[QUOTE=ivylass]
I read about the Von Trapps on wikipedia…he was 25 years older than she! Also, there was no geographically-impossible trek across the mountains…they crossed the border into Italy and hopped a train, one day before the borders were closed.
[/QUOTE]
They also weren’t newlyweds but had two children and she was visibly pregnant with a third when they left. IIRC, that is the actual von Trapp villa they use for exterior shots; when the Depression hit they took in boarders because the Baron refused the offers of employment that came his way as they were beneath his station. (His money came not from inheritance but from marriage; his first wife was ironically the daughter of a British munitions manufacturer who became a gazillionaire for the torpedoes he manufactured in WW1, when the real Baron von Trapp was a highly decorated very famous U-Boat commander.)
I always thought his performance throughout was just incredibly stiff. His daughter Amanda “Any of you f*ckin’ pricks MOVE and I’m gonna execute…etc etc.” Plummer said she went to see the movie with, ironically, her governess because her father refused to sit through it again.
Christopher Plummer trivia: When Rex Harrison walked off the set of Dr. Doolittle with an “I know I have a contract, sue me, I’m not going to do it” prima donna fit Plummer was hired to replace him. When Harrison, whose excessive alimony payments and high lifestyle and accountant made him rethink the reneging on his agreement, made peace with the producers and returned to production he was accepted back but Plummer was paid the full $300,000 he had contracted for even though he never filmed a frame of the movie. At the time that was the most any actor had ever earned for a performance he didn’t give. (Twenty years later Bob Hoskins was paid $200,000 as a retainer for the role of Al Capone in The Untouchables when DeNiro was trying to decide whether to take it, causing him to quip “I don’t care WHAT the role is, I don’t care if its porn or a live action Care Bears, if anybody out there has any movie they don’t want me to be in for a large fee, I AM available not to make it!”)
My two favorite Plummer performances:
Herod Antipas in Jesus of Nazareth- his looks of lust at Salome were scary but at the same time understated, and his love scene with Herodias was actually hot (“Repent… repent… repent…”)
The Detective whose name eludes me in Dolores Claiborne, a departure from his usual suave and debonair villain roles.
Didn’t work at all: his reunion with Julie Andrews for the live TV production of On Golden Pond. In the first place Fonda and Hepburn NAILED those roles, in the second Julie’s English accent talking about her New England girlhood was a bit too glaring and while Plummer was in his 70s when he made the movie he looks way too well preserved to be Norman Thayer.
