Bringing Tolstoy to life

Christopher Plummer teams up with Helen Mirren in The Last Station....

Two titans,one long dead,the other vibrantly alive,attracted Christopher Plummer to the starring role in The Last Station,a new movie that chronicles the last year of the life of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. One was Tolstoy himself,a towering figure in the world of literature,who has rarely been portrayed on film. Its quite a part, says Plummer. The opportunity to play him was too enticing… There are lots of old films of him walking around,but theyre silent.

The other person who drew the 80-year-old Plummer to the film was Helen Mirren,the actress playing Tolstoys wife,Sofya,with whom the author shared a passionate,tempestuous marriage for 48 years. Hed never worked with Mirren,Plummer says,But I was an enormous fan. We both come from the same kind of theatre,with a background in the classics. Recalling Mirrens performance in the Royal Shakespeare Companys 1968 production of Troilus and Cressida,Plummer says,She was the sexiest Cressida Ive ever seen! My God,was she something to look at and listen to.

The Last Station was directed by Michael Hoffman (A Midsummer Nights Dream,Soapdish). The director also adapted the screenplay,from a 1990 novel by Jay Parini. Working from letters and diaries of Tolstoy and those around him,Parini told the story of how the author struggled at the end of his life with competing,often vexing forces: his worldwide celebrity; the Tolstoyan movement,a group of Christian anarchists inspired by the authors ideas on pacifism and simple living; a confidant named Vladimir Chertkov,head of the Tolstoyans,who pushed the novelist to leave Sofya and to will the rights to his works to the Russian people; and Mrs Tolstoy,who believed she and their eight children would be left impoverished and abandoned.

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Central to Hoffmans film is the Tolstoy marriage,which gives Plummer and Mirren the opportunity for scenery-chewing melodrama as they bellow and cry and commit acts of verbal and physical violence between fervent embraces. Late in the film,driven by increasing hysteria from Sofya,Tolstoy flees from his grand estate in the middle of winter in 1910. Within days,he falls ill and soon is on his deathbed,far from home,in a train station in southwestern Russia.

Plummer plans next to begin work on an independent film that,he laments,is struggling to find financing. This summer he will play Prospero in The Tempest at the Stratford Festival in Canada. Says Plummer,The irony of it all is that Helen has just done Prospero,in a film by Julie Taymor that is due out later this year. She teased me about getting to it first.