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Last night, as news of Plummer’s death broke, Julie Andrews paid tribute to him, saying: ‘The world has lost a consummate actor and I have lost a cherished friend. It was the beginning of a friendship - unspoken, but a friendship nonetheless.’ He was nominated again six years later for All The Money In The World (pictured), a role he took over from a disgraced Kevin Spacey, playing billionaire J. ‘As two people who barely came to know each other throughout those long months of filming, we had somehow bonded. beneath my partly assumed sarcasm and indifference, she saw that I cared. ‘There was no way she could conceal the simple truth. ‘Julie was quite transparent,’ he decided. The supremely self-centred Plummer was incapable of seeing that, though: he assumed that, if she wasn’t speaking to him, it was because her admiration went too deep for words. If Julie Andrews detested him, no one could have blamed her. It was left to the bar staff to talk him out of his foul mood. Instead of backing down, the actor stormed back to his hotel and began drinking heavily, downing schnapps and beer chasers. Gently and with many apologies, the assistant director explained that Plummer hadn’t been called because this was his day off - he had no scenes that day.

A quailing assistant director led Plummer off the set and, begging him to sit on a park bench, asked why he was so angry. Everyone on the production was ignorant and disrespectful, and if he didn’t receive grovelling apologies from everyone, from the director to the canteen crew, he would quit the picture. He was being grossly insulted, he roared. One morning, badly hung over, he stormed on to the outdoor set and interrupted a take with Maria and the children. But it was small wonder that he gained a reputation during the making of The Sound Of Music, one he never lost, for being a rude, bullying, hard-drinking, priggish, loud-mouthed boor. He did add, with more than a hint of pride, that ‘my behaviour was unconscionable’. ‘The moment we arrived in Austria to shoot the exteriors, I was determined to present myself as a victim of circumstance - that I was doing the picture under duress, that it had been forced upon me, and that I certainly deserved better.’ Ludicrous though it may seem, I still harboured the old-fashioned stage actor’s snobbism toward movie-making. Yet he cheerfully boasted: ‘I was a pampered, arrogant young b*****d, spoiled by too many great theatre roles.
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And Plummer, though he spent the 1950s playing supporting roles in TV dramas, had almost no film experience. Most actors would have welcomed the role as their big break. Von Trapp was ‘very much a cardboard figure, humourless and one-dimensional. Zanuck visited the set and, in front of the cast, heaped praise on him until he agreed to return.Įven then, Plummer despised the part he had been given. Eventually, he was flattered into line: studio chief Richard D. The film company retaliated by threatening a $2million lawsuit. But Miss Andrews was the beloved heroine of Mary Poppins Yes, he was a supremely gifted, spectacularly wilful actor, utterly confident of his own brilliance. The actor demanded more time, and insisted he would walk off the picture if they made him sing.

When the producers, 20th Century Fox, asked him to tape a ‘guide track’, or early versions, of the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs to assist with filming the musical scenes, he flatly refused. ‘I was stricken - absolutely terrified,’ he said, at the prospect of the recording studio. He didn’t even sing in the shower - and in the finished film, though he didn’t yet know it, his voice would be overdubbed. Plummer, on the other hand, couldn’t carry a tune in an Alpine rucksack. But Miss Andrews was the beloved heroine of Mary Poppins, the woman with the voice of an angel who had triumphed on Broadway and the West End in My Fair Lady, too. Pictured: Plummer as Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music To him, it was The Sound Of Mucus, or S&M - a sly reference to sado-masochism. Christopher Plummer always refused to refer to his most famous film by its real title. Julie Andrews had the starring role as Maria and, though he was loath to admit it, Plummer felt intimidated. Plummer, who has died aged 91, played Captain Von Trapp, the widowed father of seven children, who hires a former nun to be their governess and falls in love with her.
