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Dublin’s O’Connell Street was alive with the Sound of Music this evening.
Movie buffs waiting in the rain broke into spontaneous sing song as Dame Julie Andrews arrived at the closing gala of the thirteenth annual Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
The actress, who played the part of novice turned singing governess Maria Von Trapp in the iconic 1965 movie, was “truly touched” by the reception.
“It means a lot to me. It’s very dear of them,” she told Independent.ie.
The hills are alive: A scene from the Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews Open Gallery 2 The hills are alive: A scene from the Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews
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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.
WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL AT 10
It’s a ‘Starry Night’ for the L.A. Phil in Disney Hall salute
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| Richard Perry, left, Jane Fonda, Julie Andrews and Burt Bacharach attend the L.A. Phil Gala. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times / September 30, 2013) |
By Ellen OlivierOctober 1, 2013, 2:13 p.m.
The event: Monday night’s “L.A. Phil Gala,” celebrating Walt Disney Concert Hall’s 10th anniversary and honoring the hall’s innovative architect Frank Gehry.
The performance: Gustavo Dudamel conducted the L.A. Phil in a varied program, beginning with John Cage’s “4’33,” consisting of only the hall’s ambient sounds — in other words, no music — and ending with “When You Wish Upon a Star” in tribute to the Disney family. Bach, Tchaikovsky, Ades, Mahler and Saint-Saens came in between, with Yo-Yo Ma performing the solos and videos by artist Netia Jones showing the hall’s phases of development.
Dudamel later called the program, “crazy,” adding: “But it worked, no?” Clearly, judging from the applause, partygoers agreed.
The setting: A reception preceded the concert and a black-tie dinner followed in an adjacent tent, decorated in a “Starry Night” theme, where tiny lights twinkled overhead like a galaxy of stars and the band Rhythm Collective, provided dance music.
The starry gathering: L.A. business leaders, elected officials, Hollywood stars and other VIPs came together to celebrate Disney Hall’s milestone anniversary. They included Jane Fonda and Richard Perry, Kimberly and Albert Brooks, former Disney chief Michael Eisner, Mayor Eric Garcetti, former Univision chief Jerry Perenchio, Sherry Lansing and William Friedkin, Edythe and Eli Broad, Annette and Peter O’Malley, Lyn and Norman Lear, Eva and Marc Stern, Lenore and Bernard Greenberg, Julie Andrews, Emmy Rossum, Ty Burrell, Ben Harper, Cheyenne Jackson, Matthew Lillard, Chris O’Donnell, Daisy Fuentes, Burt Bacharach, Herbie Hancock and John Williams.
Diane Disney Miller chaired the gala, along with honorary chair Eloisa Maturen Dudamel and co-chairs David Bohnett, Joan Hotchkis and Alyce Williamson. L.A. Phil President and Chief Executive Deborah Borda helped to welcome the crowd.
Quotes of note: Jane Fonda was so impressed by the sounds of Disney Hall’s majestic organ that she took an informal poll after the concert to discover if others, like herself, were hearing it played for the first time. She shared her thoughts on the hall’s architect, saying that her first sighting of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, brought her to tears.
“He’s the bravest, most visionary architect since Gaudi,” Fonda said. “When I was working at the Ahmanson, (in the 2011 staging of “33 Variations”), I would stop and I would gape whenever I walked past Disney Hall.”
As for the Disney family, “We’re thrilled,” said Lillian and Walt Disney’s granddaughter Jenny Miller Goff, ”with what Disney Hall has brought to the community and to the landscape of Los Angeles.”The finale score: With tickets priced from $2,500 and tables ranging upward to $200,000, the gala raised more than $5 million for the L.A. Phil’s music education programs.
Read more about Los Angeles social events at Society News LA.
Also:
LA Phil season opener a magical salute
Disney Hall: 10 years of memorable performances
Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall is inextricably of L.A.
