In Spite of Myself

· Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Christopher Plummer
Audiobook
16 hr 38 min
Abridged
Eligible
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About this audiobook

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.

About the author

Christopher Plummer was born in Toronto, Ontario. He has acted in more than 100 feature films, including The Man Who Would Be King, The Sound of Music, Stage Struck, and The Insider, and he has starred in three of the world's most important theatre companies: Great Britain's National Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Stratford Festival of Canada. He received two Tony Awards for Best Actor (Barrymore; Cyrano), and he has been nominated for the award seven other times. He also received a London Evening Standard Award for Best Actor for Becket. He has received Emmys, the John Gielgud Quill Award, the Edwin Booth Award (Barrymore), The Jason Robards Award for Excellence, and has been inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. He received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Beginners. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Elaine Taylor.

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