How old is christopher plummer in the sound of music

But at least someone in this room seems to regard it as the child he never wanted and can never get rid of. That and Poppins. Our director, dear old Bob Wise, did keep it from falling over the edge into a sea of treacle. Nice man. God, what a gent. There are very few of those around anymore in our business.

You know, I really tip my hat to Mickey Rooney. He was in his 90s and still touring. John Gielgud was still working when he was 96, but that was an ornate life John brought to the stage. Mickey Rooney was a little animal who attacked everything with just as much fire as he did when he was a kid.

He was so good at everything—tap dancing, singing with Judy, then breaking your heart in The Black Stallion as the coach. And he managed to marry about 18 times.

They were all tall. God bless him. It seems as if growing older while staying handsome in Hollywood equals having no looks at all. I hated being a poncey leading man. You really start to worry about your jawline. Andrews rallied.

But we had a very good time. We never had a cross word, nothing. I drank so much and ate all those wonderful Austrian pastries. Once was when I was soaking wet, after the boat I was in with the children turned over. You were trying to say that you were glad Maria was back. And like a child, you said that it was all wrong when I went away and it would be all wrong if I went again.

It was so endearing. Eventually, Wyler decided to direct the disturbing psychological thriller The Collector instead, and Robert Wise, who had guided the film version of West Side Story to 10 Oscars, came onboard.

Walter Matthau was actually tested for the role of Captain von Trapp, with other names like Yul Brynner and Bing Crosby also floated for the part. Luckily, footage of Andrews in Mary Poppins was available to the filmmakers and she became the top choice.

And Christopher Plummer was selected for the dash of danger he could bring to the Captain. Charmian Carr was 21 going on 22 when she portrayed the eldest von Trapp sibling.

Singer Bill Lee provided the singing voice for Captain von Trapp. Also dubbed in the movie is the singing voice of Mother Abbess, played by Peggy Woods. The helicopter that captured this famous moment during the opening of the movie also caused a downdraft that not even Andrews could withstand.

Zanuck took the studio back from Skouras, he reviewed the idea of the movie adaptation of the musical. He and his son Richard D. Zanuck then hired Ernest Lehman to write the screenplay. Immensely astonished with Lehman's script, the two Zanucks immediately saw true potential in this movie than they ever had from the original stage musical.

The project was then green-lit for production. Originally to be directed by William Wyler, who actually scouted locations and toyed with the script. He had a different movie in mind, for example: tanks crashing through walls, et cetera.

Each movie starts off with a panoramic helicopter shot where the music starts softly and becomes louder as local architecture is seen until it climaxes with the camera closing in on major characters who take up the beginning of the initial song. It ran for one thousand four hundred forty-three performances and won in a tie the Tony Award for the Best Musical.

Robert Wise cast Eleanor Parker because he wanted a name actress in this movie. Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer were unknown to movie audiences at the time. Maria Von Trapp was not invited to the Hollywood premiere of this movie. Strangely enough, the woman who made it all possible, the movie, the Broadway musical, and everything else, Maria Von Trapp, was not invited to the opening night.

As reported by "The Telegraph", Maria wondered why she hadn't received an invitation and took it up with the producers, but was simply told that there were no seats left.

This might have been because she clashed with Wise and producers during the productions. The reports were that the characteristically feisty Maria was starting to boss Wise around, and make intrusive suggestions about the production and the story, and she was eventually kicked off the set.

Perhaps to compensate for this Julie Andrews did invite the real Maria Von Trapp to appear on one of her tv specials shortly after the release of the movie; and the two yodelled together. The clips can be seen on YouTube. Although she enjoyed this movie and Broadway production; the real Maria Von Trapp said in her autobiography that Mary Martin and Julie Andrews the Broadway and Hollywood Maria, respectively , "were too gentle-like girls out of Bryn Mawr".

Maria describes herself as a wild child during her days at Nonnberg Abbey. When an interviewer asked her if she was "a flibbertigibbet a will-o'-the wisp and a clown", Maria said no, she was much worse. While the name "Liesl" is not a name of the real Von Trapp children, daughter Maria portrayed as "Louisa" had a favorite childhood doll named "Liesl".

In this and Julie Andrews' previous movie, Mary Poppins which, like this movie, are considered Andrews' most well-known movies , she played a nanny who helps the father of the children she's looking after have a better relationship with his children.

Robert Wise was so hard at work on the production of The Sand Pebbles in Hong Kong, China that he couldn't attend the 38th Annual Academy Awards ceremony where this movie was up for ten awards, including Best Picture. When the cast and crew of The Sand Pebbles heard the announcement of this movie's victory at the Academy Awards, they took a short time off of filming to throw a celebration for Wise.

The real Maria was sent to the Von Trapp family to tutor one of the kids who was recovering from Scarlet Fever. She was not sent by the convent to be a governess. The child's name was coincidentally, Maria. This was changed for the Broadway production in part because the audience would be confused if there were two Marias.

Robert Wise was the original choice to direct this movie, but he turned it down, feeling it was too saccharine. Darryl F. Zanuck and his son Richard D. This movie was accused of re-writing history, as in reality, the union with Germany in March was very widely supported in Austria. Robert Wise and Marc Breaux, on their initial Salzburg location survey of the city's streets and squares, walking, discussing, planning the cutting of shots for each tracking dance sequence involving Maria and the Von Trapp children.

Marc and Dee Dee, busy with creating the motivation for the dance sequences were followed on the sidewalk by Wise, while Marc planned each choreographed sequence out in the city street traffic lanes. The congested city traffic didn't stop Marc from sailing out into the traffic patterns planning each dance routine. After principle photography in Salzburg had finished, the weather was overcast, the country side shrouded in fog and mist, and heavy daily rain, prevented the opening hill top shot-set-up.

The company remained in their hotels waiting for the final sequence filming. Twentieth Century Fox management gave the company departure travel orders. The last day, as Robert Wise tells it, the sky opened with a bright glorious sunny morning.

The entire company raced to the hill top, with the helicopter loaded with camera and crew, setting up the opening sequence of aerial shots, finally coming upon Julie Andrews spinning around on a hill top before breaking into the title song. To get the timing right, Breaux was hidden in nearby bushes. He watched the helicopter coming over the mountains and at the right moment, he had a bullhorn and yelled to Andrews, "OK, Julie!

This is Rodgers and Hammerstein's last musical. Oscar Hammerstein had already been diagnosed with cancer when he and Richard Rodgers began working on a new musical based on Maria von Trapp's memoirs.

This movie recruited some of the same people that worked on West Side Story : producer and director Robert Wise, screenwriter Ernest Lehman, associate producer Saul Chaplin, singer and actress Marni Nixon, music adapter and conductor Irwin Kostal, and production designer Boris Leven.

But Kym gained more weight than expected on the Austrian cuisine during production, and by the end of the shoot, this became impossible. William Wyler originally signed on to be the director, and started casting. He was the one who hired Julie Andrews, not Robert Wise.

Wyler dropped out of the project eventually because he felt his heart wasn't really in it. Wise picked up where Wyler left off. People were expected to display the swastika in their windows something Captain Von Trapp refused to do and anyone who didn't was accused of being against Hitler.

He had people taken away who were suspected of Communism or being an enemy. Critics complained that Rodgers and Hammerstein were ripping "The Sound of Music" off of "The King and I", in that they took the true story of the Von Trapps and were just adding, copying, and embellishing plot points from "The King and I", their last big musical about a nanny and a brood of children, to make "The Sound of Music" more dramatic and cinematic.

The real Von Trapps complained as the movie was being filmed that Georg was being portrayed as an unfeeling monster at the beginning of the story, and the real man was not like that. This was a plot point probably borrowed from "The King and I", where we have the tough, scary, and belligerent Yul Brynner going up against free spirit Gertrude Lawrence.

Also borrowed from "The King and I" was the subplot about Maria going up against the Baroness, that never happened in real life, and was probably borrowed from "The King and I"'s depiction of Anna sparring with the King's other wives and court members for dramatic purpose.

The subplot with Leisl and Rolfe's star-crossed romance was also borrowed from "The King and I", and Tuptim's forbidden romance, as well as being influenced by Romeo and Juliet. The introduction scene with the Von Trapp children and Maria is like the March of the Siamese children scene. Not coincidentally, Yul Brynner was approached to play Captain Von Trapp in the early steps of the casting process of this movie.

Also, Marni Nixon was in both movies. When this movie was first released, Twentieth Century Fox held a grand opening on Hollywood Boulevard at Grauman's Chinese Threatre with many of the child actors and actresses present and signing autographs. A local kid's band, The Serenaders, played at the opening.

Speaking at a Von Trapp reunion on The Oprah Winfrey Show , Kym Karath Gretl recalled almost drowning during the second take of the overturning rowboat scene: "I went under, I swallowed a lot of water, which I then vomited all over Heather Menzies-Urich ", she said.

Although one of the most successful musicals and movies ever made, this show was never known for its authenticity. One of the liberties taken in the storytelling process was the notion was that Captain Von Trapp was the tough parent, and Maria was this free spirit who made the whole family more open, loving, and humanistic. In fact, by most accounts by living family members, Maria was the sterner of the two parents, not Georg.

The idea for the hugely successful Sing-A-Long-Sound-of-Music first came about when one of the organizers of the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival heard that staff at a retirement home in the Scottish town of Inverness were handing out lyric sheets to their residents during video showings of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers so that they could sing along.

London-based drag performer Ivan Cartwright was the original host at the film festival, and still regularly hosts the Sing-A-Long at the Prince Charles cinema in Leicester Square. This movie was also a hit and won five Oscars.

But while the Broadway production was a minor hit, this movie was the biggest hit of all time, up to that point. According to a recent interview on Good Morning Australia with the Cartwright sisters Veronica and Angela ; Veronica Cartwright, who was not in this movie, but watched Robert Wise and the crew film this scene from the sidelines; said the producers gave the kids in the cast brandy after they fell in the lake during the canoe scene; because they kept having to re-film it over and over again; and they were trying to warm the kids up.

Angela also said there were leaches in the pond. The song "Edelweiss" from this musical is used as the theme song for the cable television series "The Man in the High Castle", about an alternate history where the Nazis conquered the United States. Christopher Plummer has softened his criticism of the film over the decades, stating that he has come to respect the picture's place in history and its great affection from audiences. However, he maintains that he doesn't care much for it as a movie,, and the role of Captain von Trapp was the most difficult of his career due to his dislike of sentiment and working with children.

He also was greatly frustrated being typecast as von Trapp in the years following, and strived hard to regain his status as a character actor. The real Maria, long a widow by the time of filming, complimented Christopher Plummer that he was much more handsome than her husband was. Came second in the U. Production designer Boris Leven's design for the living room at the Benedict ranch home "Reata" in Giant was used again as the grand entry hall for the Von Trapp family home.

Both used the same split staircase, proportions, scale, and mezzanine hallways. However, the color scheme, details, and decorations were different for each movie. Each were also independently constructed in different studios. Both turned the roles down, insisting there was "too much sugar" in the show. Christopher Plummer routinely made fun of this movie behind the scenes, nicknaming it "S and M" and "The Sound of Mucus". In spite of this resistance, producer and director Robert Wise got them both on board.

Their contributions to this movie made it much more realistic. The Captain became less of a stereotype, and Andrews worked with Wise to make the whole show less fake and schmaltzy, and she tried to give Maria more realistic dimensions.

She even said to Wise and the producers at one point, "How are we going to get the sugar out of this show? The movie still got skewered by the critics for being "saccharine and phony". Robert Wise even wondered "What did we do wrong? But their changes are generally considered to be a huge improvement. This movie is considered to be better than its Broadway source material, and they helped make this one of the most successful movies of all time. If you factor in inflation and the price of tickets from versus today, this is still one of the most successful movies of all time, box-office wise second only to Gone with the Wind , and it is still the most successful movie musical of all time.

It even won the Oscar for Best Picture in spite of the critics' pillorying. So Andrews and Plummer succeeded in making it less sugary and more accessible to the masses. Ironically, just as Andrews and Plummer turned down the roles for being too saccharine, so did Robert Wise turn down the director's job when they offered it to him because he thought the story was too saccharine; as well as a host of other A-list Hollywood directors like Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, for the same reason.

Wise had to be approached a couple of times for this. It seems nobody wanted to do this movie because everyone thought it was too saccharine. This is ironic since it turned out to be one of the most successful movies ever made.

Julie Andrews performed the song "My Favorite Things" from this show on live television, on "The Garry Moore Show" Christmas show in , four years before she performed it in this movie, released in It can be watched on YouTube. When actor Christopher Plummer died, fellow actor Yorick van Wageningen told in a Dutch newspaper he will never forget the moment when an extra on the set of 'The New World' came to Plummer and asked if he would sing the song 'Edelweiss' which Plummer sang in 'The Sound of Music' on the cremation of her mother.

Plummer looked her in the eye and said: 'You can drop as dead as your mom'. The Von Trapp street address is "53". When Maria first comes to the villa and is looking through the gate, the address sign is on the stone pillar to the left. If Sir Rex Harrison had been cast, this would have been the second time he would have been cast opposite Julie Andrews in a big musical, since the two co-starred in the Broadway hit "My Fair Lady" just a few years before that.

Although in the movie and Broadway production the children do not know how to sing, in real life, the Von Trapp children were already musically inclined before Maria came to their home. Space and science fiction was all the rage in the s when they were producing this movie. Most of the cast followed up this blockbuster musical with some sort of science fiction outing, riding that trend.

Angela Cartwright, Heather Menzies, and Nicholas Hammond went on to have regular recurring roles on science fiction television series after this movie wrapped. Angela starred for three years as Penny Robinson on the cult classic Lost in Space Angela's on-screen sister from this movie, Kym Karath, made a cameo on Lost in Space playing a space Princess in season one, episode twenty-seven, "Lost Civilization". Heather Menzies played Jessica 6 on Logan's Run Christopher Plummer also appeared in two science fiction movies after this movie wrapped.

Eleanor Parker, who played the Baroness in this movie, played the recurring role of Margitta Kingsley on the science fiction spy series The Man from U. Julie Andrews did several science fiction outings after this movie. Although most of the lyrics and music in this show are superb; most critics agree that "LA, a note to follow SO" is pretty weak.

It's very generic. Adams humorously imagined that Oscar Hammerstein II just wrote "a note to follow So" and thought he would have another look at it later, but could not come up with anything better.

One of eleven American musicals to win Best Picture. Donehue thought that the project would be perfect for his friend Mary Martin; Broadway producers Leland Hayward and Richard Halliday Martin's husband agreed. The producers originally envisioned a non-musical play that would be written by Lindsay and Crouse and that would feature songs from the repertoire of the Trapp Family Singers.

Then they decided to add an original song or two, perhaps by Rodgers and Hammerstein. But it was soon agreed that the project should feature all new songs and be a musical rather than a play. They approached Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the rest is history.

In , Plummer shot to international stardom with the hit musical film The Sound of Music. He played the widower Captain Von Trapp, a man who eventually falls for Maria, the young nun Julie Andrews he hires to care for his seven children.

The film is based on the real-life Von Trapps, who indeed fled Austria during the rise of Nazi regime, though the film took a fair amount of liberties with the musical family's true history.

While The Sound of Music was a big success, Plummer had mixed feelings about the project. He has admitted that he looked down on the role and the movie at the time. As he wrote in his memoir In Spite of Myself , he had been "a pampered, arrogant young bastard, spoiled by too many great theatre roles" and "still harboured the old-fashioned stage actor's snobbism toward moviemaking. Before long, Plummer returned to the stage. He won his first Tony Award in for his portrayal of the title character in Cyrano.

Plummer sought out a range of acting challenges in the s. He appeared on Broadway as Iago in Othello and then as the title character in Macbeth On the small screen, he appeared in such projects as the hit miniseries The Thorn Birds and as a narrator for the children's movie The Velveteen Rabbit One of Plummer's most powerful film performances occurred in the s.