Christopher Plummer played Captain Georg von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965), giving Salzburg's most famous film its most recognisable male face. He hated the experience. That contradiction is itself now part of the city's folklore.
The Story
Robert Wise pursued Plummer after considering Richard Burton, Yul Brynner, Peter Finch, and Sean Connery, among others. Plummer came to Salzburg in 1964 as one of the most accomplished classical actors in North America, having already played Hamlet, Henry V, and Cyrano de Bergerac. He found the material sentimental and reportedly spent his evenings drinking in the Old City. He is said to have asked screenwriter Ernest Lehman to cut "Edelweiss" from the film, calling the role "awful, sentimental, gooey."
The shoot took place across Salzburg over roughly eleven weeks. Schloss Leopoldskron served as the von Trapp family villa exterior. Mirabell Gardens hosted the ballroom waltz rehearsals. The Felsenreitschule, carved into the Monchsberg cliff, became the concert hall where the family performed before escaping. Plummer was filmed in all of these locations while, by his own later account, wishing he was somewhere else entirely.
The film made him globally famous despite himself. He spent decades downplaying it, acknowledging only reluctantly that the chemistry between him and Andrews worked, and that the Salzburg locations gave the film a credibility that a studio production could not have achieved. In 2011 he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Beginners at 82, the oldest competitive Oscar winner in history, and he remained active as a character actor until shortly before his death in February 2021. His lifelong ambivalence toward the film that made Salzburg a global destination became, in the end, one of the more honest pieces of testimony about what it actually felt like to be there.
