Plummer to play Henrik Vanger in 'Dragon Tattoo' film

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Toronto native Christopher Plummer has been cast in the Hollywood re-make of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the first in Stieg Larsson's internationally best-selling Millennium trilogy of who-dunnit books.

The 80-year-old Oscar nominee will play Swedish industrialist Henrik Vanger, the patriarch of a once-powerful family with a sordid past.

He co-stars alongside Daniel Craig as disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who is hired by Vanger to solve a 40-year-old murder. Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant hacker and sexual abuse victim who teams up with Blomkvist.

Still a Canadian citizen, Plummer now lives primarily in the United States, where he has a 100-year-old farmhouse on an estate in Weston, Conn. with his wife of 40 years, Elaine Taylor.

The film, which is shooting in Sweden, is directed by David Fincher, whose latest film, The Social Network, opens in theatres Friday.

Over his 50-year career, Plummer -- great grandson of Sir John Abbott, the third prime minister of Canada -- has split his time and talents between the theatre and feature films. And despite his age, he still shows no signs of slowing down.

This summer, he kept up a grueling pace playing Prospero in The Tempest at Stratford. His latest film, Beginners (Plummer plays a dying, 75-year-old father who decides to come out of the closet) had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. And this January, he is booked to revise his Tony Award-winning role in the play Barrymore in Toronto.

This year, Plummer was finally nominated for an Oscar for his role as Leo Tolstoy opposite Helen Mirren in the drama The Last Station.

Best known for his role as Captain Von Trapp, paterfamilias to the musical family in The Sound of Music, Plummer has rarely spoken about that part since he felt it "wasn't terribly exciting," he said in a recent interview with the UK Telegraph.

But the actor recently agreed to reunite with Julie Andrews and the rest of the cast of the 1965 Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical on The Oprah Winfrey Show to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the film. The show will air at the end of October.

Larsson died in November 2004, leaving three novels that were published posthumously: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

Central to each book is the theme of sexual violence against women, a crime Larsson loathed after witnessing the gang rape of a young woman (also named Lisbeth) when he was a teen.