In Spite of Myself: A Memoir.

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

If there’s a fault to find with Christopher Plummer’s 648-page memoir, In Spite of Myself, it’s that it has no index or Table of Contents. Otherwise, the book, with its 182 black and white photographs, is a sterling example of what an entertaining, erudite, first-class performer’s memory-based account of his life should be.

For page after page of the four books and forty-four chapters into which he assembles his bank of prodigious recollections, Plummer has an overriding mantra of, “I happen to know ’cause I was there.” And so with passion, drama, and humour he tells his stories of his growing up in Montreal, falling in love with the theatre, and admitting to measuring the rest of his life by the plays he’s been in. He delivers his anecdotes with the polish of an actor talking directly to an audience, whether telling of episodes with his first two wives, or with his third, Elaine Taylor, “my true strength” and who “has seen through me from the beginning”, or in recounting drinking bouts with Jason Robards, or in lingering over encounters with any number of colleagues such as Tyrone Guthrie, Kate Reid, John Huston, Laurence Olivier, and the plethora of other icons he has met during his nearly 80-year lifetime.

Always gentlemanly in his comments about others, either male or female, he communicates his reverence for the theatre as a place that “separates the men from the boys” and even pays homage to critics such as Herbert Whitaker who boosted his early career. Courteous, perhaps, but he’s not above the realism of foul language or the details of a bawdy story about the removal of a stone via his penis, an incident marked by his appearance in Henry V when William Shatner took over as his understudy and Plummer marked him for future stardom. He admits to faults, too, such as his absentee role in the raising of daughter Amanda.

In Spite of Myself is a five-star, fully-loaded memoir from one of Canada’s premiere performers and a worldwide theatrical icon.