his is the year of the Stratford Christopher Plummer Festival. It’s not billed that way, of course. The season’s brochure still announces the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, with “Stratford” spelled out on the front cover in large capital letters, “Festival” in much smaller capital letters, and “Shakespeare” squeezed between them, with a capital S, but with the rest of his name in lower case. Two other names appear: those of Antoni Cimolino, the festival’s general (read “administrative” ) director, and Des McAnuff, its artistic director. But there’s only one face — a keen-eyed, questing, weather-beaten face — on that title page, and it takes up most of the space. The back page shows the face’s owner at three-quarter length in a jovial, parental pose, his arms wrapped protectively around the shoulders of the two directors, both of whom are some thirty years his junior. No name accompanies the picture on the front page, and you have to look very hard to find it at the back. The assumption seems to be that no name is needed.

It probably isn’t. Christopher Plummer, aged eighty and sporting the first Oscar nomination of a career that includes more than 100 movies, is appearing in just one of this season’s twelve Stratford shows. He plays Prospero in The Tempest, and, according to Cimolino, advance bookings for the production equal those for the festival’s two major musicals, Evita and Kiss Me, Kate. On some days, it even outsells them. (Why it should be deemed worthy of remark for Shakespeare to do better business at his own theatre than Andrew Lloyd Webber is a question best left for another occasion.)

If Plummer’s star billing is justified commercially, so it is historically. A history of the festival, published in 2002, described him as “the poster-boy Stratford actor,” but he might just as well be termed the poster boy Canadian actor. He hasn’t lived in this country since the early 1950s; he has seldom appeared in any Canadian theatre other than Stratford; and most of his film career has been American. But he has deep Canadian roots, and he has maintained a Canadian, and certainly a Stratford, presence — even when not working here. (He can usually be spotted in the festival audience at least once a season.) He is the local boy who made good internationally but is still thought of as local.

When Plummer first came to Stratford, in 1956, playing the title role in Henry V, he was twenty-six. He remained a virtual Stratford fixture until 1962, made a brief encore return in 1967, and wasn’t seen onstage here again until 1996, when he appeared in Barrymore, named for and celebrating the fabled American actor John Barrymore, who died in 1942 but whose image, Plummer said, “inspired a lot of us guys, all the good two-fisted drinkers of our time.” He could hardly be said, though, to have rejoined the Stratford company by playing the role; Barrymore was a virtual one-man show, mounted in collaboration with a commercial producer and bound for Broadway the following year.

Plummer returned in 2002, for the festival’s fiftieth season, and this time it was a return in earnest, maybe the greatest earnest possible: he was playing King Lear. What was impressive about his Lear was that it wasn’t, as it might easily have been, a mere guest turn by a visiting star. It was, in the best sense, a modest performance, from an actor who seemed to have parked his ego at the stage door (at least until the curtain call). It was a very complete performance of the old king as a vain, deluded, but fundamentally honest man, bewildered into new experience and running with it, into madness and beyond. Plummer’s performance, under the medically informed direction of Jonathan Miller, became famous for its intimations of dementia (this Lear could never remember the name of one of his daughter’s suitors), but it was more truly notable for its incarnation of what the text calls “authority,” which here translated into “bluff off-handedness.” Plummer was a humorous Lear, regally unused to introspection, who brooked no nonsense but whose idea of nonsense was anything he didn’t wish to hear. Two of the actor’s finest moments were delivered from offstage. Before his first entrance, we heard the sound of cackling as he shared a joke with his faithful Fool. Before his last, we heard a transfixing, feral moan that resolved, when he appeared with the body of his murdered daughter, into the four most devastating monosyllables in Shakespeare. So he took us on a highly articulate journey between two inarticulate extremes: from “heh, heh, heh, heh” to “howl, howl, howl, howl.”

He was back again in 2008, as Julius Caesar in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (a production subsequently filmed). Still in sparkling vocal, physical, and intellectual shape, he perfectly realized Shaw’s idea of Caesar as a passionate soldier and philosopher whose relationship with the young queen Cleopatra was strictly pedagogical. The role reflected his position in the Stratford company; he was charming, witty, irrepressible, and unbeatable. Prospero (like Lear, a father; like Caesar, a teacher) seems a natural progression.

So his Stratford work has found him at the two extremities of his career. It’s as if he’s gone straight from Roaring Boy to Grand Old Man, with Barrymore as a way station in which he was a Grand Old Man playing a Roaring Boy — or, just conceivably, vice versa.

n 2008, and without benefit of a ghostwriter, Plummer published his autobiography. It’s actually billed as “a memoir,” though that seems a slight term for a volume of 656 pages. Its title, In Spite of Myself, playfully reflects its overall tone, which ranges from rueful to gleeful, with the latter predominating. It also reflects its author’s singular position among Canadian actors. Most obviously, it’s a picture of high living and high success, the story of a theatre star. It’s also, seemingly, the story of a movie star. And yet there’s an air of bashful incredulity about it, as if the narrator were still dazzled by the company, professional and otherwise, that he’s been privileged to keep. He’s with them, but he’s not quite of them: enough of an outsider in Hollywood for us to identify with him. In the theatre, American as well as Canadian, his name, all by itself, is bankable. But that’s never been true in films, where he’s respected but not idolized. So the theatre can feel proud of him without ever feeling that it’s lost him. And since the theatre is his real home, as both his book and his track record attest, it’s worked well for him.

The book’s first, arrestingly blunt sentence is “I was brought up by an Airedale.” This is then elaborated, with what proves to be typical buttonholing whimsy, as follows: “I won’t deny it, ‘tis the truth and nothing but, Your Honour — a bumbling, oversized, shaggy great Airedale.” Dogs have featured prominently in Plummer’s life; the house in Connecticut he has shared for thirty years with his third wife, Elaine, has been overrun with them; four of them even make it — along with her — into his book’s dedication.

The dog who watched over him in his earliest memories was called Byng, named after Field Marshal Lord Byng, a former governor general and a friend of Plummer’s grandparents. That was the kind of family he was born into; a great-grandfather on his mother’s side was Sir John Abbott, the country’s first Canadian-born prime minister. Plummer himself was an only child. His parents divorced soon after his birth in 1929, and he barely knew his father. It was, with all respect to the Airedale, his mother and her extended family who brought him up. Home was Montreal, and his family were “the distinguished poor — not poverty-stricken, I assure you.” They were certainly cultured. He got hooked on acting after seeing his first school play, but he was equally enthusiastic about music — all kinds of music.

Montreal before and during World War II was a music-hall and cabaret mecca, and Plummer, even when underage, was able to get into the clubs and developed a taste for all kinds of high life. He saw every entertainer who came through town, from Edith Piaf to Count Basie to the stripper Lili St. Cyr, and those who already lived there, like the young prodigy Oscar Peterson. A lifelong jazz fan, Plummer had an equal passion for classical music. He studied to be a concert pianist, and Cimolino says he’s still a fine one. The one musical expression he’s always felt sheepish about — unnecessarily, one suspects — is singing. He has starred in one musical on Broadway, and his most famous film remains, of course, The Sound of Music (1965), but his vocals were dubbed. It came very early in his movie career, and he expressed an uneasy contempt for it, famously renaming it “The Sound of Mucus,” but he has come to accept and even love it. The late Richard Monette, former artistic director at Stratford, reckoned that the film contributed mightily to Plummer’s Canadian icon status: “People see it when they’re young; he’s living forever.” In a backhanded way, it made him famous.

Plummer entered the professional theatre at a time when there wasn’t much Canadian theatre to enter. He was able to begin with what was then the nearest thing to a full-time company, the Canadian Repertory Theatre in Ottawa. But his richest early Canadian experience came in radio. McAnuff, who directed him in Caesar and directs him in The Tempest, was talking to him over dinner about current young actors’ vocal facility, or the lack thereof, and asked him where he developed what Kenneth Tynan once called “a voice of kaleidophonic virtuosity.” Plummer replied that it came from radio: “It was my bread and butter.” He commuted from Montreal to the cbc studios in Toronto, exploiting his Quebec upbringing to appear in “so many soaps in both languages” that he once forgot to show up for one of them. (It was a live broadcast, of course, and his fellow actors had to improvise an off-mike death scene for him — at least that’s what he says in the book.) Not all good radio actors prove equally good onstage, but McAnuff was sufficiently impressed by Plummer’s account to consider inaugurating radio classes for the current Stratford company.

Plummer’s real theatrical baptism occurred outside Canada: in Bermuda, in fact, as the young leading man in a year-round rep housed in a hotel. (Another Canadian, Kate Reid, was his leading lady.) Contacts he made there got him, in phenomenally short order, to New York. And it was New York that got him back to Stratford.