In Conversation With Christopher Plummer

this program contains material and topics that may not be suitable for younger audiences viewer discretion is advised so now it's my uh distinct pleasure to introduce your moderator for today who uh joined us last night for the tribute and was serving on the documentary feature jury this year and we've long been admirers of his film criticism on npr's show fresh air i know you've probably heard him on there yeah i'm a huge fan um also cbs sunday morning where he provides a lot of the film reporting on that program and of course new york magazine to which my family continues to subscribe in print which is rare these days but we love the magazine and we're huge fans of mr david edelstein david thank you enjoy thank you oh i have my mic attached um i gave a rather fulsome introduction to mr plumber last night and said to him backstage i would say something brief he said how about just um the next schmuck you see no no absolutely not um he's going to talk about all the amazing things that he's done but i want to say we live in an age of hyperbole we live in an age of flattery uh there's so many superlatives and awards out there that we all become a little jaded i just want to briefly tell you about a something that genuinely changed my life which is um i saw the musical sereno starring christopher plummer in the early to mid 70s and never in my life did i realize that what was supposedly ugly could be beautiful that one could become drunk on words that one could be both a sort of nerdy outsider and a swashbuckling hero at the same time i saw an actor who's who could at once be be profoundly heroic profoundly beautiful and at the same time deeply deeply silly to to be able to reconcile these two things truly changed my imaginative life which is to say changed my life suddenly i realized that there was um a kind of nobility a kind of panache as cyrano describes it a white plume over the battlefield that one can one can aspire to in life no matter no matter how small the task and everything i've seen uh that that he has done since then um i i i go back to that night a truly life-changing night so of course when i was um uh asked to come down and do this i mean i would have been mad to have said no in any case but to be able to come with someone who you can say yes you know you changed my imaginative life and i am so profoundly grateful so please let me introduce christopher plummer okay thank you god what an introduction i'm going to go off again i want to hear that again well um you frame your career in a very anyone who has written spent as long a time writing a memoir as you have it's always interesting how one frames a career and let me i'm caricaturing i'm paraphrasing what essentially i read uh from from your memoir was the story of a a kid raised in canada by by a single mother you know somewhat privileged um somewhat uh conceited i think and yet at the same time very very eager to be a bad boy so so much of the beginning of your career as an actor so much of what led you into acting was this impulse to be the bad boy can you tell us a little bit about that and if it has ever ended indeed you know where i'm going with this i think yes well no but it wasn't all my fault i i mean i grew up in montreal which which back in the 30s and 40s was one of the real sin cities of the world i mean it was a bad town thank heaven and toronto hardly existed then the old saying you had to go to buffalo to have fun rang absolutely true in toronto's case but montreal was the power city and ran ran the country uh and at night there were more nightclubs than there were days of the year i mean it was just the most exciting extraordinary city and life began at midnight so how could i it was also cold and we drank a lot but your family had a very long political history in canada you uh your your family was very prominent not your mother who was who was of course divorced and that had a stigma i believe at the time but your family was very instrumental in uh in mcgill where you where you took the exam i believe and then walked out at a certain point deciding that this was not for you so you definitely decided to go in in the diametric opposite direction that was expected of it yes well it was a it really was like an edwardian upbringing in our house my great grandfather was sir john abbott who was prime minister of canada and he also helped create the canadian pacific railway which was not no mean feat in those days and he had to do it with also with american money so he he knew how to do that very well to to tie the two countries together financially and he he was very criticized for that but in spite of all that it was a beautiful romantic way of growing up because there were yachts and stuff like that and then the family gradually lost its money and whatever money it had and it was wonderful to sort of see the glory and then grow into the kind of sad departure while everyone in the family was still trying to live as if they were full of style of turning a deaf ear to any financial loss and it taught me a a great deal of how to be humble about trying to be grand and at the same time knowing that we were getting broke my mother had to go to work which was unheard of in that sort of society and she did she worked her butt off for me of course ungrateful horror that i was i said what are you doing at home you should be back at work mother you know that kind of not quite that bad does that uh answer your question i it it was also taught me that i wanted to be to break the sort of mold of discipline that the family had taught me of good manners which i'm glad they did teach me that i can use them when really needed but but it made me want to be to be bad and rough and and pick and find the streets rather than the gates and uh it's tough because most actors are come from the streets and their rise to uh fame is guided by a kind of natural anger that grows up in the tough toughness of the streets and but it was even harder to find that anger and that rage coming from a sort of gent gentler background are you saying that anger and rage is what propels a successful acting career i think it does i think it does and certainly if you wanted if you want to ever play the great roles which i've i remember somebody used the phrase you have to as well as understand the humanity of those great creatures that that of literature you also have to know how to blaze and it was a wonderful phrase and it's one that i i that i immediately understood because there was lots of pent up anger inside me and i learned how to i mean you play hamlet the gentle prince and the the introspective and intellectual and philosophical young prince but you also have to blaze i mean in the lines that is the very witching time of night when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to the world you have to know how to frighten the audience just briefly for a second your hamlet was among the most frightening i've ever seen what do you mean by that well i i don't know if everybody knows but but actually a portion of this conversation is going to be filmed the bbc is going to be releasing a dvd of hamlet at elsinore the great production that was done in 1964 and we've been asked uh to spend a little time conversing about it uh so that it can be used as a dvd supplement so you can all be immortalized on the this spectacular dvd of this spectacular production so since you brought that up and since i brought it up there seems to be a very conscious decision that you've made to be uh let's say out of joint with the other actors in that particular production you you um you speak in a higher register you are very consciously weird sometimes theatrical sometimes you go the ops absolute other way there is a kind of of uh i am not going to make this hamlet sound like any hamlet who has ever lived would you say that's accurate well that's certainly what i tried to do yeah yeah and can you tell me about your conception of the role in that setting in at elsinore and what you discussed with your director well funnily enough although it was terribly exciting to be able to film the thing in the in castle elsinore there was a sort of rigidity about elsinore castle it's a very jacobean building and it's very formal inside so it actually didn't make me too comfortable because i wanted my hamlet to be more rough hume and wilder and come from perhaps a you know there's a castle ruined quite close called yutland which uh is really the castle that should have been shot as as hamlet's domain with the sea crashing against it and dark passages and that and suddenly elsinore was rather a sort of formal classic castle and i mean maybe it was a good thing but i had to rub against it i think it was i think you were the guy who was going to do graffiti on the on the walls that's right else in our castle yes that's right i think that works there is a bad boy quality to your hamlet a there's even a uh i used the word last night a kind of unmanliness at times we think of an avenger you know a stalwart avenger as one thing and you were at times prancing you were you were giddy you were um it was there there were certain hamlets that i'd read about but had not seen who who who played him slightly mad or very close to the um the knack uh ernest milton had done in england an extraordinary eccentric hamlet he was an extraordinary eccentric actor and uh played it quite mad so that when he tried to play mad in front of polonius he was just playing straight you can't really build the performance that way i think the german actor fector did some mad things and i'm sure dear old drunken edmund keane was as mad as a hatter when he played the thing so there was i think i i i remember that and used that a little bit what an exciting part though oh my god there's nobody who there's no other part like in the world and i i disagree with people who say that king lear is the masterpiece of course it's a masterpiece but hamlet drives the play and lear doesn't i mean there's so much time when you sit in your dressing room in the second act and say wait a minute i thought this play was about king lear and and what is this old guy gloucester going on and on about and then suddenly edmund and edgar come in and well they're taking over the kingdom what kingdom i don't have only got a dressing room when can i go on and then suddenly you you do come on for that sublime last passage and the audience sort of says hey that must be king leah i haven't seen him for a long time so you're acting as if shakespeare denied you so many great moments but maybe maybe in fact he was taking compassion on the older gentleman he would be playing the role and letting him pick his moments you know unlike hamlet who's in the bloody thing all the way through um you know harold bloom wrote a somewhat controversial but a uh an interesting book about hamlet as the birth of the modern consciousness and your hamlet is actually the best i have seen at conveying thought at conveying self-consciousness i actually have never seen anybody do to be or not to be as if the words were coming to him at that precise moment i saw the wheels turning in your head and that seems to me the case all the way through the performance is that something that one one says okay this is a head guy and i'm gonna do this i'm gonna think in character is that something because that can be at war maybe with speaking the verse you know uh trippingly on the top yes but not on the screen the screen is your friend there and it and you know that shakespeare would have been a terrific screenwriter and all the introspection that is in hamlet is so much easier to play in front of a camera because you just have to think it and whisper the soliloquies and it rings much truer than having to do the same on the stage and project to the back of the audience is terribly difficult and have this making having the same effect so uh no it was easy and in front of that i loved i loved doing the silver liquids oh camera can you talk about to be or not to be about how you take this war horse it was hell of it was a hellish thing to to write i'll tell you it was so difficult to write and uh i stayed up many a night no they can't talk about what what do you mean it's hard to talk about to be or not to be unless you say it and i'm damned if i'm going to go through the speech well i guess that's where maybe i'm leading but um say it what what no no it's the first feeling no no it is interesting that you said it you said it uh very brightly and energetically as a klingon um yes that's all right you're heavily disguised right right uh um well the the there's a lot in in it of of you talking right into the camera i mean um and that's a interesting and strange choice that obviously you worked out with your director not only talking to the ghost who is in fact you yeah but also to also just um looking into the camera and speaking as if to whom yes to what well to the poor unfortunate tv audience who was watching but philip savile was a i think a marvelous television director he's certainly one of the best england ever produced and his knowledge of the cossacks was was was really extraordinary and he was so loyal to the verse and adventurous yet i think that was one of the first outdoor broadcasts that television had done and uh for i think it was four hours in the beginning and i don't know if they split it up and played it on two nights or not i can't remember but uh it's it certainly worked in an adventurous sort of way it was an adventure and he was marvelous and gave me great confidence to be able to to do that very thing to speak my thoughts right out in front without pretending that no one's hearing them you know more honest that way and then you had the sweetest most loyal doting horatio who was who was just usually at the end when horatio says i'm going to drink the poison and i'm going to join you you think oh come on horatio no you're not this is you know very over dramatic of you i really believe that michael caine wanted to follow you into death that's how much he loved you yes skinny skinny young michael kane yes but later on he deserted me and went his own way that srp actually it was extraordinary wasn't it because michael kane who who had us all in stitches all through the play i mean he was god he told stories that are just he's got a million of them and he lifted the spirits in denmark very high and it needed you in that gloomy old castle but um his his horatio he spoke absolute aristocratic english just as if he was leslie howard or someone i mean something and then the minute the it was cut and the print he'd say all right now there's the one about the parrot and the the contrast was heaven they're not many i think zulu was another picture in which michael used the aristocratic english voice which he could do very well but then he obliterated it and became honest cockney for the rest of his life god bless him he was a marvelous that's his trademark was that his first shakespeare that he had done i think it was and it he looked as if he'd done it all his life yeah you and i talked about uh robert shaw who is probably the most sort of sexually charismatic uh usually claudius is played the way hamlet sees him the way speaks of him as the the bloat king some you know some big some big guy who you think gertrude fell for that and uh that's right but shaw shaw has his own kind of inspired mag lunatic magnetism yes i think the best king i've ever seen you totally believe that gertrude would fling herself at him because he was so much obviously even stronger and more virile and more sensual than her old husband who as john barrymore used to say what a terrible bore he went on so long um what that's a familiar love i know that i paid that laughs shaw what was shaw like to to work with was quite a character he was the most competitive man i've ever met in my life robert shaw hey i remember a friend of ours uh who he had recommended to look after us in europe a fellow called john kirby who was absolutely dear and spoke all sorts of languages and he was a great help he even spoke swahili which was of no help at all but but he managed to open doors and help us through a lot of countries in europe because of his dexterous language ability and suddenly he he died and uh i never knew how but the way i found out was we were in a huge party in new york at a then very fashionable restaurant called fonda del sol and uh sitting there as a huge room full of people and suddenly at the door i could see robert shaw come into the room and he from a great distance i saw him look at our table and recognize elaine and myself and he shouted across the room hey plumbers you remembered john kirby dead i'm absolutely true and that was his cornish kind of hot blood rising he was extraordinary he had the sensitivity of an uh god i can't think of an animal that has but he was uh if he also ping pong can you imagine somebody really getting violent overlapping but i adored him and of course with that same um drive he was as loyal to his friends as anybody could be he would fight to the death for you i loved old rob bob he's a wonderful actor and he was getting better and better and better as an actor and of course he died i told you last night and i i've since looked it up that uh donald sutherland your your old mate did a um did an interview for the guardian which he was asked about that hamlet and he went off on a tear about shaw he was speaking about shaw's death he had a heart attack in a car he ran from the car throwing up as uh but running running and and sutherland said that was the character of the man he was trying to outrun death yeah that's a lovely thought that's a lot it was uh uh but but he i agree with you he's the great he i said i said to you last night in some ways claudius really should be a lot more attractive a character than hamlet for the whole thing to make sense john louis bello played hamlet in french which i saw in paris and uh the only other actor that came anywhere near shaw's sort of viral performance was jacques who was a marvelous character actor in that company at the call i think at the comedy fall says i think but he was the closest he was also and then i thought ah they understand about the king being the sexy fella to hate that was a very important it's very important and europhilia the actress looks about 12 in the 1.7 that was an extraordinary choice yes it was it was very a very brave choice but she she was quite sort of she brought on the effect that she was quite deranged already she which i i think is perfectly legitimate i mean growing up in that family when and uh alec clunes's polonius was uh just an extraordinary uh he was an anything but a tedious old boar every line he had he came at it from a different direction well alec clunes was one of the best shakespearean actors there ever was he was because of his absolutely original way of reading the lines of thinking of the portrayal he was never on the nose he was he did everything unexpectedly and spontaneously and he spoke verse of course absolutely beautifully so it became totally natural to him uh i loved alec and uh well you remember in the olivier film richard iii he played hastings and in a very strange kind of a serial performance that unlike any other i've ever seen again very original no did you you have formal training and how to speak meter because you began with you just jumped in off the deep end with a lot of these shakespeare parts right you did do some supporting work but you you since you didn't go to school and you didn't go to acting school where did you pick up how to speak verse or or did in fact you ever into nightclubs in the joints no no my mom spoke our family spoke very well actually for a full canadian and uh she she taught me to love poetry and we used to read out loud to each other at home and i i my grandmother was always saying you're ruining the cadence of the as if they were a family of actors i don't think they liked actors at all except my mom who was very loyal to me but uh no i learned really at home your grandmother said you're ruining the cadence if i broke up the verse oh right the machine knew enough about well they were very well read family and and we we did that old victorian custom of reading aloud after dinner every now and then we read dickens thackery whatever and so i grew up in that atmosphere which was wow it was pretty heady stuff so by the time you hit you hit the stage in high school you already you you were already practiced and yes and then of course it could imitate olivier and henry the fifth and we you know one's mimicry came to the fore and uh you suddenly learned about imitating people was he the one above all others that you were that you imitated when you went when i was young yeah because he was he made shakespeare attractive uh i i had only seen before i mean all those old fuddy-duddies who speak the verse with great old-fashioned donald wolfe donald wolford except of course in the case of timberlane and king lear there was no one to to touch him but but those parts demand a kind of huge theatricality and he was able to do that no olivier made those heroes i mean his henry v was was superlative i mean and definitive i think and i love i do henry all the time with the orchestras we do but uh the william walton the william walters score which is lovely yes you ought to get neville mariner as there's a there's a cd out of a neville mariner doing doing the score with uh well you play every part right yes it's a wonderful evening for me i don't know yes i play the chorus which has some of the most beautiful words ever written and henry of course all the big speeches and oh well so he's pistol and the duke of burgundy at the end who has that wonderful pacifist speech you do false staff as well you're for a second yes for a second but a very sweet and tender sexy yes um well so so how did you you just jumped in you received your first glowing review when you were still in high school from a montreal film yes a theater critic yes herbert whitaker who became i guess canada's leading critic how did he know to show up at a high school well because there was i guess rather a little very few english productions in montreal in those days and he covered the schools and he he was interested in we had a thing called the drama festival in those days which was amateur for the most part but he was searching for a young talent he was an extraordinary guy i mean he did more than just a critics work he really took an interest in traveling the country what did he see what did he say about you i can't remember something about my having sort of a natural command did it go to your head yes instantly did everybody you you were in the play with hate you then or i didn't talk to them you were already so out of there weren't you yeah you're damn right so then you go to mcgill you're taking this exam right yes yeah with a friend of mine who was called john lynch staunton sort of a very grand old name and i love john we used to go out to all the night clubs together and there there it was the entrance examined to mcgill university and we're all sitting there and i look out the window i look at my full scale sheet of paper in front of me with all the questions i look out the window again and i see john looking out the window and this is sort of the daffodils are just or the crocuses just peeping through the snow and there's a sun out there and i and we both turned back and we both at once on on cue wrote all over the fuse gap i haven't the faintest idea got up and left john became a senator in the theater of absurd and i became of course a starving actor well starving but you know one thing about reading reading your book is you seem to have an extraordinary capacity to pick up mentors tutors people taking you under champions people taking you under their how do you account for that well i think in those days there was a there was much more uh concentration on the theater than there is now i mean good god there's hardly any now when you think of it there there was a goal to reach in those days for every young actor i mean the new york actors in the 50s of whom we all knew who they were they were terrific actors for the most part were very snobbish about movies they said ah of course i suppose we'll have to do the film i need the money but they had very great disdain the theater was the moment of glory for for for us all and uh and we were very go we guarded it very jealously and uh thought it was the cat's meow and of course it is it's the since time began i mean i think when all the holograms are destroyed and all the tricks are used i think we're there always be somebody walking across the stage in front of a live audience the theater will never die but you still didn't answer why they liked you so much i mean were they i was stalling oh i was stalling for time no you meet extraordinary i mean you all meet extraordinary people and then you get go to work for him like michael langham who was a marvelous who really really cemented stratford ontario he he'd done such marvelous work and formed a company of very strong actors he was my first mentor and tyrone guthrie for a brief second those are two amazing mentors to have i know i was extraordinarily lucky and then in in new york before that guthrie mcclintick who was married to catherine cornell i played with her the last of the great sort of american star actresses who had her own private train in which we toured the country and you know uh it was just like traveling with royalty when i read your memoir i don't there's there's almost no distinction between art and life it's all part of this all this fantastically fluid thing of of you rehearse you perform you get you know you rehearse you perform you get i mean you you party you you meet all kinds of amazing women you hang out and have the most you know you you read it i read it with my hands trembling in envy oh if i could have been there um you know you make it sound i mean like a a design for living also a design for dying in certain yes certain many people of lesser constitution did not last the way you have or meet the right the right i used to think i know what you're absolutely right that that is our life and it's got to be your life and it's not boring i remember jason robards and i used to play scenes together on the stage and uh if we'd been in the run for a long time in new york uh we'd say under our breath you'd say the line in the play and then under your breath saying where are we starting out tonight and it was always the white horse inn down it you know great stuff and life did begin at midnight then they really did we couldn't wait to the show to be over which we love doing to have to to sort of invade that bigger show called life however i i thought for one or two glamorous moments that i wasn't going to last very long i had absolutely no fear in my 20s i thought if i if i make 35 i'll be doing okay and then i got scared around 40 and now i'm 81 and i'm scared what was the moment um that you that you thought you know was there a moment that you thought i've arrived you know when you were on stage everything came together for you not just how you felt but how the audience responded to you and you thought this is actually i could survive by doing this in every on every level well i think that you know strangely enough the the the role that you spoke of uh in your introduction i think playing sierra no de lejarak um was uh a sort of marriage and gave me such enormous confidence that i never was afraid again to walk onto a stage and make a fool of myself i wasn't afraid of that anymore and that was a huge step in the right direction and i've always wanted to do serrano in french but unfortunately my french is not not good enough because that is francaise and it's a different kind of but my god in french it is just magical ah i don't think there's a and anthony burgess's translation is now the definitive one and it's marvelous and he's written it in the alley of the true alexandrine rhythm and uh so it almost matches um ross dawn's play but the french is so easy and it rolls off the tongue so gorgeously i'm very jealous like i can never do that maybe one day but you had a lot within with anthony burgess being commissioned to do that yes we commissioned him my friend and i richard gregson who was an english agent and a good friend of mine and i uh formed a producing team and we raised the money and and commissioned anthony burgess to write the definitive version of cyrano and he did and i was supposed to play the first performance it was going to be at the guthrie theater in minneapolis michael langeman again directing and i couldn't make it so uh somebody else did it then i did the musical yes to which burgess wrote the book right but we were thrilled that that we'd just been a part of that that relationship he was such an extraordinary character cyrano or burgess or both what about what about can you tell us a little about working with elya kazan and in jb that was a play vastly overrated play but very juicy and i gather the production was i'm so sorry i missed it it was just electrifying and you played the devil you missed it i did then i refused to talk about it you played the devil uh raymond massey was god and jb was played by a a wonderful actor named pat hingle um now what was it like working with ilya kazan because talk about you know and also some somebody who came from the group theater and also maybe was steeped in the method which is probably not something that you oh no i was dying to be recognized as a as a true method actor and and the and the chance to work with ilya kazan i was so excited that that i came on in rehearsals with more method realism that oh my god dude the italian school of acting would have looked at me and said well hey come on hey come on and i was determined to be so real with every word i must have been finally kazan gadge as we all called him called out from the back sixty percent chris for christ's sake six people and i thought my all my sort of belief in the method was shattered right there oh my god this is no longer a religion it's crap and uh he had uh he was marvelous to work with i don't think there was anyone better to direct uh political and intrigue and he he was going to do othello of which he would have been a master director he would have understood that passion and that and the whole racist thing and the whole oh my god we're dying to do it he asked me if i'd play iago because the then wonderful black actor please give me his name he was in all those 50s movies was to play othello and uh gadget was all ready to go and i was so excited this was after jb and when when we'd had a relationship a friend a friendly relationship together and he said yeah i think it's going to be very exciting uh the sydney bowed out he didn't do it so so uh well it was tough in those days it was uh and perhaps he was right to bow out oh he wasn't classically trained was he well then not that but i mean the black actor hadn't been totally recognized as much as he should have been and perhaps he knew that that audiences might he he didn't want to make his race look like a like he was duped or vulnerable vulnerable to be duped and i understand that but then later on of course the black actors own othello and rightly so um but that was interesting because um gadge suddenly was going to branch out into rick classics i couldn't i couldn't wait to see that happen well now we come to the entertainment portion of our program and captain captain von trapp which i'm sure everyone is waiting everyone this man will follow you around forever won't he um not if i can help you well i'm i'm curious how you were cast in the beginning what what led them to you and uh i i should say also that i i can quote your book you you you describe your behavior on the set as uh i believe either insufferable or unforgivable or at least the first part of the of the process so you can take us through the beginnings of your of your uh star making film storm making performance yes i don't know what possessed robert wise who was a you know very distinguished and very good director and fabu fabulous editor uh to to cast me in the first place but he came to see unlike an awful lot of film directors he bob came to the theater a lot and i i just made a uh a modest hit in london called henry the second by a jean jean we and it was a i played him and it was a very terrific role and i was successful in it and why i saw it from the audience and i guess he thought well that's my my guy for fun trap i don't know why nobody else wanted to play it maybe they'd read the script but suddenly i was available and and i hadn't done i'd only done two pictures before that really um stage struck sydney lamette who just recently died that was my first screen play and the second one was uh the one we did in the rod and gun club wind across the everglades which we called breaking wind across the everglades and um and so there was nowhere to go but up and uh so i said yeah i was thrilled i also wanted very much to do a musical of cyrano de bergerac and i never sung before so i thought what a wonderful opportunity to be in a big hollywood musical learn how to sing and then do it opposite julian officer julie andrews who i who i was a fan of inhumanly pitched perfect and that's hardly a hardly a challenge keep and so i said yay yay and then of course they didn't they thought that i should record right away i said record right away what are you talking about i don't know how to sing bring me a coach so we fought like hell over that and finally robert wise came to my rescue and said no chris will record at the end of the film uh everybody who seemed to be happy about that but that process was in was was horrible i thought i'd been betrayed and and uh i hated the whole thing i wanted to get out of it and that's why i behaved so badly on the set how did you make your displeasure known to those poor children no they loved my behavior they thought it was so funny and silly and it looked like great grown-ups all of them there they were they were sweet actually the kids it was the presence of so many nuns that that depressed me terrible and shooting in austria particularly when there's the fern which as you know is that sort of storm that wherein people who commit suicide during it are forgiven as that because it was under the influence of the fern uh that didn't help cheer everybody up i must say but then you you actually ended up forming a very vast and long friendship with julie andrews oh yeah no no i'd already been a huge fan because i'd seen her in both the the review uh which first she came through were new york and then my fair lady what was the review called i can't remember it was a wonderful review from london uh she came with six people and i don't i don't remember i wasn't there no that's right you weren't wow um no i adored julie she was she was and is a consummate professional and and is radiant and in in a funny sense it's really an old-fashioned star in every sense of the word she she presents herself before the public like you know sarah bernhardt might have thought of you know she she's so loyal to her fans and so generous it's a great lady well no matter how how bad your behavior was she had just come off a three-year stint with rex harrison who is who has a reputation for uh tempestuous isn't really the word i know he was a dear friend of yours no i don't think rex was a dear friend of anybody but but i liked him very much and we we got on yeah oh my god i gotta i gotta say do you have you ever heard of a book by mark harris called uh pictures of the revolution came out uh two years ago excellent book it's a um uh it examines um social changes and changes in the culture through the prism of the five academy award nominees of 1967 one of which very mysteriously was dr doolittle now during the process of casting and creating dr doolittle was very fraught because rex and his then wife rachel roberts who had a bit of an alcoholism problem were on their boat off the coast of italy all day long it sounded like who's afraid of virginia woolf every day from from morning to night with the glasses being thrown and people drinking and you know valpurgish knocked all day long so um so and so it was rex harrison and rachel roberts and then i gather a couple of you know degenerate enablers were also along so i'm reading your memoir and i'm oh my god that was him you were one of the degenerate enablers who was on that whoa and you lived wha wha what was that like i mean that just you have to tell us yeah well we we'd gone out to to spend a weekend with uh leslie brickus the composer and his wife and um to rex and rachel's house on the top of the hill in portofino uh my second wife and i not not elaine my my second wife was a journalist no elaine would have absolutely drawn the line did she she would have she would would you have gotten on that phone yes she would have been very severe but she would have watched and so we arrived and of course in those days rex had the very top villa on top of the mountain so as you came around by boat you could see the flag of saint george flying above portofino he had already established a kind of baronessy of his own up there and we had a wonderful time and he was in great form we used to go every night and he'd sing a song sing the songs from the up and coming dr doolittle and leslie who wrote the damn thing would be there playing the piano as accompaniment and then when leslie wasn't there i would sit down and try and play the accompaniment for rex and he was on it was always always there and then that's an extraordinary and then we were down at the at the bar a lot and one night i remember pat i and rachel and rex and it was a huge storm hit now rachel when she'd had a few uh i remember in london in several rather posh restaurants i would walk in and we'd walk in to get our table and suddenly i'd hear in the distance downstairs on another table oh and the italian waiter would say i'm sorry mrs harrison is here tonight she was incredible this wild wolf call i mean you knew that she totally turned the corner and there was no help and then we had a ghastly night in the connot hotel one night and a very stiff table uh a wonderful restaurant that i loved but but the audience was particularly old english that night the rest are in the restaurant i always call it the audience because in rachel's case and there she was she started the evening okay and in the bar and she said oh crystal will go and get in her welsh towns uh go and call rex for christ to get him down here i don't know what he's doing up there oh my god boy so i said i called rex up in his room and he said is she pissed i said yes but rex come on down honestly honestly because it's going to get worse if you don't you're dying to even come down now all right and then he came down the stairs and he whisked us into the restaurant and halfway through the desert it started he started to take her martinis away from her and put them on the other side of the table and then she would and that would go on silently very well until at one point at the desert call the minute of middle of the con-out restaurant oh my god and then there was absolutely nothing but the rattle of cutlery if i see english do not react to anything at all and just the cutlery reacts and we all tried to look for waiters no waiters there was a little phalanx of wages way over the corner that was that night well anyway in portofino we jump and uh rachel says oh go on home you bastard i don't care going home so up we go up that steep drive in rex's jeep where you have to stop at a certain steep incline and walk the rest of the way and suddenly the whole mediterranean was blacked out in this electric storm it was absolutely incredible absolute silence except way down somewhere in a bar and reported oh god love her god love her and then the studio the studio because he was behaving so badly the studio actually cast you as dr doolittle yes he used it as leverage right yes i know he suddenly gave up as rex would i don't want to do the movie selfie that he was so they came to me and the same cast of characters that had arrived from hollywood to portofino came to the algonquin hotel in new york where i was staying and my agent kurt fring says i know they're all here again but it's for a different reason you have now been offered doctor doolittle and i said my god rex are not going to do it no they said don't worry i have you covered i said okay so i said yes and then the minute i said yes rex i think god do the movie and paramount was relieved of course or whoever was the studio at the time but i got paid so that was a nice weekend at portofino and then you went back to another big star making performance you were giving and well you were already star but another uh reputation cementing performance and royal hunt of the sun yeah peter schaefer that was a marvelous play actually i think it was his best play i wish it had been shown a few years later it would have perhaps made more impact i think it was a slightly ahead of its time and you actually played both main characters one on film and one on stage which had to have been very weird going back and forth great though but they weren't at the same time i mean it was about two years later that i did the film playing atawalpa uh that's strange i'd seen robert stevens play uh atawalpa you know the the peruvian the inca god ruler and at the um in a production of the national theater and he was marvelous he made these strange bird noises as this extraordinary creature well i tried to do that and more so i learned a bits of quechuan which is a dead language i got some professor who was nigh being a corpse himself to teach me a few words and catch you on and one day i'm making a whole speech in quechua and i was so pleased with myself because it was and i was walking up and down pacing and going over my lines and and dear old anthony powell who is a wonderful costume designer with about five academy awards to his name and he's sewing sewing my cloak that i'm supposed to wear out of bird feathers and he's just sitting and i'm going up and suddenly says what are you doing dear i said i'm just trying to learn learn this quechuan well you know what it you know what it really means don't you do you know what it means no i said no it's it's it's a dead language it's ketchup and it's the sounds that are important no but you know what it means i don't know the cat sat on the mat dear that's what it means so i had no confidence left at all i said can't i play this in english for the love again that performance has been described as one of the most over the top a major actor has ever given on the screen what what a compliment no actually riveting and rivetingly wonderfully over the top i mean it is a very you you made a choice and you stuck with it i believe is the is the actor saying yeah you made a choice and you stuck with it yeah um and but you didn't think the film worked no it wasn't really because there was no real script we used the peter schaffer play and just put passages in where it seemed suitable there was no writer to do no it's a shame because it could have been a wonderful move now you yourself personally could have could have theoretically gone the way of uh of uh mr harrison and mrs harrison but fortunately you met somebody around that time who was to change everything um and you are still married to her and absolutely marvelous and i'm still mandatory it's been blackmail all the way down the line and she put a stop to your um to your bohemian lifestyle yeah yes she did i was getting rather obese and drinking much too much and she said look if it's not off the hard stuff or else bye bye she she really made it i said i'm not gonna go because you look terrible anyway so get out and that really hurt i'm so vain i was so bad it wasn't the fact that i'd miss her or anything the fact that i was sort of bloated that angered me i'm told she sees you go to the gym three times a week that's right that's right now she saved my life with absolutely no question about it and uh and i'm indebted to her she's a great character well you met her last night um and how did was there a change as as your personal life suddenly became very happy um as i as i can infer do you think there was a change in your work yes absolutely also fortunately one had one was getting too old to play those boring leading man parts uh god they're boring honestly and i've become you know the age of being a character actor and playing the interesting supporting roles which are far more interesting anyway than the damn leading people and um i was able to do what i wanted very much and that was to be as versatile as i could be on the camera and in the theater and it all began around the time of marrying elaine and also because i was the right age to give all that other stuff up no it's been fun since then and i i think fun and i think i improved you know and enormously as an actor i found my niche but you told me that the 70s the parts in the 70s except for cyrano i guess we're not to your liking that you almost left a blank page in your memoir sale and then the 70s happened yes yes i wanted to uh i wanted somebody suggested why don't you just draw a little black morning line over that and then just say the 70s turn the page and you're in the 80s you know you don't know well it's interesting because over here um the the american cinema uh was a lot of people believe sort of peaking in the in the early and mid 70s with the godfather with altman with you know a lot of a lot of but you weren't you weren't doing that kind of acting well you weren't doing that kind of acting you weren't in those kind of pictures you were coming from a very different tradition yeah so what were you seeing well i was seeing the the awful hangovers and i was still doing them of the 60s movies a lot of which were so slow if you look at them now a 60s epic was oh my god everybody moved well you know why because of course there was all the money in the world in the 60s for some reason and in europe you had two hours for lunch and they always had wine at lunch served wine at lunch which was great we couldn't wait to get on the film set on the film sets and then you'd go back to work around three o'clock and it was all very slow motion it was awful and that those sort of pictures were for many were still going on in the early 70s there were big star world war ii movies that you know were just kind of money deals and you know um and of course then you and you did you did waterloo which i remember seeing on the giant cinerama in uh in the hartford state uh in hartford connecticut where i grew up and um boy that was a that was a strange movie it was huge you were in you were in russia for a long time yeah almost god almost six months i think something five months ago and you played wellington yes and rod steiger was talk about over the top as napoleon yes and you had a russian director who spoke no english yes uh bond archuk who was a very famous russian director he'd done that remarkable war and peace in russia which was an extraordinary movie uh we had we had inherited all the uh technical guys from war and peace on on what on his waterloo of course it had taken six years to make war and peace and some of the caste died during the making of it and had to be replaced so they had to go all the way back and start shooting again and that was another two years oh my god so of course by the time we we inherited the the technical guys and the stunts they were totally gaga by that time they were so tired and so exhausted and one day i'm sitting on my horse which i'd insisted was to be a quiet horse and because the explosions were so huge on the set i mean 50 feet in the air they would go that the horses were rearing and throwing very able stunt men from everywhere all right left and center while i sat on my horse looking for all the world trying to look for all the world like the duke of wellington and stuntmen were bad of course you know why because my horse stuck was his name was a police horse from moscow and totally deaf never heard the explosions nothing well there was a great day when we were supposed to rush across and skirmish and and uh fight the french on the left bank of that hill and i saw that i was to lead the thing on an old stock and i saw the the guys the technical guys they're putting their little red flags down every 12 feet busy and i said through my interpreter i said um those are for the explosions yes as we ride over them but when do they go off would you please ask them that please when do they go up and the guy said no no i he said no mr plumber after you have passed the the explosion go oh and i said that you said so we're ready action i got stuck to start galloping right away he did that beautifully and the explosions went off but every one of them under my horse's belly stock took off i i mean it was it was grand prix it was bran's hatch man i mean he took off and every other horse of course behind me followed him and we we're nearly at the hungarian border i could nobody could stop their horses they were going to say forget it who who cares if you're a duke it's a week and then of course they're all tired and we turn them around and walk slowly back of course the smoke is still all over the sky and as we approach minutes later hours later it felt like the little group of the director bondart chuck sitting around the smoke parted and there was nobody in the chairs they were all at lunch i mean what a humiliating day that was it was a very dangerous movie for the horses it sounds like too who weren't who weren't trained most of them right they were just horses they're just horses and if it was horrible because there's no spca in in russia and they they killed a lot of old horses just to put them down as corpses on the battlefield yeah don't see the movie it's uh that's not a great movie but i still remember you riding over the the battlefield at the end and saying the only thing worse than losing a war though what's the line it's a famous it's a famous line didn't you add it in i remember you saying it well we had so moving yes we put in as many of his quotes as possible because the script was nada and so we had a very interesting guy on it who was colonel gray who was the technical advisor willoughby gray he had he wore a monocle and and a scottish kilt and uh he he was an expert on on wellington and waterloo because his family had also been in there there was scott the scots graves they had ridden under wellington and he knew his stuff and so he he would furnish me with these wonderful quotes of which i can't remember either who is the best um who is the best film director in terms of getting you accustomed to to um to film technique to acting in front of a camera who are the best directors that you've worked with as an as an actor and maybe there's some who leave you alone or maybe there's some who who work with you well you know the best directors i i honestly think are the ones that do leave you alone and if you're comfortable if they've cast you right in the in the role they sort of should leave you alone because they've done and i think the first person to to show me that that was the case was john huston and he he was marvelous because he never directed anybody he just rehearsed the scene and then he shot it and this is the man who would be king the man who would be king which was a wonderful little film i think written beautifully by john and gladys hill his partner and it was very very true to the kipling style of mike kane and sean connery were wonderful and all the billy little the indian actor syed jaffe who played billy fish i mean he could have stepped right out of kipling's novels i mean it was just wonderful and john was extraordinary and one day i had i had a major scene i played roger kipling and i had a major scene and i was emoting away and i felt this nudge all the time god i look back there was a camel standing right behind me who kept bunting me with his head and i said what is that camel doing there uh chris john talked like that uh chris um just go on with your lines while the camera's rolling just just do it again i said but john there's a just do it again chris thank you i tried again and finally he said so let the camel the camel is just as important as any actor if the camel wants to nudge you you should be grateful john was diabolical but i i then realized it was a challenge he wanted richard burton to begin with and he would have had a much better time drinking at night with richard than me and this was a sort of challenge a masculine challenge so i finally said i did it and i got it and he said and he never tried it again but he did say um to me you know you know at the very end when they bring the the head of uh michael caine's head onto this and kipling looks at it the author and looks at it and says some line i can't remember about old carnahan uh you were great or something um and i couldn't get the line i was trying to prepared i tried to cry and then say the line i finally he just said look uh chris just take the music out of your voice and by jesus if it didn't work i suddenly learned how to well if you have a terribly emotional line on the screen and a huge close-up you don't have to color it at all you just have to deadly whisper and if you look at all those old movie stars or the john wayne's of the gary coopers and the jimmy stewart's when they have an important deadly line to say it's always sort of just like that absolutely straight and uh the face face does all the rest that's great direction it sure is and and how many people know that and how many people dare say that but that's the only direction i ever got great the great director john he used to he didn't last long after that because of course he had emphysema and he kept smoking these huge cigars all the time and the local guide doctor looking after me he had an oxygen tent on the set which he had to go and visit every now and then come out light up a cigar and finally he was out one day he was getting very excited and then and the doctor said i think you uh john i think it's time you should go back and have a break and go into the tent he said oh all right all right he opened the door the tent went in and lit his cigar in the tent doesn't that make it blow up i mean no it was it was just in time i said oh my god it was diabolical it was diabolical i heard it said i can't remember who did that he that he could direct in the end much more easily than he could breathe just so natural yeah yeah um yeah he was a great director really great speaking of your of that the accent now a lot of people i know think you're british um and sometimes in a formal occasion like last night when you received the award i could have sworn you were you know you were lawrence olivier getting up there and speaking so charmingly do you do you find that your voice your inflections changed depending on where you are and you do marvelous imitations so clearly what is your voice i don't know yeah it's it has always been a downfall in a way too to be able to mimic is not the greatest help in you in not being yourself but uh it's also a kind of way of cheating easily too but it does i'm affected by atmosphere and my i think all our voices change a little bit and if you've lived in a lot of countries you kind of use accents that you've sounds that you've heard and they accidentally come into your speech pattern that's the only way i can think of it but i'm i i canada is very lucky in the sense that it it sits between two great powers and has always been highly influenced by both the brits on the one hand and this country on the other and they they they've developed the canadians a sort of mercurial ear that they can the australians are also marvelous at with their particularly here they can do american accents better than almost anybody and we can too and we can the brits can't do american accents most of them at all at all no yeah they hit their r's really hard yes but the aussies pick it up just like that aussies are just amazing yeah and of course meryl streep is the most amazing of all i mean she can talk polish but she's not canadian but she's going to be extraordinary as maggie thatcher she'll be extraordinary she'll get her voice down pat like that i'm i'm in awe of that woman's uh ear i think she's the greatest ear in the world but um we've been lucky because we're sandwiched between those two powers and we've tried to use the best of both let's jump ahead to the to the insider which i think was another breakthrough performance of yours michael mann's film based on a a real story you played a real man i said last night i thought it was the noblest form of satire because on one hand this guy was kind of a dick but on the other hand he had this real i think heroic drive to him as well he did he i mean he was fearless in a certain way in terms of going out and getting the story i i love that performance so much and and you made it look really easy well that's good thank you but i'd watched mike wallace ever since you know he started in the early 50s on television as the first hard core journalist in front of the camera there was i think i can't think of anyone except john freeman in england who who did some pretty naughty stuff by making um people cry in front of the camera when they were being interviewed he was had a very cruel streak in him but at the same time in a funny way had a genius for knowing what the medium was all about that it was an accident medium and if you got in there and you were bold and you made people react you would get to their core quicker and be seen on television and that's the medium to catch the embarrassment and the humility humiliation it's a cruel medium it's been particularly cruel today to both of us make up please and uh i watched him so it was i'd watched him so much uh the only person that really put him down was frank lloyd wright that put down mike wallace and mike wallace was very grand in those days and sort of uh patronizing a little bit and he started to patronize mr lloyd wright and the very end of the program he says you know he's mike takes out a cigarette and lights it and then offers one to frank lloyd wright and mr wright says strange that you didn't offer me that first and from then on it was the put down and uh as as a show went off the air mike wallace was still sort of uh well uh sir it was just great to see that happen and i never told when i saw mike i didn't tell him about that that was a thousand years ago but it was a wonderful wonderful show maybe one could get that and play it so what stayed in your mind was when this man was humiliated on national television that you were about to play that's what really anchored itself in your mind when you sat down to play this role no i admired his guts mike wallace and so that all that stuff was easy and you know our voices are not that dissimilar in time so it wasn't difficult to get his voice and then you have to imitate him to a certain extent in the television interviews because you can play that back and compare notes and say oh that wasn't like but once you're out of the studio in the film you can be yourself as mike wallace avoiding that horrible thing called imitation well you just you got the man's conceit very very easily which you know was just so much a part of his makeup but you didn't you didn't underline it you didn't you didn't go for the sort of cheap laughs that that many of other others would have gone for it just was it was very organic the whole thing it was it was just if you haven't seen it you must um and it's a good it's a good and it's an important film and russell crowe is just extraordinary in it we had uh mr wyant on stage with us black ant from the cigarette company the whistleblower yes and uh you couldn't tell them apart i mean the voices were just absolutely perfect he can really disappear into uh into a part can't he oh yeah but he has that matt would he have been somebody you would have uh you would have gone carousing with in the early yeah i think so he reminded me of of all our gang yes yeah and he he's that kind of free spirit he was just he and colin farrell are sort of the yeah i love them they're my favorite modern people modern actors and i've worked with both of them a lot now do you think that i think that they they're fading oh okay he's he's got really great performers instincts so if you want to ask questions about um the the last station uh his great performance says count leo tolstoy um some of his animated work uh i'm telling you what to ask so we can uh but then we we have to just say a few words about beginners um you guys who have not seen beginners i envy you it is such a treat um he um mr plumber plays a man who comes out at a late age and i'm not spoiling anything by tell you his character dies because we know that in the first minute or two of the film you have never seen a more spring-healed jaunty elated performance of a character who is dying from cancer on one level it's complete denial on the other level it is the man is feeling joy for the first time in his life isn't he yes because he was closeted for so many years it's beautifully conceived by mike mills the the author and director because it's about his own family and i play mike's father on the screen and it was that character that you're you're referring to and mike was the totally unselfish and uh unsentimental direction in the play was just a joy you and ewan mcgregor uh was such such a lovely actor plays my son and um who i suppose is mike and uh again it gives an extraordinarily beautiful performance it's it was total fun to work with and and mike mills is one of my favorite directors because he he did that very thing he just let everybody be free and you played a gay man and you kissed you had a lover whom you smooched with and the the inevitable question is god was it gross or was it kind of kind of fun now what goron yik who plays uh my boyfriend a stupendous actor anyway was uh he was nervous because he's very very butch and he went pacing up and down he said oh my god are we gonna we really got to kiss in this thing and i began to get sort of petulant about it myself i was saying well what's so wrong about kissing me we'd have these sort of sparring effects before going on it was nerve-racking but it once happened it was rather pleasurable actually and i thought and so you add in your mind all the girls and then there's goron in your fantasy of uh in your sensual fantasies uh but again um the man at the top mike mills made it so comfortable and uh we joked about it but and then fell into it as naturally as if we'd always been gay and i remember too what you said in in your book having worked with uh jose ferreira and sereno de bergerac as his christian um that he you were uncomfortable i i got the sense with going for pathos uh in a character who is dying because um in a way you sort of preclude the audience's reaction if you're crying too much yourself was that was that a strategy in your mind this man is dying and you don't play him like a dying man no no because he is happy to die knowing that he's finally been honest with himself and free and um and knowing a great love same with serrano de bergerac you know at the end he and and joe made joe who was terrific in the role ferreira uh made the made the mistake of crying at his own death he as he died he was crying and i said no no that's something i can't i've got to learn not to do because it is in the theater it's perhaps one of the most ecstatic deaths ever written and he is so happy because he's just told roxanne has shown that she knew that it was him who wrote those letters and that makes him oh die the happiest of men and that's why it's moving at the end and of course so i remembered that and if ever that case came up which it did in this movie the beginners you used that he died happy now we're going to open it up to some questions and i can't see anybody but i believe you can there's still there what let's go there i'm sorry you know i have about i have five zillion questions and i i i don't want to use up all the air in the room so does anybody have a uh microphone uh oh well let's start down here yes many years ago i had the marvelous opportunity to go to broadway and hear you performing your one-man show on barrymore oh yes and i i thought that was an ex a wonderful performance but exhausting and sometimes you did it twice a day in a matinee on a wednesday and then in league how did you can you tell us something about how you manage that let me just repeat that she saw the um she saw him do his his uh spectacular one-man show on barramur and uh it was a very exhaust on broadway it's an exhausting evening and you sometimes do it twice in a day and how do you have the stamina for something like that well i've just done it again i did it for five weeks in toronto and um and then we filmed it so it might make quite an interesting little film because we were we took to the time to shoot away from the theater we shot the performance of course we filmed the performance but then we shot bits of it all through the play in different locales so it was like a surrealist dream it would go back and then it would come back to the stage again so i hope it works a very talented young director who is french-canadian uh eric conwell some amazing imagination so i i'm sure it'll come out well thank you so much i it was a great part for me and no yeah it wasn't it was night in the 90s actually it wasn't that far away about 15 years ago i did it on broadway yeah my gran my grandpa in 1920 when he was i think he was only 14 or 15 he lied he got an usher job in pittsburgh barrymore was coming through his hamlet it was my grandpa's job and one other person to sober him up before he went on stage he would always tell the story he was so eager for me to see hamlet because he saw barrymore do it do five or six performances and he still talked he even if the guy had been wretching before he went on stage he said he was still magic when he hit the stage well you have to be actually sober to play a drunk so uh um right over mr plumber i've here fortunate enough to see you numerous times at stratfor do you have plans to return oh yes i always have plans to go back there because i love that place i'm in a couple of years i'm going to go back i'm not going to go back next year but because you don't want to outstay your welcome but i but i've got something i i want to do which i want to bring to new york and that would be the ideal place to uh to open it thank you very much yes sir hi um we are very interested in the movement to rebuild the global theater our family patronized that a great deal and i just wondered if you had any plans to work with the global theater out of london the question is about the rebuilding of the globe theater you tell some wonderful stories about sam wannamaker in your book you were you were around for that movement and a counter movement competing movement at the time so do you have any plans to work at the globe theater no not not really when mark rylance ran it uh i would have loved to have gone and played something at the globe because mark uh who is now in a sensational two performances on broadway he's a wonderful actor when he ran the globe just after sam wanamaker died he had the complete spirit that sam wanted to that place to inherit a spirit of visiting companies from all over the world that would take a real sort of world national theater the globe would become and since oh somebody's already drunk oh my god oh my god but now it's out of his hands and the present management has is not particularly interested in the things that sam it's so funny more and more i used to be on the board of directors of the globe theater both in america and sam asked me to to be there and then when he died it was so funny to see as the years went by more and more people taking credit and not mentioning sam so i have a little bit of a an icky feeling the only one that was truly his disciple and his continuance in spirit was mark rylance whom i saw to a first-rate hamlet in cambridge massachusetts did you see that oh fabulous he's an extraordinary actor yes uh is anybody i can't see the back so would somebody yes you i see a waving hand um i love the dog whose dog is that that's great um is that otto from the movie no i i adored we had i think we had great chemistry i love helen helen she's just a terrific fun to be with and she's such a so easy to work with an actress who knows her craft so thoroughly as does helen because you don't have to talk about it you take it all for granted and you just do it and she was a joy i've been very lucky with most extraordinary leading ladies i've worked with both in the theater and in films i think it's not a good idea to make love to your leading lady or have an affair with because it always shows in some way on the stage and i i cite the perfect example in elizabeth taylor and richard brittain in cleopatra in which they were having a raging affair as you all know during the late 60s and it was worldwide i mean it was the gossip of of centuries but i mean in fact it was much more exciting than anthony and cleopatra's alliance but um when they got onto the screen they both looked so exhausted from the heavy off-screen duty they were to perform i mean i could richard remember he's always always very much like that all the time so it's not it ain't a good idea the funniest interview about that was the hume cronin who was a good friend of mine had a small part in in that picture and i'm watching television one night and milton berle comes on and um the guy says milton oh by the way have you seen cleopatra milton says i never miss a hume cronin movie um i i have to apologize um our the the head of this great festival has just given me the the winded up signal and i i fear i've taken way too much half the audience is left well now actually i want to i want to ask you about that now you said to me at a certain point you as a stage performer you you have one ear on the audience right even if you can't see them you know you can sense yeah the audience what did you sense about this audience well the fact that a lot of chairs were being scraped and people were getting up and violently making for the exits and dogs were yawning and no it's just subtle little things like that that i thought we should wrap it up you all have homework you have to rent a movie called my dog tulip an animated feature in which uh as i believe i said last night you gave the the most extraordinary narration that i have ever heard in a film except i would put you on par with boris karloff and how the grin stole christmas um this is first of all it's a beautiful movie from a great book and uh it's a movie that didn't have a very high profile so that's your homework for this day uh otherwise uh i am so unspeakably honored to to have been allowed to uh so you

Channel: Manatee Educational Television METV

Views: 63,958

Rating: 4.8958783 out of 5

Keywords: 2411, In, Conversation, With, Chris, Plummer, Christopher, Sarasota, Film, Florida, Sarasota Film Festival, 2011, Opera House, History, BBC

Id: reTF8CMS4lg

Length: 94min 44sec (5684 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2011