Christopher Plummer (The Last Station) is the latest actor to be cast in David Fincher's adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon TattooTHR doesn't specify, but from the character descriptors ("patriarch," "wealthy industrialist"), it sounds like Plummer will play Henrik Vanger.  He joins Rooney Mara (Lisbeth Salander), Daniel Craig (Mikael Blomkvist), Robin Wright (Erika Berger), and Stellan Skarsgård (Martin Vanger).  Max Von Sydow was at one point in talks for the role of Henrik, which would have lent the film some Swedish authenticity.  Though Canadian, Plummer, a recent Oscar nominee, is no slouch: he should do just fine.

In Stieg Larsson's book, Henrik hires Mikael and Lisbeth to solve a murder that has gone unsolved for forty years.  Hit the jump for the full synopsis.

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The synopsis for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:

A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.

It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.

It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves.

It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives. [Amazon]