Nominee, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture (All The Money In The World)

Replacing an actor in a lead role with only four days of preparation is no easy feat, yet the great Christopher Plummer doesn’t even consider it the biggest challenge of his career. Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Plummer took an early interest in the stage, acting in various productions that included ballet and opera. Plummer found fame as Baron von Trapp in the much-loved musical The Sound of Music (1965), starring opposite Julie Andrews. As a classically trained actor, he struggled to find film roles that paralleled his immense talent, and found solace on the stage, where he won Tonys for Best Leading Actor in the musical Cyrano (1974) and the drama Barrymore (1997).Classically handsome and equally capable of channeling good nature or villainy as required by the script, Plummer also easily straddled starring and character roles acting in such acclaimed films as The Man Who Would Be King, The Return of the Pink Panther, International Velvet, A Beautiful Mind and The Insider, working with directors as diverse as John Huston, Spike Lee, Michael Mann and Ron Howard.He garnered an Academy Award nomination as the literary revolutionary Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009). Within the next year, he won his first Oscar in a supporting role as Hal, a terminally ill widower who comes to terms with his homosexuality in Mike Mills’ comedy-drama The Beginners (2010). In a cathartic acceptance speech, he cried out to the statuette, “You’re only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?”Following these two critically acclaimed films, Plummer found roles in movies such as the thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and as the dementia ridden Zev in Remember (2015). The path that brought him to don the suit of recluse billionaire J. Paul Getty for Ridley Scott’s All The Money in The World is in itself worthy of a Hollywood plot. Following revelations of sexual misconduct by Kevin Spacey, Scott and the film’s producers decided to remove Spacey from every scene of the already completed movie in which he appeared in the Getty role. Plummer who had originally been considered for the same role was rushed in to reshoot the scenes. It was an unprecedented operation of virtuoso filmmaking and with only four days of preparation, Plummer and the entire cast and crew worked long days and nights to complete the film.“I replaced two or three people in my time very quickly in the theater and so I know the dangers of quick and the importance of quick study and so I treated this the same way I did when I was young,” the actor said.  As to how he memorized the lengthy monologues, he credits his theatrical training, as he had to learn long soliloquies for parts such as King Lear. On the press tour of The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017), he spent his downtime memorizing lines and studying the script.  His hard work did not go unrecognized, as the actor is nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture for his last-minute role as J. Paul Getty.