Plummer’s Not the Type
Amanda Plummer is sitting silently on a sofa in her publicist’s office, her legs crossed, her arms clasped tightly around the waist of her gray sweater. She is staring, intently, at an undefined point in space, almost as if she is hypnotized, as if she has drifted off into some other dimension.
The silence--now more than a minute long--has been triggered by the most routine of questions, a simple inquiry as to what had drawn Plummer to her latest project, a “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentation called “Miss Rose White.” Plummer plays a Holocaust survivor who, after years of separation, comes to New York to live with a younger Americanized sister (Kyra Sedgewick in the title role) who does not remember her sister or understand the horrors she endured. The character of Lusia, like so many of Plummer’s recent roles, is a woman fraught with pain, with memories she cannot escape.
“There are so many answers that come to mind, so many images,” she finally says, “but I just realized I’m not talking.”
She laughs, an odd wheezing giggle. “Do you, by any chance, have telepathy?”
There are no pat answers with Amanda Plummer and no way to be entirely sure when she is kidding and when she is not. The telepathy remark is a joke. But moments later, when she says that she’s always had a sense of poverty, how she’s constantly aware of the sensation of “dogs biting at my heels,” she turns serious.
“I’ve been hungry enough, at least twice in my life, where I said, I’ll do anything in order to get some money, just enough for food,” she says with an ever-changing assortment of nervous tics. She fiddles with her slightly-askew hairdo, chain smokes, crosses and uncrosses her legs revealing a glimpse of aqua-colored tights under her flowered print dress and the brocade tops of her rose-colored boots.
“That’s why I can’t say there’s any kind of part I wouldn’t ever consider doing. There might be a time when I’m on the streets again and I don’t want to burn my bridges.”
Homelessness doesn’t seem like anything she should worry about in the immediate future. After years of dazzling New York theater critics (and winning a Tony Award in 1982 for her performance in “Agnes of God”) Plummer finally got some mainstream movie attention this year for her performance in “The Fisher King,” as the forlorn object of Robin Williams’ delusion-soaked affections. That, on the heels of her Emmy-nominated guest stint on “L.A. Law” (as Benny’s mentally handicapped girlfriend), may at last give Plummer a chance at a broader range of film and television roles. Until now, she says, producers and casting agents have seen her in a fairly limited light.
“Frail,” she says, when asked what she thinks her image probably is. “Quirky. Suicidal. When I was younger, I was a suicide hotline. A casting agent would say, ‘We have a suicide victim in this film? let’s call Amanda Plummer.”
“In theater, it’s just the opposite. I’ve played some very strong women, tough women. Not impenetrable characters, because they can be deeply hurt. But they move on and survive. And I think that’s important.
And, finally putting her thoughts into words, Plummer says it is the survival instinct that attracted her to Lusia in “Miss Rose White.” But her first emotion when she read the script?
“Anger,” she says before another lengthy pause. “... the fact that a person can be extinguished, that someone can be responded to as if they didn’t exist, because of a difference in somebody’s class or station. Wherever you look, you can see something being extinguished on this earth.”
Plummer says she had no difficulty with doing an Eastern European accent. (“Peter O’Toole once said I was a mynah bird. I get all gooshy when I think of him saying that. It makes me giggle. It makes me very proud.”) Nor was she hesitant to play a Holocaust survivor, even though she is not Jewish.
“I find it enlightening,” she says of having to learn Sabbath rituals for the part. “I love roles that let me learn. I’d love to play a trapeze artist, just so I could study for three months how to do it. Anything that adds to your physical or mental life is wonderful.”
Plummer, 34, is the daughter of Tammy Grimes and Christopher Plummer. They divorced when she was very young and, until she developed a reputation of her won, questions about her famous parents were enough to keep her from doing any interviews for nearly five years. “At the beginning with the press,” she said “I felt like I was being utilized as a way to shoot at them. No matter what I said, it was turned around and used as a weapon. It was terrible.”
Her parents never expected her to become an actor, but she says now she would have a hard time being anything else. “I’m insatiable for stories, for reading them and for playing them out with other people.”
And if she couldn’t be an actress? “I would go to Ireland and hang out with storytellers and poets and sheepherders and listen to what they dream about. And I would probably go mad, become one of those black shrouded women that waves to everyone from the front of her house and people would bring me apples in the afternoon, just to be sure that I’m OK.
“If I couldn’t act in stories, then I guess I’d have to become one.”
“Miss Rose White” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on NBC.
