Biography
The daughter of Canadian actor
Christopher Plummer and American stage actress
Tammy Grimes, Amanda Plummer grew up on the East Coast with a love of horseback riding and literature. After studying at Middlebury College and the Neighborhood Playhouse, she settled into an acting company in Massachusetts. Plummer made her film debut in the 1981 Western
Cattle Annie and Little Britches opposite
Burt Lancaster. Working on Broadway, she won the Tony and the Drama Desk award for her performance as Agnes in the 1982 stage production of Agnes of God. She lost the role in the film version to
Meg Tilly and stayed in the theater. Some of her stage credits include The Glass Menagerie, You Never Can Tell, and A Taste of Honey. She earned another Tony nomination for her performance in Pygmalion, opposite
Peter O'Toole. On television, she earned an Emmy nomination for her recurring role of mentally challenged Alice on L.A. Law.
Plummer's feature film work would consist of playing small, fragile, almost invisible characters who nevertheless leave a big impression. On the big screen, Plummer displayed her silent intensity in the non-speaking role of Ellen James in
The World According to Garp (1982). She also created the interesting, if little-seen, character of Dagmar in
John Patrick Shanley's
Joe Versus the Volcano (1990). Her big film breakthrough came about in 1991 in
Terry Gilliam's
The Fisher King. She played awkward and plain office worker Lydia Sinclair, who inspires the love of a homeless man played by
Robin Williams. The next year, she earned her first Emmy award for her role of concentration camp survivor Lusia Weiss in the post-war drama
Miss Rose White (1992), a made-for-TV adaptation of an off-Broadway play. In feature films during the late '90s, Plummer often played slightly off-kilter women just on the verge of violent behavior. She was a disturbed sister in
So I Married an Axe Murderer and an semi-balanced Castle Rock resident in
Needful Things (both 1993). In 1994, she played a partner-in-crime with
Tim Roth in
Quentin Tarantino's
Pulp Fiction. As the gun-pointing Honey Bunny, Plummer gained a lot of exposure with a minimum of screen time. The next year, she played a serial killer in
Michael Winterbottom's
Butterfly Kiss (1995).
Returning to television, Plummer earned another Emmy for the role of Professor Theresa Given in a 1996 episode of Showtime's
The Outer Limits. For the rest of the '90s, she continued portraying delicately damaged characters in small independent films like Matthew Bright's
Freeway (1996) and Peter Cohn's
Drunks (1997). She also appeared in the family film
A Simple Wish (1997) and lent her voice to the TV series
Stories From My Childhood as well as the animated feature
Hercules (1997). In 1999, Plummer revisited her earlier days as a horseback rider to play a member of the title harem in
Peter Greenaway's bizarre 8 1/2 Women (1999). In 2003, she played
Sarah Polley's food-obsessed co-worker in
My Life Without Me. Plummer's projects for 2004 included the horror film
Satan's Little Helper and
Tobe Hooper's
Brew. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide