From a Montral high-school production of Pride and Prejudice to a five-decade career opposite the likes of Tyrone Guthrie, Laurence Olivier and Julie Andrews. [Photo credit: Tibor Kolley / The Globe and Mail.]

After a half-century on stage and screen, Christopher Plummer is putting his life story to paper. So far, writes Michael Posner, he's at 500 pages and counting.

TORONTO -- Christopher Plummer is writing his memoirs -- 500 pages so far, in longhand, no less. "I'm too old-fashioned to use a computer," he insists. "I'm too old-fashioned to use a quill."

The book's end is nowhere in sight. And no surprise. After all, it must encompass an acting career that spans more than 50 years, one populated with such names as Tyrone Guthrie, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson, Zoe Caldwell, Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller, Mike Nichols, Irene Worth --the absolute elite of English-language theatre in the latter half of the 20th century. In fact, it's hard to think of a major stage figure with whom Plummer hasn't worked.

The book must also deal with some major cultural moments, including his Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews, one of the most popular films ever made; his Tony Award-winning performances for Barrymore and the musical Cyrano; his Tony-nominated Iago in Othello, opposite James Earl Jones; not to mention dozens of other movies for film and TV.

And there's a serious time problem: Still vigorous at 74, Plummer seems to be busier than ever -- the result, he says, of the attention lavished on his one-man, Garth Drabinsky-produced hit Barrymore, which he expected to be a modest little eight-week Broadway exercise and, after a national tour, ended up running for nine months. In New York, the stage manager actually drew up a list of his backstage visitors, and it read, says Plummer, "like a who's who of Hollywood and the theatre. They realized I was alive again, even though I was playing an old, dying sop."

And it led, he is convinced, to a resurgence of demand, including his appearance as CBS newsman Mike Wallace in the Oscar-nominated The Insider, with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino.

Indirectly, then, the oft-maligned Drabinsky bears credit for the Plummer renaissance. Plummer is agnostic about the still-pending charges filed against the former Livent impresario. "But I've always admired Garth because the country has always needed someone like him. And dealings have been going on since the world began. I don't know why everyone is so terribly shocked. As one American friend said to me, 'You'd think he had been a child molester . . . something really serious.' "

Meanwhile, the scripts pour in. This month, he's wrapping up work in Toronto on a children's film, Blizzard, with Whoopi Goldberg and Brenda Blethyn. That will be followed by seven weeks in London, where he's shooting a new Nicholas Nickleby, written and directed by Douglas McGrath, who played a private investigator in The Insider. And then, after a short respite at the Weston, Conn., home he shares with Elaine, his wife of 32 years, he's into rehearsal for the title role in King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller -- part of Stratford's 50th-anniversary season, and starting its run in August.

Stratford is not exactly terra incognita to Plummer. He was among the fearless company that, under Guthrie's tutelage, helped fix its name on the theatrical map almost 50 years ago. He spent several seasons there. The new and undiscovered country is Lear, perhaps the only major Shakespearian part he has not yet essayed.

And even this Lear, Plummer concedes, he tried to duck. "First of all, I was going to do [Ben Jonson's] Volpone, because I want to try all the outrageous, funny clown parts. And I thought Jonathan would know how to pull that great, unwieldy piece together. And so I told that to Richard [Monette, Stratford's artistic director]. Suddenly, Jonathan calls me and says he can't do it. It's hopeless, it's too unwieldy. It doesn't work."

Miller then proposed mounting either The Tempest or Lear, but the festival had recently staged the former. "So I was stuck. And so I said, 'Oh, all right, I'll do King Lear.' "

He says it's still too early to have a clear fix on his approach to the senescent, vain and half-mad king, plagued by two vile daughters and a third whose genuine love and innocence he can no longer recognize. But during his Nickleby shoot in London, Plummer plans to meet frequently with Miller, who previously directed him in the West End in Buchner's Danton's Death. And looking beyond the Stratford season, there is some ambition to take Lear and perhaps one other property to London and/or New York.

Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer blames The Globe and Mail's one-time theatre critic Herbert Whittaker for his decision to pursue acting.

"Herbie was then the drama critic for The Montreal Gazette and he gave me a good review in a high-school production of Pride and Prejudice.

"I played Darcy -- I think I was 15 -- and it went to my head, and I thought, 'This is for me.' "

In fact, Whittaker liked him so much that he then cast Plummer in his own Montreal Repertory Theatre productions. In no time at all, he was performing Shakespeare at Rosanna Todd's open-air theatre at Beaver Lake, under directors she brought over from England, including Malcolm Morley, and Russian émigré Fyodor Komisarjevsky.

Of course, it's probably a safe bet that Plummer would have ended up in the artistic world, regardless of Whittaker's endorsement. Raised by a single mother in Montreal in the 1930s and 40s -- he's a great- grandson of former Canadian prime minister Sir John Abbott -- Plummer grew up amid affluence, refinement and culture, with a private-school education, piano lessons, and frequent trips to the theatre and ballet. He never met his father, John, a lawyer and civic administrator, until he was 17.

"We were both terribly nervous, as you can imagine. I was in a play and he came to see me, so the first time he saw me in the flesh was on the stage, which is a bit weird. So we went out to dinner, and he was charming and sweet, but I did all the talking." After that, they met occasionally -- his dad would come to Stratford when Plummer performed. "But we kind of knew it was a bit late to start a relationship."

It was Morley who took Plummer to Ottawa to help found the Canadian Repertory Theatre, one of the first professional theatres in the country.

He made his professional debut there in Shakespeare's Cymbeline; he was 17. He worked as well at CBC radio and television: As early as 1951, he appeared in a TV version of Othello, acting with the likes of John Colicos, William Shatner and Richard Easton. By his early 20s, he was already touring the United States in plays with Edward Everett Horton and Katherine Cornell, and he made his Broadway debut at 26 in The Star Cross Story in 1954. He made his on-screen debut in Stage Struck, directed by Sidney Lumet, the following year.

Will all of these people be in the memoirs? "Well, I really have to be careful," Plummer says. It's the morning after the Oscar ceremonies at which A Beautiful Mind -- in which he has a role as a psychiatrist treating John Forbes Nash Jr.'s schizophrenia -- walked away with honours for best picture and best director.

"There really should be two books, one for Canada and one for . . . the voild," he says, slipping into a comic German accent. "My publisher in New York -- Knopf, which is pretty damn good -- keeps telling me, 'Get out of Canada as fast as you can.' I said, 'C'mon guys.' However, I've written about the early Montreal days, which I knew very well. I knew every bar -- there were about 345 of them -- so I have some damn good stories to tell. I want to paint Montreal as a rather fantastic city, which it was, because nobody knows today what it was like. And I'm one of the last survivors, or rapidly becoming one."

At Stratford, he intends to use his days off working on the memoir. "Up there," he says, "you either turn into an alcoholic or you better write.

"And I'm going to write."