Christopher Plummer whom we once knew as the dashing Austrian Captain Georg von Trapp plays aged Russian Count Leo Tolstoy in the new film The Last Station. It is based on Jay Parini’s 1990 novel of the same name. Script writer/director Michael Hoffman says that he wanted to make a movie about the “tragi-comical” marriage of the famous novelist and Sofiya, 16 years his junior, played by Helen Mirren. He might have aimed higher.

Most who read more than current fiction will claim to have, at least, dipped into Tolstoy’s monumental War and Peace, arguably the first great modern novel. Many have quoted the opening words of his Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.

In 1910, aged 82, Tolstoy determined to end his days in the contemplative solitude of a Hindu sadhu. Kneeling to kiss the ground at his rural estate, Yasnaya Polyana (Serene Meadow), he left home secretly on a final journey. After contracting pneumonia, he died in the railway station master’s house at Astapovo, 200 kilometres southeast of Moscow.

Plummer, Tolstoy on the screen, is scheduled to play Prospero in The Tempest at Stratford this year. Other noted actors have chosen that as their final role. The possibility that it could be Mr Plummer’s swan song gives the coming season added interest and a theatrically historic aspect.

Tolstoy was himself once a thespian. Although he and Bernard Shaw were contemporary writers, his plays satirising the rich, intellectuals and his own inner struggles have never been produced at Niagara on-the-Lake. The Fruits of Enlightenment (1889), for one example, is much more than a “tragic-comical” marriage tale.

Although Plummer was born in Toronto, he grew up in Senneville near Montréal.

I first encountered him 46 years ago when, home on vacation from Montréal, we took our children to see The Sound of Music at the old Eglinton Cinema in Toronto. The now

veteran actor, then in his 30s, says that he has never thought of himself as a film star. His world is the stage. Indeed, he downplays the von Trapp role except to say that working with Julie Andrews was “like being hit on the head by a Valentine card”. Was that, in fact, a compliment?

The man who is generally agreed to be the greatest Shakespearean player born in North America in the 20th Century is the great-grandson of Sir John Abbott, sometime dean of the Law faculty at McGill, a senator and successor to Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald whom he outlived for only two years.

Plummer told a recent interviewer that he enjoys ‘disappearing’ into the roles he plays. He said that playing characters “can bring out in you a personality that you have never known before. To play Tolstoy I used bits of all the parts I have ever played”.

Director Michael Hoffman says that had a younger actor been cast as the Russian reformer he would not have been as convincing as is Plummer, aged 80. Despite the patriarchal beard Tolstoy remained a romantic and young at heart. A filmed love scene with Sofiya was written to make the point.

Although Christopher Plummer and his long-time third wife have lived in Connecticut for many years he remains a Canadian citizen. He has been since 1968 a Companion of the Order of Canada, this country’s highest civilian honour. Were it not for Canada’s rejection of overseas titles, he would long ago have been Sir Christopher. On the other hand, such notables as Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis and Ralph Vaughan Williams have declined knighthoods.

As to the real Tolstoy, after an aristocratic education by French tutors and later military service in the 1853-6 Crimean War, he lived the life of what he called a prosperous, unreflecting land owner. In late mid-life he rejected bourgeois values in favour of non-violence and mutual love. Organised society’s injustice, exploitation and hatreds were represented equally, he said, in Russian autocracy and in Western democracy. The Russian Orthodox Church accused him of heresy, polite society rejected his views and many thought him to be demented.

His heresy was an effort to redefine radically traditional social standards and beliefs. He thought that the ‘freedom’ to amass great personal wealth underlies the power struggles and poverty that must be eliminated from the world. He said that while love is the most powerful force in the world, the poor are forced to believe that it is money and think that only violence can improve their lot.

His own income was considerable but Tolstoy adopted a simple life style, dressed and worked like a peasant. Sofiya did not share his will to renounce his worldly possessions. She guarded jealously the inheritance of her children which he seemed too ready to give away.

The Last Station is “a dance between fact and fiction”. Although the family diaries and many biographies tell the longer story, both the book and the film focus on Tolstoy’s last year. Having decided the escape the tensions of home, he set out at age 82 with his youngest daughter, Aleksandra, in search of a more spiritual life style. “My position has become intolerable. I can no longer endure luxurious conditions. What I now wish to do is to leave a worldly life behind and spend my last days in peace and solitude”.

Although there had been mounting arguments and a growing estrangement between Leo and Sofiya, there was a continuing affection the details of which both Parini and Hoffman “freely imagine”.

The countess could be from time to time hysterical, affectionate, demanding and shrewish. Moreover, the family was constantly at odds with a community of their father’s admirers and disciples who lived not far from Yasnaya Polyana.

The old man’s life and search for inner peace ended at Astopovo. Ill, he detrained and was taken to the station master’s house. The news soon spread. With townsfolk, reporters and photographers crowding outside to know his condition, he died there on 20 November, 1910. Leo Tolstoy rejected the idea of personal immortality but his name and fame live.