For Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, The Sound of Music Was Never “So Long, Farewell”

[KoKo]

This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Sound of Music, which first captivated audiences in 1965. Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer reflect on the making of the classic, their decades-long friendship, as well as the mountains they’ve climbed since then.
by Alex Witchel

It would surprise no one, perhaps, to learn that Julie Andrews travels with her own teakettle.

On a late afternoon last winter she and Christopher Plummer met me at the Loews Regency Hotel, in Manhattan, to talk about the 50th anniversary of the movie version of The Sound of Music, which is being re-released in theaters in April. For anyone who saw it originally, in 1965, it hardly seems possible that so much time has passed. Now that Plummer is 85 and Andrews is 79, you can imagine how they feel.

It was during the filming of The Sound of Music that Andrews and Plummer began a friendship, which, half a century later, is still going strong. Andrews’s husband, Blake Edwards, directed Plummer in The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975, and they remained friendly until the director’s death, in 2010. (Edwards and Andrews had been married for 41 years; Plummer has been married to his wife, Elaine, since 1970.) In 2001, Andrews and Plummer co-starred in a live television production of On Golden Pond, and in 2002 they toured the U.S. and Canada together in a stage extravaganza called A Royal Christmas. By now, they have perfected the well-worn patter of an old married couple themselves.

Once Andrews’s kettle was pressed into service and the tea was brewed and poured, the two of them settled onto the couch in a suite to talk. They had just returned from a photo shoot. I asked how it went, and Andrews leapt in: “Well, I was dressed in black. He was dressed in black. We were against some white, I think. I had a great pair of earrings, and my hair was really exciting. It was done up rather wildly.”

“You didn’t notice me at all, did you?” Plummer asked wanly.

“No, I didn’t,” she answered vigorously.

He pouted. “I haven’t eaten anything for days,” he announced.

She responded on cue. “Oh, honeybun, that’s terrible!”

Heartened, he continued, “There was a charity dinner last night, and the food was so awful nobody ate anything.” She fumbled through her bags. He looked on hopefully, but she landed on a bottle of Advil. “I have to have these—I’m sorry,” she said, shaking out a few pills, which dropped onto the carpet. She picked them up and swallowed them anyway. “There were just so many stairs today,” she said, continuing to dig until she unearthed a Kashi peanut-butter granola bar. “I brought half a peanut-butter cookie with me,” she told him cajolingly.

He eyed it shrewdly. “Not half,” he said. “A quarter.”

O.K., guys. Part of the reason we’re here today is to talk about your 50-year friendship.

“What do you mean, friendship?” Andrews asked.

“Exactly,” Plummer said.

Not His Favorite Thing

Through the decades, Plummer has remained unabashedly ornery about playing Captain von Trapp. He was, even in the early 1960s, a celebrated stage actor and chose to do the film primarily as training for playing Cyrano de Bergerac in a Broadway musical (a role that would not materialize until 1973). Instead, at 34, with gray highlights in his hair, he found himself shipwrecked aboard what he considered the Good Ship Lollipop as an unwitting party to seven chipper children, a warbling nun, and a bosun’s whistle. Indeed, when The Sound of Music was released, the reviews were awful. Pauline Kael trounced it as “mechanically engineered” to transform the audience into “emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.” In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther allowed that Andrews “goes at it happily and bravely” while noting that the other adult actors “are fairly horrendous, especially Christopher Plummer as Captain von Trapp.”

MORE AND A SWEET MEMORY AT:

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/02/sound-of-music-julie-andrews-christopher-plummer-50-anniversary#12

[Nitram]

1. At the time. Plummer called it the "Sound of Mucus."

lol

[liberalhistorian]

2. I agree that the movie really isn't all

that great (the stage musical is much better), but I love Julie Andrews and there is something appealing about it. I'm sure the critics went apeshit when it received the Oscar for best picture that year, but it certainly wouldn't be the first movie to get the Oscar nod without the critical acclaim, or without truly deserving it.

This fiftieth anniversary of the movie has special significance for me. As a sixth-grader, nearly forty years ago, I was in a stage production of it presented by one of the local high schools and directed by none other than my stepfather, an English teacher at that high school who also directed the plays and musicals. We were both into acting and the theater (he was active in the local community theater productions), but it was the only time we actually worked together. He died last month after a decade-long battle with Lewy Body Dementia; he was institutionalized for the past seven years with it. I will be looking forward to the fiftieth-anniversary theater release of this in April if, for nothing else, purely nostalgic reasons.

[Frank Cannon]

3. It's one of my favorite movies of all time.

Yeah, there are a lot better movies out there. But I've loved it since I was a kid, and I never get tired of it. During the aftermath of 9/11 and the run-up to the Chimp's wars, I can't tell you how often I felt like Captain Von Trapp.

[liberalhistorian]

4. I know just what you mean.

I kinda felt the same way, and I think there were a lot of others who did as well.

[JI7]

5. can it be compared to Cameron's Titanic ?

[liberalhistorian]

6. In what way?

Do you mean that they were both blockbusters with emotional appeal, that won the Oscar in no small part due to that emotional appeal, but that really weren't nearly as good as they were supposed to be? You've got a point there. Although Titanic wasn't nearly as critically savaged at the time of its release as Sound of Music was.