At first glance, and when she first speaks, actress Amanda Plummer is unfailingly linked to her lineage.
Her long, angular, bony face and dramatic, stentorian tones are mirror reflections of her father, actor Christopher Plummer. Her dark, piercing eyes and the curious crackle in her voice call to mind her mother, actress Tammy Grimes. After that, though, Plummer, 36, is her own woman, wending her way through a career that defies categorizing.
Plummer, who distinguished herself as the lonely secretary courted by Robin Williams in “The Fisher King” and who has appeared this summer in “So I Married An Axe Murderer” and “Needful Things,” looks at her career this way:
“It’s like walking down some foreign country’s cobblestone streets, not really heading anywhere, bumping into somebody’s house over here, being invited in for coffee, then being on the street again.
“And then somebody else is on the street, too, and you walk a little way with them, and then you’re on your own again. You don’t know where you’re heading. I mean, no flying saucer comes and lifts me up. It’s terribly real-charming and real.”
A bit dramatic? Perhaps. Yet drama and tension are at the core of this actress. In a two-hour conversation, Plummer traverses quite a landscape, from backstage on Broadway, to watching her mother perform in the Irish horse country where Amanda spent part of her teenage years, to the streets of Manhattan where, she recalls, she begged for food at one point, and on to today.
Plummer talks about her penchant for making “strong moves,” like her shift westward three years ago to Los Angeles from New York, after realizing that “the whole face of the Earth on the New York theater scene changed artistically,” and about her yearning to perform overseas, but always to keep moving.
She has been on the go nearly all of her life. Born in New York, her parents divorced when she was 2. From the outset, she remained with her mother and grandmother. Like Liza Minnelli’s walk-on with her mother, Judy Garland, in “In the Good Old Summertime,” Plummer’s debut came with her mother on the stage in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” (She was the baby in the sinking boat.)
“I had a very dramatic childhood in that there was drama always around me,” she recalls. “I lived in the theater. I saw `Antony and Cleopatra.’ I saw Tennessee Williams’ plays as a child, going way back. I think that’s food for imagination. I had very high ideals for men-high, dramatic, romantic feelings. And I couldn’t differentiate between the stage and real life very easily for a long time-as if I can now,” she says of distinguishing the difference between the two.
She traveled with Grimes, attending public and private schools in New York and elsewhere, and spending summers with her grandmother on a farm in New Hampshire. Later, she attended two New York high schools-Trinity and the United Nations International School, which “gave me a diploma, I think, because they felt sorry for me-I wasn’t much of a student.”
Her high school years were broken up by her great love-riding, exercising and generally tending to horses-on the East Coast and in Ireland, earning money all the while. “I got to ride once on the Belmont track,” she recalls.
While a teenager she spent a year in Ireland on farms where she exercised and rode horses. “I couldn’t rid myself of the fact that I love racing-I felt tied to the horse when I raced. There was no separation-none! It was a great life.”
It was a chapter in a life, Plummer maintains, that she chose herself- “every inch of it.” And her mother was “very supportive in whatever I was doing.”
Next came a year at Middlebury College in Vermont, which she left in order to take classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, which led to her first job, off-Broadway, in a comedy called “Artichoke.” After that, she says, “the ball started rolling.”
But not before she had her first brush with unemployment in the late ’70s. She had enough money saved to pay her $200 monthly rental for an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, but not enough left for food and cigarettes. So, she says, “I would tell stories for food.”
“I’d stand in one place in mid-Manhattan, and meet all kinds of people, people shellshocked from war or drugs, school teachers out on the town who had nowhere to go, who looked lonely. I wasn’t a hooker. I didn’t dress like a hooker. But they’d stop to talk to me. I’d say, `I’m hungry-can you buy me a meal at Howard Johnson’s?’ And I’d make up a name, and stories.”
Her luck changed with her first movie, the 1981 western “Cattle Annie and Little Britches,” about two teenagers who become part of an outlaw gang. The movie drew attention to her abilities, with Plummer and Diane Lane holding their own against Burt Lancaster and Rod Steiger. Within a year, she made her mark on the New York stage gaining a Theater World award as a “promising newcomer” in the revival of Shelagh Delaney’s “A Taste of Honey,” and winning a Tony as the title character in John Pielmeier’s “Agnes of God.”
Much of Plummer’s work after that was on the screen, notably her mute performance as an abused young woman who sparks a feminist movement in “The World According to Garp,” and as the tragic daughter of convicted and executed atom spies in “Daniel,” her first two adult movie roles.
She had another low in the late ’80s, “a time when I couldn’t get a job as a waitress, or a bartender. Nobody would hire me-I was overqualified. I found nothing for three years.”
Toward the end of that period, she sought financial help from her father. They had been out of touch over the years, but “never estranged,” she says.
Plummer, who appeared with her mother on the stage (in a New York revival of Ivan Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country”), has always wanted to perform with her father. It almost happened once, but, she suggests personality factors may have intervened to prevent father and daughter from working together.
“What comes back to me a great deal,” she says of the way she is perceived by others, “is my unusualness, my flakiness, my eccentricity-all separate. I’m not saying all those words mean the same thing. Dad has a difficult reputation, and I have an eccentric reputation-I think the other word for it is enthusiasm.
“So this very brave director, I would say, under influence, turned very unbrave. They were scared of working with two perfectionists, two very good workers, people who don’t just go, `Hail, Captain,’ or `Gee, I don’t know what to do here.’ We’ve got a lot of ideas, but we’re also very open to a strong director-very open. It’s more fun when you get a strong director, and you love to argue.”
She moved to Los Angeles in 1990. She had sensed a changing mood, more of a bottom-line mentality being brought to bear in the theater.
“You noticed (in a production) how the producers wouldn’t come in on the first day and shake everybody’s hand, and wouldn’t smile. It was very awkward, so subtle. It wasn’t something where you’d go, `Oh, he didn’t smile at me.’ You’d just go, `This is strange. Why aren’t we comfortable? Why isn’t anybody having a good time?’ The stagehands were unhappy, and the costumer. I never had felt that before.”
Surveying the situation in theater today, she is critical of her fellow actors as well. “They will not do the run of their contract, which puts the producer in an embarrassing hole. Mom did two years (on stage) in `Unsinkable Molly Brown.’ I turned down two films so that I could stay in `A Taste of Honey’ for a whole year-because I hadn’t finished it.” I hadn’t finished telling the story yet. It was so well-written. There were so many things still to find out.”
Lamenting what she calls the loss of “a great tradition,” and the emphasis on money sweeping through the entertainment industry-even the theater now, she looks forward to a time “when actors, producers, directors start being leaders instead of kissing each other,” she says.
She has strong words to say to fellow actors about the tradition of their profession. “Tighten up your belt a bit-guys in the 1700s did, in their little caravans, moving from town to town. Remember where we came from! Look back at the Booths-minus the guy who killed the president. Look back to the great guys! Learn about them! Talk to old people, who’ve been around, and learn from them. We’ve got roots-and the responsibility for that.”
She keeps her private life private. She is single, and uncertain whether that will change. “I’ve been very close, many times. I was very afraid of marriage. I couldn’t marry. I can now, but I couldn’t then. I was afraid of commitment. I’ve had great affairs, great loves, absolutely. That’s why I can be alone now-I can look back and go, `Wow!’ “
Since moving to California, work has been fairly steady-“a godsend,” she says, for which several casting directors, who have worked very hard for her, are responsible. Next up is a part opposite Charlie Sheen and Cary Elwes in “Martin Eden,” based on the Jack London novel, due to be filmed this fall.
“At heart, I’m an optimist,” she says. “I want to live a long time. I want to be old in this business.”
