in and out of self-awareness and self-deception, travesty and despair. He puts himself down as “the clown prince” of American theater’s royal family; for him, the family business is “a scavenger profession.” His four wives were “bus accidents.” His hands shake, his memory’s gone and his health is shot.

It’s a grueling performance. Onstage the entire time, Plummer sings, prances, jokes, rages, agonizes, recites Shakespeare, nibbles on a banana to cure whiskey breath. He impersonates W.C. Fields, Barrymore’s brother Lionel and sister Ethel, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, even a French-speaking parrot.

New York producer Robert Whitehead, who saw an early draft of Luce’s play, immediately sent it on to friend Plummer. “Chris has enough understanding of the disillusions of life and enough remembrance of the problems of boozing as well as the pleasures,” says Whitehead, who has known Plummer for more than 40 years. “He has a poetic quality deep in his heart and soul, and he has just enough tough-mindedness and nostalgia to fill the character of John Barrymore.”

Luce couldn’t have been happier, he says. “I didn’t write it for him consciously, but he was there in the back of my mind as the quintessential choice. . . . And Christopher is an actor far better trained and more gifted than even Barrymore, which enables him to plumb all the colors of Jack Barrymore.”

Luce visited Plummer and his wife of 28 years, Elaine Taylor, at their country home in Connecticut. The two men watched Barrymore films on video, walked in the woods and brainstormed, says Luce, who sounds genuinely appreciative of Plummer’s contributions.

Plummer acknowledges that he suggested words, phrases, even entire scenes. The actor added poetry fragments from Browning and Byron, as well as snippets from Shakespeare he has performed again and again in his career. Plummer introduced the idea of beginning the play with some lines from “Antony and Cleopatra,” for instance, saying that although Barrymore never played him, “Jack would have been the perfect Antony--glamorous, slightly seedy, past his prime, a great warrior. A fading star. He was born to play it, particularly at the age that we do him in the play.”

He also persuaded Luce to rearrange his material so that it would be more theatrical. “I have now, God knows, been in the theater almost 50 years,” Plummer says. “I should know where the climaxes and the codas should come.”

Great-grandson of Canadian Prime Minister John Abbott, Plummer says he “got a smell for the stage very early on.” He doesn’t want to talk much about his early years, given that he’s now finishing up a book about his life, but he vividly tells of childhood visits in Montreal to great theater, ballet, opera and symphonies. “I even saw Rachmaninoff play the piano when I was 12.”

Plummer helped with the lighting on a school play at 16, and by 18 was performing as a radio actor in both French and English. He trained with classical repertory companies in Montreal, Ottawa and Bermuda before heading off to New York with letters of introduction to producer Whitehead, who recalls that even in his early 20s, Plummer “already had a force.”

He made his Broadway debut in “The Starcross Story” in 1954, performing with both Eva le Gallienne and Mary Astor. Elia Kazan directed him in Archibald MacLeish’s “J.B.,” and his distinguished classical work in New York, London and Stratford, Canada, has swept in everything from “Henry V” to “Medea” and “Beckett.” Writing in the New York Times in 1982, Walter Kerr called Plummer’s Iago (to James Earl Jones’ Othello) “quite possibly the best single Shakespearean performance to have originated on this continent in our time.”

While his only other Tony Award came for his performance in the 1973 musical “Cyrano,” Plummer has rarely been offstage for long. In recent years, he has also played on Broadway opposite Glenda Jackson in “Macbeth” and with Jason Robards in a revival of Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land.”

Unlike many other actors of his generation, he has been able to glide back and forth readily from the stage to film, television and recording roles. Plummer has made more than 60 films since his 1958 debut in Sidney Lumet’s “Stage Struck,” and picked up Emmys for both performance (in Arthur Hailey’s “The Moneychangers”) and voice-over (the animated “Madeline” children’s TV series).

There have been countless heroes and villains on both the small and large screen, some of them forgettable but many monumental. While he is surely best-known for his Baron von Trapp in “The Sound of Music”--a role and film he has often disparaged in interviews--he has also appeared in everything from Peter Shaffer’s “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” to Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys.”

“Chris is a character actor as well as a leading man,” says “Barrymore” director Gene Saks. “He can play a great classic, and he can play vaudeville. There’s his intelligence, his great humor and all his natural attributes--a wonderful, handsome face, a great voice and an [ability] to move with grace, no matter what character he plays. His range is vast, and it’s something you rarely see.”

Plummer adds that he likes the variety of working in so many media. “How boring it would be to be just one thing--just a movie actor, or just a stage actor--when you can just keep going from one to the other. I think one also helps the other. I’ll go on doing it until I drop.” Even as he tours America in “Barrymore,” Plummer is simultaneously working on a new Michael Mann film. The film, yet untitled, is about tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand and “60 Minutes” segment producer Lowell Bergman’s fight to get Wigand’s testimony on the air.

When Plummer glances up from his coffee to say that he’s playing Mike Wallace in the film, he somehow looks for that minute exactly like the television icon. But Plummer doesn’t mimic Wallace any more than he does Barrymore.

It’s an approach director Mann is looking for: “If you try to mimic in physical appearance Mike Wallace, who is seen by 30 million Americans every Sunday night, that’s not a very intelligent way to go about it. Instead, there’s some quintessence to the personality you’re trying to regenerate.”

Wallace is tricky to do, adds Mann, who scheduled Plummer’s shoots around the “Barrymore” tour. The actor, he says, “is absolutely a revelation. There’s an attractiveness and energy to his portrayal that’s wonderful. He’s acidic, witty and charismatic as hell as Mike Wallace.”

Just as with Barrymore, Plummer says, the important thing is to suggest someone. “As long as the audience sees in flashes the person, that’s fine. If it was an imitation, it would be so artificial and so cardboard cutout.”

It helps, of course, that in addition to their shared ability to deliver fabled Shakespearean performances, Barrymore and Plummer look astonishingly alike. In smaller ways, too, they have much in common: Barrymore was married four times, Plummer three. (Plummer’s first wife, actress Tammy Grimes, is the mother of his daughter, actress Amanda Plummer.) Barrymore wanted to be an artist, not an actor, while Plummer thought briefly of a career as a pianist but didn’t pursue it, he says, “because it was too much like work.”

While Plummer never met Barrymore, an early friendship with Barrymore’s daughter Diana “helped a great deal to paint a picture of Jack--certainly, that was a part of my subconscious.” But he already knew a great deal about Barrymore from his movies, he adds. “I’d known them all when I was a kid. They were so much a part of me, and he was so much a part of me because I’d read all the books on him when I was 14. They’d just come out, I was interested in acting, and here was ‘Good Night, Sweet Prince,’ by Gene Fowler, full of racy stories.

“Jack was a glamorous man with an enormous talent and an enormous sense of the macabre and fun,” Plummer continues. “I think that spurred me on to become an actor--if I could be like him and also get all my drinking done at the same time. He seemed to be able to do everything and still enjoy his drink, which finally caught up with him, of course.”

Plummer calls the play “a sort of love letter to an actor,” and in Plummer’s hands, Barrymore in decline seems more charming and childlike than pathetic. While the unseen prompter in the play rages at Barrymore’s failure to take “Richard the turd” seriously, Plummer is more sympathetic.

Plummer tells of his “fascination for the man, my affection for him even though I didn’t know him, my respect, and my total delight and amusement by his antics. . . . He lived dangerously and too near the sun to let anything worry him. And he took full responsibility for his devilry and his actions--he didn’t blame his analyst or his mother.

“I don’t think that Hollywood, particularly the film industry today, would have the time, the patience, the money or the humor to deal with Jack Barrymore. Because his great stage reputation had preceded him, he got away with murder. . . . But I would love to have known him because I imagine he was absolutely great company. Elaine Barrymore said she thought the two of us would have gotten on great.”

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“Barrymore,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens Wednesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 27. $15-$52.50. (213) 628-2772.