Christopher Plummer spent ninety-one years being one of the most magnificently, unapologetically himself human beings that the theatrical world ever produced — the Canadian actor whose classical training and whose fierce, restless intelligence took him from the stages of Stratford to Broadway to Hollywood and back again across a career spanning seven decades, who collected awards and standing ovations and the reverent admiration of every serious actor who ever shared a stage or a screen with him, and who maintained through all of it the particular quality of someone who had decided very early that the only performance worth giving was the completely honest one and who applied that conviction to his work and to his life with equal and sometimes unsettling thoroughness.

He married three times, loved with the specific intensity of a man who brought everything he had to everything he did, and spoke about the women in his life with a frankness and a literary precision that made his interviews feel less like celebrity profiles and more like chapters from a memoir written by someone who had actually examined his own experience rather than simply lived it. The last confession Christopher Plummer ever made about the love of his life arrived in the final years of a life that had contained more love and more loss and more genuine human experience than most people accumulate across three lifetimes — a confession that the people who thought they knew his romantic history completely were not prepared for, that named someone and described something in the specific, unguarded language of a man who had run out of reasons to be anything other than completely honest, and that landed on the theatrical community and the wider world that had loved him as Captain Von Trapp and as Iago and as every other extraordinary character he inhabited with the particular silence that falls when someone finally says the true thing and the room understands immediately that it has been waiting to hear it.