Listen to full audiobooks for free on :
#ad https://amzn.to/499CVn8
Title: In Spite of Myself
Author: Christopher Plummer
Narrator: Christopher Plummer
Format: Abridged
Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
Language: English
Release date: 08-13-13
Publisher: Random House Audio
Genres: Arts & Entertainment, Celebrity Bios
Summary:
A rollicking, rich portrait of a life. And what a life! By one of todays greatest living actors.
He was born a Canadian on a Friday the 13th in 1929 - the year of the Crash. His boyhood was one of privilege: an ancestor was a Governor General; his great-grandfather Sir John Abbott was Canadas third prime minister and owned railroads. There were steam yachts, mansions, and a life of Victorian gentility and somewhat cluttered splendor.
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 18-year-old playing the lead in Shakespeares Cymbeline, directed by the legendary Komisarjevsky of Moscows Imperial Theatre.
We see his glorious New York of the '50s, where life began at midnight, with the likes of Arthur Miller, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, and Paddy Chayefsky, and how Plummers 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 25 in The Starcross Story ("It opened and closed in one night! One solitary night! But what a night!"). He writes about Miss Katherine Cornell (the last stage star to travel by private train), who, with her husband, Guthrie McClintic, added to what experience Plummer had the necessary gloss, spit, and polish to take him to the next level. Guthrie bundled Plummer off to Paris for a production of Medea, opposite Dame Judith Anderson ("a little Tasmanian devil...who with one look could turn an audience to stone").
Plummer writes about the great producers with whom he worked - Kermit Bloomgarden, Robert Whitehead, and Roger Stevens - about Lillian Hellman, Leonard Bernstein, Elia Kazan ("If you werent careful, this chameleon of chameleons might change into you, wear your skin, steal your soul"), and the miracle that was the new Stratford Festival in Canada, where Plummer blossomed in the classics under the extraordinary Tyrone Guthrie. He writes about his (too brief) encounters with his favorite geniuses, Orson Welles and Jonathan Miller. He writes about his lifelong friendships with Raymond Massey and the wild Kate Reid, and with that fugitive from the Navy, "that reprobate and staunch drinking buddy, the true reincarnation of Eugene ONeill, whose blood was mixed with firewater," Jason Robards, Jr.
Plummer writes about his affairs and his marriages, and about his daughter, Amanda, who "despite her slim looks and tiny bones could raise tempests, guaranteed to loosen the foundation of any theatre in which she chose to rage."
We see him becoming a leading actor for Peter Halls Royal Shakespeare Theatre, with a company of young talented players, each destined for stardom - Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Peter OToole, et al., collectively the future of the English stage. The old guard was brilliantly represented by Dames Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft and Sir John Gielgud.
