berniegfletcher — 10 years ago(May 12, 2015 02:36 PM)

It is interesting that once a bio mistake is made on the Internet it is repeated endlessly. In his memoir "In Spite of Myself" (2008)Plummer writes that after her divorce his mother Isabella went to work as a secretary to the Dean of Sciences (a family friend)at McGill University in Montreal. Somehow this job was transferred online to John Orme Plummer, Christopher's father, who never lived in Montreal and was a securities salesman in Toronto, where Christopher was born. It is small wonder there was trouble in the new marriage as Christopher had the bad timing to be born on Friday, the 13th of December 1929, only weeks after the stock market crash. Fortunes were lost and panic seized the stock exchanges where John Plummer worked. Christopher Plummer writes that it was a double disgrace at the time for a woman of his mother's upper class to be divorced and have to go out to work (at McGill back in Montreal). Christopher also writes that he did not meet his father until he was 17 and backstage at a play in makeup as an old man. I have always wondered why Christopher was born in Toronto, but grew up in Montreal. Isabella took her baby son back home and he was raised in a home full of cultured aunts.
I have seen this error repeated over and over on the Internet once it became gospel. The lesson is not to believe everything you read online.