Actor Christopher Plummer died today, at age 91. In addition to his roles in films such as The Sound of Music, for which he is probably best known, he is also notable for having starred not just in two libertarian films, but in one of the most important ones.
He played a leading role in Harrison Bergeron, one of the most dead-on libertarian films ever made. The film fully articulates the price of enforced equality, in terms of both lost liberty and of those accomplishments that inequitably great people make possible. Based on a Kurt Vonnegut story, it has an imaginative and thought-provoking quality.
Seven years later, Christopher Plummer made Ararat, an important film that restored in the popular mind the heretofore forgotten memory of one of the twentieth century’s worst crimes by government — the massacre of as many as a million Armenians in a genocide that set the pattern for the many democides of the twentieth century.