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‘We’re still almost boringly normal,” says Nicholas Hammond, helpfully making an observation that I was still figuring out how to tactfully phrase. “If you sat down with us today, you’re just sitting down with a bunch of people.”
The 75-year-old actor, speaking by Zoom from his home in Sydney, is the oldest living member of the seven-strong youth ensemble who played the Von Trapp children in The Sound of Music 60 years ago. With the indelible musical receiving an anniversary rerelease in cinemas this weekend – in a gleaming new 4K restoration to boot – five of the seven are preparing for another reunion to mark the occasion.
Two are no longer with us. Charmian Carr, who played eldest daughter Liesl, and Heather Menzies, who played Louisa, died in 2016 and 2017. But the other Von Trapp actors, as Hammond says, have otherwise largely been spared any great misfortune. “None of the actors who played the children have really had terrible incidents in their lives of tragedy, chaos, addictions or problems that you hear about so often with child actors. Yes, we’re all identified forever as those characters. But it hasn’t sent anybody’s life off the rails.”
None of the seven became major movie stars off the back of starring in what was, at one point, the biggest box office hit of all time; some went on to steady acting careers, while others eventually picked another vocation entirely. (Duane Chase, who played Kurt, studied geology and became a forester; Debbie Turner, who played Marta, is a floral designer, though she makes and sells Sound of Music-themed scarves on her personal website.)
You might expect the combination of vulnerable youth and blockbuster exposure to have monkey’s-paw consequences in at least one of their cases. But various where-are-they-now interviews with the actors over the years have been consistent in their general positivity: it was a great experience, they’re part of a great legacy, and they’re all still great friends.
“It’s like watching home movies,” says Angela Cartwright, who played middle daughter Brigitta, of watching the film today. “It’s like the way our kids watch videos of themselves. It brings back wonderful memories. I remember, I instantly clicked with Heather Menzies, so I was in Salzburg with a really, really good friend who also loved the Beatles and it was just fantastic. But everybody on it was great. When we see each other again, it’s like we’ve never been apart. We’re just like a family.”
“We see each other at Sound of Music reunions, of course,” says Hammond, “but sometimes we just get together and have a meal, and that’s always really fun, too. I love them all. I mean, unashamedly, I love them. I don’t have a sister, and those girls are my sisters. We’ve been through a lot with each other, you know: good times, birthdays, weddings, bad times, divorces, funerals, illness, and we’ve always been there for each other, and we always will be. I know no matter what happens to me, at three o’clock in the morning, I could call any of them, and they would pick up, and be there for me if I needed them.”
Their tales of making the film are uniformly sunny, and steeped in fondness for the film’s leading lady Julie Andrews, then a new mother, who was happy to bond with her on-screen charges when the cameras were off. Hammond, who toured the southern hemisphere with Andrews in a two-person stage show, regards her to this day as a close colleague and personal friend – someone with whom “you can talk about this and that, and make sure you don’t have spinach between your teeth just before you walk on stage.”
Cartwright, meanwhile, treasures her memories of attending on-set classes with all her on-screen siblings (save the then-adult Carr), which bonded them across a wide age spectrum. “We all went to school together. Kym [Karath], who played Gretl, was only five, so she wasn’t required to get her school hours. But she wanted to go with us anyway.”
Collectively, they had little sense that they were in the process of making a cultural phenomenon. “You hope every movie will be a success, but there were a lot of factors that were telling people it might not be,” says Hammond. “It was already the mid-60s, and we were moving into an era of darker, grittier, more realistic stories. Musicals about singing nuns and singing children – people weren’t at all sure this was something the public was going to buy.”
Only at the film’s premiere did it dawn on the young stars that they were part of something very big indeed. Cartwright’s memories of the night are rapt: “It was a huge event at this theatre where the big velvet curtains parted and the music whisked you away to this land of mountains. And then, of course, Julie twirling. I remember just going: ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing.’”
Of the seven, Hammond and Cartwright are the two who have enjoyed the most sustained showbiz careers. Each was an established child actor prior to making The Sound of Music; indeed, Cartwright had already worked with the film’s director, Robert Wise, on the Paul Newman boxing drama Somebody Up There Likes Me at just four years old, though she recalls he didn’t remember her nine years later. And each found cult TV success in the years after the film, Hammond as a 1970s Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man, and Cartwright on the sci-fi series Lost in Space.
Hammond was last seen on cinema screens in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; Cartwright has retired from acting but cheerfully plugs her website, Angela Cartwright Studio, and a podcast she recently launched with her sister, Alien star Veronica Cartwright. But neither has had a role to eclipse The Sound of Music on their CV, and both are perfectly happy with that.
“There was nowhere I could go in the world where people didn’t come up and always want to talk about it,” says Hammond. “People would have a story to tell of what the movie meant for them, what it meant for their grandmother, what it meant for their child. And the enormous impact that the film had on everybody meant that I felt it was a great responsibility to listen to those stories, and to always behave in a manner that didn’t let down the film. And, in a way, that didn’t let down people’s opinion of the characters in the film.”
“It is moving,” Cartwright says of the enduring fandom that follows the film, and her. “I try to go to the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles every year for the singalong screening. And when you stand up there in front of all those people that have come together to watch one movie, and we sing Edelweiss, and everybody sways back and forth with their phones, and you see all those lights – it’s tremendously moving and very, very special. Magical. You can’t jar something like that. It’s just a feeling. And I’m grateful that I’m able to let that sweep over me and appreciate it.”
“To this day, if a flight attendant looks at my boarding pass and sees my name, they will want to tell me what the movie meant to them,” says Hammond. “That still happens all the time. That’s just part of who we are now, you know? We can’t do anything about that.”
