Plummer, 79, still has stories to tell, and not just on stage and screen. His new backstage memoir, “In Spite of Myself” (Alfred A. Knopf, 656 pages, $37), is winning great praise for its candor and wit, “a rich, ribald, old-fashioned name-dropper,” Entertainment Weekly called it. The actor recalls being fired by the great stage actress Katherine Cornell, being overweight and prone to tantrums (“pampered” and “arrogant”) while filming “The Sound of Music,” the funny debacle of filming “Waterloo” with Russians, the challenge of “The Man Who Would Be King” with , and.
“I’ve spent my life remembering lines, and that memory training helps a great deal. As I went back and recalled say, Kate Reid, for example, a great actress who became a great friend of mine, I’d think of Kate and about 20 other stories would pop into my head. The anecdotes snowball … “My family trained me to love poetry, to appreciate its cadence and rhythm. I learned Shakespeare that way, so by the time it came to playing the roles, I was ahead. I could go back to any Shakespeare role I’ve played and it wouldn’t take long at all to recall the lines, even now.
