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The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival has announced that the legendary actress Julie Andrews will be attending two very special events on the closing day of the Festival. Miss Andrews will participate in an unmissable public interview at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre and will then close the Festival in tremendous style with the gala screening of the Academy Award winning film The Sound of Music in the Savoy Cinema. Miss Andrews has brought elegance, grace and happiness to stage and screen and it is a great honour to welcome her to the Festival to participate in a public interview hosted by Aedin Gormley from RTÉ’s Lyric FM, Movies and Musicals at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. Miss Andrews will discuss her extraordinary career from her luminous first appearance on Broadway starring in The Boy Friend; to creating the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady; to her film debut as the titular beloved character in Disney’s Mary Poppins, for which she won a Bafta, Golden Globe and an Academy Award for this iconic role. The interview will start at 3pm, followed by an opportunity for the audience to ask questions. Miss Andrews will later introduce a special presentation of The Sound of Music, the Festival’s closing gala event in the splendid setting of the Savoy Cinema at 7.30pm. Grainne Humphreys, Festival Director, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival says: It is a great honour to welcome one of the great legends of stage and screen to Dublin.
The Festival is honoured to welcome Dame Julie Andrews to Dublin to introduce the 50th anniversary screening of The Sound of Music and participate in a Public Interview hosted by Aedín Gormley from RTE’s Movies and Musicals. Of all the illustrious guests who have attended the festival, few have brought such happiness to so many film fans. Tickets will be on sale at 9.00am tomorrow Friday 20th February for Julie Andrews At the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre priced €25 – €39.50. The 2015 JDIFF programme launch will be Wednesday 25th February at 9.30pm on jdiff.com. The full lineup for the Festival programme will be announced on the night to include exciting themed strands, along with a host of special guests and special events. The 13th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival takes place from 19th – 29th March 2015.
For Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, The Sound of Music Was Never “So Long, Farewell”
Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, photographed in New York City.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
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 PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
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.”
Plummer returned to the theater, where he was, is, and always will be a giant. (His Iago was masterly, as was his Lear.) Ten years after The Sound of Music, he found his footing on-screen as a character actor portraying Rudyard Kipling, opposite Sean Connery and Michael Caine, in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, and he has worked steadily in film ever since. In 2012, he accepted an Academy Award for best actor in a supporting role for Beginners, in which he played (underplayed, beautifully) a husband and father who comes out as gay in much later life. He has just shot the lead in Remember, a thriller directed by Atom Egoyan, and is choosing between two new film roles.
