It's no wonder I'm perched excitedly on the edge of my chair. It's my first time in Toronto. My first time in this canadian city's fabulous Eaton Centre. My first bank heist. As I scribble illegibly on a small pad, I see a note surreptiously passed on to a bank teller by a red-haired lady in a beige Chanel suit and Chanel two-color, sling-back pumps. She is the personification of a well-to-do matron from one of the more affluent American suburbs- say, Grosse Point, Michigan, or Greenwich, Connecticut. In fact, however, the First Bank of Toronto, which I've just seen robbed , is the figment of a screenwriter's imagination, and the handsome matron I've described is none other than Christopher Plummer in drag.
Christopher Plummer? The internationally famed Shakespearean actor who is equally at home in Stratford, Connecticut, and who is as comfortable in Hamlet as in Julius Caesar and Henry V? Who, on TV has proved his versatility in Oedipus Rex, After the Fall, and as Herod in Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth." Who in films, is as well known for The Sound of Music as for The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Inside Daisy Clover?
One and the same. I'm on the set of the Canadian film The Silent Partner has won the best film award at the Twenty-ninth Annual Canadian Film Awards. Shortly before, Plummer starred in the English film Conduct Unbecoming, The Man Who Would Be King, and The Return of the Pink Panther, and made The Disappearance, another Canadian film, for Silent Partner's producer Garth Drabinsky. Awhile back, he'd starred on Broadway in Cyrano de Bergerac, for which he'd won a Tony, and in 1978 he'd not only won an Emmy for his work in NBC's series "The Moneychangers," but starred off-Broadway in E.L. Doctorow's ill-fated Drinks Before Dinner in which critics agreed that he was splendid. At press time, his dapper, urbane version of Sherlock Holmes in the film Murder by Decree is still delighting audiences, and his film Hanover Street is just opening. Plummer seems living proof that the more one does the more one has time to do, as he confides, over lunch in his dressing room, that he's now busy Concord-ing between Toronto and London so that he can fulfill his working obligations.
"It's quite true," Plummer concedes, "that one of the things that appealed to me about making both The Disappearance and Silent Prtner was that they were both Canadian projects. It was a chance to help Canada develop its industry. I also thought this had a clever, intriguing little script. It gave me a chance to play a real black devil, and I don't get much chance to play villains on the screen. Am I bound to Canada? Well," he says candidly, "I'm bound to my business, which is everwhere, and I don't think an artist should be in any way nationalistic. It's a universal medium. But, though my wife, Elaine, and I now live in Connecticut, I'm a Canadian citizen, keen in my small way, to help Canada. It's so nice to come back to one's own country and get decently paid. In the past, one had to reach elsewhere, you know.
"The arts are now so much stronger here than they were twenty, or even ten, years ago. Montreal, where I was brought up, was musically always quite acceptable, and gave an enormous amount of singers to the world. Some very fine Mozart singers came out of Montreal. Music, yes, but not so much dance, and as to theater! French theater was always alive, but back in the days when I was starting out," he goes on, "there were only one or two French companies and the English-speaking elements wre mostly amateur productions,, which we all began in. It was hard to persuade people that the arts should turn professional and we all had that awful kind of colonial backwash of Presbyterianism that dampened all that sort of thing. It still exists a little bit, that Puritanism.
"I know it," declares Plummer, whose great grandfather, Sir John Abbott, was prime minister of Canada, "because I come from that stock myself. I know how dangerous it was, how unaccepting and inflexible they were, those people. We had all of those wars to fight before, finally, things began to happen in the theater, I think," he adds with considerable satisfaction, "largely because of some of the really good groundwork that we all did, if I may say so."
Though Christopher Plummer came to the Stratford Festival in Ontario two years after it first opened, he feels he was in there pretty much at the beginning. After all, he was the first Canadian to take a major leading part, because during the two previous seasons the stars were Alec Guiness and James Mason. "Then," he says with quiet enthusiasm, his deep clear voice taking on Shakespearean cadences, "I followed on with Henry V, a divine play. It was a wonderful production because we had all the French Canadians playing the French court, which was a kind of nice bringing together of the two languages, which is, unfortunately, something that is not happening now.
"De Gaulle really needs to be blamed." Plummer says grimly, "for all that. Way back in '67 he made that- that speech, and the troubles now stem from his stirring up what had been dormant for a long time. Of course," he pounds the table with capable hands whose nails are polished scarlet for his role, "I think French should be the first language in Quebec. I always have. But there's no reason to delete English from the schools; it'll be too hard on the Province. How are they going to do business with anybody? What kind of currency are they going to have? They've just taken it over the top," he says, sadly shaking a head still covered by a woman's marcelled wig
Plummer himself chose every bit of the regalia he wears in his role of psychopathic and murderous bank robber Harry Reikel in The Silent Partner. "Why Chanel? Well," he explains, "I didn't want to look like a sort of boyishly dressed modern lady, you know, in slacks. That Chanel outfil was a sort of traditional, rather dignified suit that would," he chuckles, "kind of suit me, and it would also suit the character more. I also think that, later on, when he's shot and the blood spurts out, it'll somehow look more horrible in a Chanel suit. I must say, I did get a kick out of choosing the outfit because it gave me," he says mysteriously, "a reason that wasn't written in the script. And I'm very glad the director, Daryl Duke, bought the idea. I was nervous that he wouldn't, becaue when my character originally came back again to rob the bank after his prison term, merely disguised as somebody else, there seemed no reason for his strange behavior. But if you know that he likes getting into drag and has transvestite tendencies, you understand that there's a very sick sort of person underneath this vengeful, violent exterior . It's just a little bit more of an explanation of why this poor frustrated man does the things that he does. I also," he says proudly, "thought of the idea of the ankle bracelet that he wears with his own masculine clothes. I thought there should be, you see, a suggestion all the way through."
Fleshing things out. Adapting. Directing. Writing. All things that fascinate Plummer. And he's done them all. "I'm thinking of the overall," he puts it, "not just acting. I know I'm good at adapting things, because I have my actor-director's eye on rhythms and codas and I know how they play. Even writers have trouble adapting sometimes, because they don't understand the process of acting- when exits are coming and all that. And I'd like very much to write a book if I ever have the time. I'm working constantly, but one can," he insists, "workon it in bits. Not an autobiography or anything silly like that, but a novel of some kind. I'm quite confident that I can write good prose, but I'm not so sure about poetry. I've tried, and...."
Plummer has tried, and succeeded at, many things, including an outstanding documentary for ABC sports a few years ago, which he not only narrated but co-authored, about the discovery of an old Spanish galleon that had been sunk in the Bahamas near Walker's Cay. "I sprinkled in poetry, Archibald MacLeish and Hart Crane, to go with the scenery," he says. "We shot some of it in the Andes, taking the whole subject of the conquest of Peru into account and working backwards to the actual discovery of the galleon."
Since he's bilingual, he's played in French plays, been on French-Canadian radio and television, and, "Forgive me for my sins," acted in a production of Moliere's Le Marriage Force which the Theatre du Noveau Monde did a long time ago. "I was horribly nervous," he bemoans, "because they take it at such an incredible speed."
He also recalls happily the BBC-Denmark production of Hamlet at Elsinore which he did at Kronborg Castle in 1964. "The most illlustrious cast," he carols. "Mike Caine as my Horatio, Robert Shaw as Claudius, and Donald Sutherland played the small role of Fortinbras at the end. Incredible cast. It was shown all over and won all sorts of awards. It was done for the quatrocentennial celebration of Shakespeare's birth. There were," he recalls, "several Hamlets that year, actually. Burton's, O'Toole's, Max Schell's and mine. Life magazine did a whole thing on Burton's and mine, and it was quite exciting. That extraordinary cast."
Several hours later, I stand precariously on the edge of a fountain in the dense crowd gathered in Toronto's Eaton Centre to watch a make-believe shoot-out in front of the make believe First Bank of Toronto. Plummer, revolver in hand, crumples against the inside of the bank's door, then staggers out and falls. Christopher Plummer was dead right. The blood spreading silently over his chic beige Chanel ensemble underlines in scarlet the horror of the scene.

Photos connected with the article: 1. Full page color of CP seated with hands clasped, wearing a blue serge suit, with a pensive look- "Toronto-born, Montreal-raised Christopher Plummer is one of that hardy crew of international actors, who, whether it be on stage, in films, or on TV, is always working. Most recently, he narrated the Martha Graham segment of WNET"s "Dance in America" series, and is in the Canadian film, The Silent Partner." 2. Half page black and white of CP holding a glass of wine with raised right arm at front of the set of "Drinks Before Dinner"- Although New York critcs had little good to say about E. L. Dockorow's Drinks Before Dinner when it ran briefly off-Broadway, Plummer, in the lead, garnered excellent notices. 3. Half page black and white of CP in Sherlock Holmes clothes comtemplating a small Snoopy dog dressed as Sherlock- Deductive logic seems to have reached its limits as Plummer, camping between takes for his role of Sherlock Holmes in Murder by Decree, ponders one more Holmes clone. 3. Fifth page black and white of CP as Harry Reikel dressed in black- In The silent Partner (above and at right), Plummer plays Harry Reikel, a psychopathic bank robber who works in drag. Also starring in this shoot-'em-up thriller are Elliot Gould and Susannah York. 4. Half page black and white of CP in drag in Chanel suit. 5. Half page black and white of CP as Atahualpa on Broadway in Royal Hunt of the Sun, seated on his stone seat throne- On Broadway, Plummer portrayed the serenely arrogant Atahuallpa, the Inca sun god, whose empire is crushed by the travesties of civilization as the Spanish conquer Peru in The Royal Hunt of the Sun.