Christopher Plummer Interview at TCM

Christopher Plummer, whose autobiography In Spite of Myself has just come out, was interviewed by Jeff Stafford for the Turner Classic Movies website. Below is a brief snippet:

TCM: With you being such a classically trained actor, I was curious about your opinion of "The Method" and Marlon Brando's impact on the theatre world with A Streetcar Named Desire.

CP: Listen, to me "The Method" is usually totally misunderstood. It doesn't mean that you have to mumble and not be heard. It means that you use it when you're in deep trouble, when you can't bring your imagination to work then you try and have a sense memory of your own that can help and I think that's true of any instinctive actor. You don't have to go to a method school to learn that. But when Marlon came to the fore and became the second – actually – very real actor, the first being Montgomery Clift … Monty and Marlon Brando were the two supremely realistic actors on the screen at that time. And it was just wonderful to watch and you realized they knew how to treat the medium. The Medium needed that then. Now I'm going to switch back a few decades before that to an actor not a lot of people will know but an actor called Robert Williams who was one of the most realistic comedians the screen had. He made Cary Grant look like he was overacting. Robert Williams was the lead opposite Jean Harlow in Platinum Blonde which was directed by Frank Capra. To watch Robert Williams act was like seeing a comic using the Method, long before the Method became famous with Marlon and Monty. So people were doing it already, that's my point. Brando was great and I would have liked to use both my classical knowledge and Brando's kind of wonderful imaginative reality and mix them up and that would have been the perfect mix for any artist.