The actor remained queasy of the role in The Sound of Music which brought him enduring fame, finally finding his groove aged 80 as a long-closeted father in Mike Mills’s Beginners
• Christopher Plummer dies aged 91
It is 1938, and the cynical music impresario Max Detweiler is at the lakeside home of his friend Captain Georg von Trapp in Salzburg, where the conversation has turned to the disagreeable subject of the Nazis and Austria’s imminent Anschluss with Germany. “You know I have no political convictions,” shrugs Detweiler evasively. “Can I help it if other people do?” Von Trapp’s responding flash of anger is a genuinely compelling and grownup moment in this movie – the 1965 hit musical The Sound of Music: “Oh, yes, you can help it. You must help it.” Playing Von Trapp, Christopher Plummer’s face becomes fierce and hawkish with contempt for all those who do nothing and allow evil to flourish.
At 35, the Canadian-born Plummer became an international star in this film, but as the years and decades went by – and almost everyone swallowed their pride and admitted that they loved The Sound of Music – Plummer became the most famous and stubborn refusenik until almost the end of his life, calling it “awful and sentimental and gooey”.
