Julie Andrews
Julie Andrews made her Broadway debut at the tender age of nineteen, having already decided that she would only sing songs that were happy, uplifting and positive, because she was not sure how she would control her voice, or how it would sound, were she to be overcome by the emotion of a song that was inherently sad. She became a theatrical sensation in 1956 with her performance as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, and a mere nine years later made her big screen debut as the straight-laced English nanny who could magically make a nursery tidy itself up with a click of her fingers in the instant classic Mary Poppins, for which she received an Academy Award in the Best Actress category. A year later she took on the role of Maria von Trapp, winning a Golden Globe award in the Best Actress - Comedy of Musical category. This was the first of five Golden Globes that she won over the course of her career. Over the next twenty years she worked primarily on movies that had a theatrical or musical component, most notably the 1982 film Victor/Victoria, based on a classic German movie in which she played both the male and the female leading roles.
Suffering from wear and tear on her vocal chords, Andrews took most of the nineteen nineties off, but re-emerged in 2000 when she was made a Dame by the Queen in her birthday honors list. In 2003 she directed a Broadway production of The Boyfriend, the musical which gave her her fist big break in theater. She also began working on The Princess Diaries franchise before going on to work as a voice actor on the animated classics Shrek, Despicable Me and Aquaman.
Christopher Plummer
Canadian Christopher Plummer is a man of many firsts, and records. For example, he is the only Canadian to win the Triple Crown of acting awards - an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony - in a career that has spanned over sixty years and shows no signs of slowing down. He is the oldest first-time winner of an Academy Award, finally walking away with the statuette at the age of eighty two in 2010 for his performance in the film Beginners. He went one better six years later, becoming the oldest Academy Award nominee in any acting category when he was nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category for his portrayal of J. Paul Getty in the critically acclaimed drama All The Money In The World, opposite Michelle Williams.
After beginning his Broadway career in the 1950s, he stayed largely away from the theater until the late eighties when he appeared in two Shakespearean tragedies, Othello, and Macbeth, winning a Tony award for the latter and garnering another nomination for the former, in which he played Iago opposite James Earl Jones' Othello. He continued his Shakespearean odyssey by performing regularly at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford Upon Avon.
Plummer's daughter Amanda, from whom he was estranged for much of her childhood, is also an actress. Although they have never worked together, they maintain a friendly relationship and an intention to collaborate artistically in the future.
Eleanor Parker
Parker appeared in over eighty feature films and a further fifty television series, earning her the moniker "woman of a thousand faces". She was signed to the Warner Brothers Studio as a starlet in 1941 and worked diligently within their studio's system until she began to win leading roles in some of the most notable films of the 1950s. The was nominated for three Academy Awards, but if was for her role in The Sound of Music, for which she was never nominated, that she was best known.
In 1963 she won an Emmy award nomination for for her appearance on the television drama series The Eleventh Hour.
Richard Haydn
Haydn began his working life as a supervisor on a banana plantation in Jamaica; quickly realizing that this was not the career for him, he joined a troupe of travelling performers when they made a stop nearby, and traveled with them until returning to London, where he was born, and quickly becoming established on the London music hall circuit alongside notable acts Danny LaRue and George Formby. Prior to working on The Sound of Music, Haydn's best-known performance was as the voice of the Caterpillar in the Disney animated movie version of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
Haydn passed away in 1985 in California, and donated his body to medical science.
Charmian Carr
Before being cast as Liesl von Trapp, Carr had never had an acting or a singing lesson in her life. A student at San Fernando Valley State College, studying speech therapy, her mother, who had been a renowned vaudeville performer, arranged for her to audition for the role, without actually asking her daughter first if she would like to do this. A complete novice, she beat out several actresses for the role, including Terri Garr, Mia Farrow and Lesley Anne Warren.
Despite the success of the movie, Carr never really catapulted into the stratosphere as an actress, preferring instead to concentrate on her interior design company, and attending regular reunions with the other Von Trapp children from the film.
Peggy Wood
Best remembered for her Emmy -worthy performance in the television series Mama, Mother Abess would turn out to be Wood's final acting role. She was nominated for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, both in the Best Supporting Actress category. Although a respected singer earlier in her career, she was not able to make the higher octave notes required to sing Climb Every Mountain and so the song was dubbed afterwards using a vocal double, Margery McKay, whom Wood noted with glee to sound exactly as she had done when she was younger.
Wood passed away after a stroke in 1978, in Stamford, Connecticut.
Nicholas Hammond
Hammond, an Australian American, is known both for the role of Friedrich von Trapp, and for the role of Peter Parker in the television series The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman, both, in their way, deserving of their cult following. He made his film debut in the adaptation of William Golding's controversial novel Lord of the Flies before being cast in The Sound of Music.
Struggling somewhat in the transitional period between older child roles, and young man roles, he found success on the television soap opera General Hospital and also appeared on the original television version of Hawaii Five-O.
After relocating permanently to Australia he has alternated acting and directing work, most recently portraying director Sam Wanamaker in Quentin Tarantino's movie Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
Heather Menzies
Another complete newcomer to acting and singing, Menzies was cast in The Sound of Music at the age of fourteen, singing The Lonely Goatherd in the film. She went on to guest star in a number of television series including T.J. Hooker and Dragnet. She also enjoyed a brief career as a Playboy model.
Duane Chase
Retiring from acting after his child star career came to an end, Chase had a small role in the family movie Follow Me, Boys! in 1966, joining the United States Forest Service three years later. He studied at the University of Alabama and earned a master's degree in geology. He went on to become a software engineer.
Angela Cartwright
Angela Cartwright is the younger sister of actress Veronica Cartwright, and she became known as a child actress after her performance in The Sound of Music. She went on to appear regularly on the television series Lost In Space (which spawned a spoof sketch on the weekly Muppet Show called Pigs In Space in which Cartwright's character was re-played by the one and only Miss Piggy). She was also a regular on the series Airwolf.
