For decades, Christopher Plummer
loathed the movie that defined his
career. The Sound of Music was
“awful and sentimental and gooey,”
the dashingly handsome actor told one interviewer,
rechristening the beloved 1965 musical “The Sound
of Mucus.” He deemed his character, Capt. Georg
von Trapp—the stern, widowed father of seven folk-
singing children—an “empty carcass” and likened
working alongside the relentlessly upbeat Julie Andrews
to “being hit over the head daily with a Hallmark
greeting card.” Plummer was already an acclaimed
Shakespearean performer at the time of filming; the
movie made him an international star and he went on to take scores
of memorable roles on stage and screen in a wild variety of genres.
He was a charming jewel thief in The Return of the Pink Panther
(1975), a Shakespeare- spouting Klingon villain in Star Trek VI, and
a declining Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009). In old age, he
even softened toward his most famous film. “I was a pampered,
arrogant young bastard,” Plummer wrote in 2008. “I still harbored
the old- fashioned stage actor’s snobbism toward moviemaking.”
Born in Toronto to parents who divorced soon after his birth,
Plummer was raised in Montreal by his mother—a granddaughter
of former Canadian Prime Minister Sir John Abbott—and his grand-
parents, said the Los Angeles Times. An only child, “he took refuge
in literature” and developed exquisite diction by reading aloud to
his family after dinner. Trained as a concert pianist, he found greater
satisfaction in theater, and by 18 was performing classical roles with
Canadian repertory companies. Plummer debuted on Broadway in1954 in The Starcross Story, which closed on its open-
ing night, and played Henry V at Canada’s Stratford
Festival in 1956, said The Wash ing ton Post. Hailed
by critics as the new Laurence Olivier, he “grew
cocky fast” and rebuffed movie offers in order to play
Hamlet in Ontario for $25 a week.Plummer’s film career began in 1958 with a stand-
out role in Sidney Lumet’s theatrical comedy Stage
Struck, said The Times (U.K.). The Sound of Music
elevated the actor to a new level of fame, and tales of
his carousing soon began to spread. He once “partied
so hard with Tyrone Power that they both contracted
hepatitis”; his other drinking partners included Richard Burton,
Peter O’Toole, “and, on one occasion, a tequila- swigging horse.”
Yet his hell-raising rarely interfered with his work, said The New
York Times, and he played Macbeth, Richard III, Mark Antony,
and Iago “on prominent stages to consistent acclaim.”Plummer enjoyed something of a late- career movie renaissance.
“He gave one of his most authoritative performances” as the
real-life newsman Mike Wallace in 1999’s The Insider, said The
Guardian (U.K.), and played a psychologist in 2001’s Oscar-
winning A Beautiful Mind. Plummer received the first Oscar nomi-
nation of his long career for 2009’s The Last Station and finally
won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for 2010’s
Beginners, in which he portrays a terminally ill widower who
comes out to his son as gay. Addressing the golden statuette in his
acceptance speech, the 82-year-old Plummer said, “You’re only two
years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?”George Shultz built one of the deepest
Beltway résumés of the late 20th century.
He served three U.S. presidents and held
four Cabinet posts, as labor secretary,
treasury secretary, and budget director under Richard
Nixon and as secretary of state under Ronald Reagan
from 1982 to 1989. It was in the latter job that he made
his biggest mark. With Cold War tensions running dan-
gerously high, the unflappable consensus builder opened
diplomatic channels to the Soviet Union and encour-
aged Reagan to engage with Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev. Opposed by administration hard-liners,
Shultz helped bring about the 1986 Reykjavik summit
between the two leaders and the following year’s Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first-ever pact to reduce nuclear arsenals.
Ten months after Shultz left office in January 1989, the Berlin Wall
came down; in December 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. Shultz
attributed his diplomatic successes to a simple concept. “Trust is the
coin of the realm,” he said. “Everything else is details.”
“Born into a prosperous New York family,” Shultz attended board-
ing school in Connecticut and then studied economics at Princeton,
said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). After graduating in 1942, he joined
the Marines and saw combat as an artillery officer in the Pacific dur-
ing World War II. Leaving the corps as a captain, he earned a Ph.D.
in industrial economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and from 1952 to 1968 “developed an impressive record as an
industrial relations arbitrator.” He also served as a staff economist
on President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors and took
professorships at MIT and the University of Chicago, becomingdean of the latter’s business school in 1962. Six years
later, Nixon appointed him secretary of labor.
Shultz was soon named director of the Office of
Management and Budget, becoming “the president’s
right-hand man on economic matters,” said The
Wash ing ton Post. He then served as treasury secretary
and “refused to allow the IRS to investigate Nixon’s
political enemies.” That angered Nixon, who called
Shultz a “candy-ass.” But Shultz “emerged unscathed
from the Watergate scandal,” resigning to head the
engineering giant Bechtel. He remained in the job until
he became Reagan’s secretary of state in 1982.
He arrived at a perilous moment, said The New York Times. “The
Middle East was exploding, the U.S. was underwriting covert
warfare in Central America, and relations with the Soviet Union
were at rock bottom.” In addition to improving relations with
Moscow, Shultz worked “to forge peace between the Israelis and
the Palestinians, setting the stage for later efforts such as the Oslo
process,” said Foreign Policy. He was unsullied by the Iran- Contra
affair—in which the profits from secret arms sales to Iran were
channeled to Nicaraguan rebels—that engulfed the Reagan adminis-
tration, denouncing the dealings when they emerged in 1986.
After Reagan left office, Shultz returned to Bechtel, retiring in 2006.
He “remained active both in academia and politics,” said the Los
Angeles Times, but called his time in government the highlight of
his career. “I can look back on things I was involved in that made a
difference,” he said in 2015. “Really, that is what life is about—you
are trying to make a difference.”Obituaries
George
Shultz
1920–2021Ge
tty
(^2
)
The Shakespearean actor who starred in The Sound of Music
The steady diplomat who helped end the Cold War
Christopher
Plummer
1929–202135