Amanda Plummer Acts Differently
Amanda Plummer is not the girl next door — unless, that is, you live on Mars. It’s not that she’s a space cadet. She’s just unlike any other actress you’ve met.
She came out of nowhere less than five years ago and burst onto the stage and screen — not just a promising lump of flesh begging to be noticed in small roles, but a full-blown actress with imagination and mannerisms of her own. Her professional debut as a wizened 14-year-old farm girl in an off-Broadway play called Artichoke earned her raves that have been echoed ever since. One critic called her “charming,” while another said, “She quivers, her voice is a nasal squeak, her stare is glittery and hypnotic, and her upper lip moves in perpetual rumination.” That performance even earned her the honor of being singled out for attack by critic John Simon, who said she was like “Shirley Temple doing Boris Karloff.” Plummer broke into movies as the star of the offbeat western Cattle Annie and Little Britches, which prompted Pauline Kael to write, “The only other actress I’ve ever seen make a movie debut this excitingly, weirdly lyric was Katharine Hepburn.”
Dorothy Parker once said of Katharine Hepburn, “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B,” and one could similarly characterize the range of roles Amanda Plummer has thus far essayed. There was Vera, the high-strung teenage orphan in A Month in the Country; Frankie, the teenage ugly duckling in The Member of the Wedding; Jo, the pregnant teenager abandoned by her mother in A Taste of Honey; Ellen James, the teenage orphan who has her tongue cut out by rapists in the movie The World According to Garp. Get the picture? If it were anyone else playing such an unbroken succession of orphans and eccentrics, the world would be sick and tired of her. They would be clamoring for Boris Karloff to eat this pathetic little Shirley Temple.
But Amanda Plummer is no doe-eyed simp, no professional victim. She’s, how you say, special. She won a Tony Award on Broadway for Agnes of God, a poor play but one that she made riveting with her performance as an emotionally disturbed nun who kills her baby.
Possibly her most spectacular performance yet is in Sidney Lumet‘s new movie, Daniel, in which she and Timothy Hutton play characters based on the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Before our eyes, she degenerates from an Ivy League revolutionary proud of her police-inflicted battle scars to an institutionalized Thorazine receptacle, burned up by her own anger, her past, her sense of social injustice. Plummer acts — no, lays herself bare — with an animalistic intensity, an alien vitality that’s enough to make anyone wonder, “Where is this girl coming from?”
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Technically speaking, Amanda Plummer came from the brief marriage of two flamboyant actors, Tammy Grimes and Christopher Plummer. To some people, that explains everything. Hamlet meets the Unsinkable Molly Brown. No wonder their daughter is funny and flighty, grave and giggly, solemn and spooky: It’s all in the genes. Or is it? It’s true that Amanda inherited her father’s aquiline profile along with his last name, and that she has her mother’s eccentric voice; she chews her vowels and swallows her consonants in a high-pitched, squawky slur. But there’s more to Amanda Plummer: Anyone who’s seen her perform can tell she’s got a whole secret life going on inside her head. And no matter what kind of frail creature she’s playing, her secret makes her strong.
But the secretiveness that makes her so provocative onstage can make her appear spacey in real life. Plummer shows up for an interview looking like something from Loon Lake, barefoot and bedraggled, with a boy she met on the beach whose name she can’t remember. “This is … I forget your name,” she says to the sullen youth, who sticks out his paw and mumbles, “Matt.” Plummer is wearing her bathing suit under what looks like a rumpled nightgown. Her short, reddish-brown hair is tucked into a purple headband. She’s carrying a pair of baby-blue shoes, and she tows her handbag along the ground like a bobsled.
“How you doon?” she says, tilting her head to one side like a nervous crow and crooning in a voice eerily reminiscent of beatnik girls and diehard Method actors. Al Pacino meets Rickie Lee Jones. In the car, she runs her toes through the plush carpeting and talks about her cat, Isadora, who tore up the apartment she was staying in, forcing her to move. When we get to the restaurant she’s chosen for lunch, she lags behind, humming to herself and dragging her feet like a bored child. Where is this girl coming from?
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Although she’s 26, you’d never accuse Amanda Plummer of being adult. She giggles and gets ahead of herself when she speaks, babbles and backtracks. Ask her a question, and sometimes she goes so far into herself looking for an answer, a word, a feeling, that you wonder if she’ll ever come back. And then, sometimes, a surprisingly sophisticated response will come off the top of her head. When she’s not tuned in to another planet, she seems so defenseless that, as one person after another will testify, you just want to throw your arms around her. Meet Amanda Plummer, space puppy.
“Because you are an actor’s daughter or son, it’s assumed that you’re terribly unhappy because they were working and not around,” she says. “But I had a fascinating childhood.”
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