Christopher Plummer

Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer was born on December 13, 1929, in Toronto, Ontario. He was the only child of John Orme Plummer (1894–1977), who sold stocks and other securities, and Isabella Mary Abbott, who worked as secretary to the Dean of Sciences at McGill University, and was the granddaughter of Canadian prime minister Sir John Abbott. On his father's side, Plummer's great-uncle was patent lawyer and agent F. B. Fetherstonhaugh. Plummer was also a cousin of a Canadian classical pianist Janina Fialkowska and a second cousin of British actor Nigel Bruce, known for portraying Doctor Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes.

Plummer's parents separated shortly after his birth, and he was brought up mainly by his mother in the Abbott family home in Senneville, Quebec, on the western tip of the Island of Montreal. He spoke English and French fluently. As a schoolboy, he began studying to be a concert pianist, but developed a love for theatre at an early age, and began acting while he was attending the High School of Montreal. He took up acting after watching Laurence Olivier's film Henry V (1944). He learned the basics of acting as an apprentice with the Montreal Repertory Theatre, where fellow Montrealer William Shatner also played.

Plummer never attended university, something he regretted all his life. Although his mother and his father's family had ties with McGill University, he was never a McGill student.

In 1946, he caught the attention of Montreal Gazette's theatre critic Herbert Whittaker with his performance as Mr. Darcy in a Montreal High School production of Pride and Prejudice. Whittaker was also amateur stage director of the Montreal Repertory theatre, and he cast Plummer at age 18 as Oedipus in Jean Cocteau's La Machine infernale.