In his 2008 autobiography, Christopher Plummer starts his “S&M” chapter - what Plummer calls “my perverse nickname for that musical epic” - with a Doug McClure quote: “‘The Sound of Music’ is like being beaten to death by a Hallmark card.” Bettmann ArchiveĪs the movie wrapped in Los Angeles, there was a sense around the studio that “The Sound of Music” had all the von trappings of a smash. He felt guilty about his own bad behavior, but that only drove him to down more schnapps at the hotel bar. He loved watching her rehearse and film scenes, marveling at her unflagging energy, radiance and kindness to everyone in the set. The only bright spot was Andrews, with whom he struck up an enduring friendship. “I was,” Plummer admitted, “starting to look like Orson Welles.” How are you going to fit into your clothes?” He was so dissipated and bloated that director Robert Wise took him aside one day and said, “Young man, you better go on a diet right away. “In my day, it was a badge of honor to play Hamlet at the matinee, have two or three bottles of claret at dinner, and then give an even better performance that night,” he once told me. He was also a world-class drinker, hitting the bar at his hotel every night and showing up on the set with “raging” hangovers. “I still harbored the old-fashioned stage actor’s snobbism toward moviemaking.”Ĭhristopher Plummer, ‘Sound of Music’ actor, dead at 91 “I was a pampered, arrogant young bastard, spoiled by too many great roles in the theater,” he wrote. He arrived in Austria resentful, snidely referring to the musical as “S&M.” By his own admission, he was pain on the set. He wanted to quit the movie, but the threat of a $2 million lawsuit brought him to his senses. He was horrified to learn that 20th Century Fox wanted him to start recording tracks with Julie Andrews even before he had his first singing lesson. He took it, he confessed, because he secretly wanted to turn “Cyrano de Bergerac” into a Broadway musical, and thought “The Sound of Music” would be good practice. Plummer became a movie star at age 36 playing Captain Von Trapp in “The Sound of Music.” But, as he recounts in his deliciously gossipy memoir “ In Spite of Myself,” making it was a nightmare, the beauty of the Alps notwithstanding.Ī prominent Shakespearean stage actor at the time, Plummer had never sung before when he was offered the role. “I avoid television at all costs around the holidays,” he added, with a laugh. If the movie popped up on television, Plummer, who died Friday at 91, “reached for the remote,” he once told me. Whenever Christopher Plummer was asked about “The Sound of Music” – and he was asked about it so often it made him dyspeptic – he quoted the actor Doug McClure, who once cracked: “Watching ‘The Sound of Music’ is like being beaten to death by a Hallmark card.”
0 kommentar(er)
