Crazy fan rush for ‘Sound of Music’ 45-year reunion on Oprah

LONDON - Fans are in a mad rush to get tickets for the ‘The Sound of Music’ reunion, which will see the entire cast of the film reunited for the first time in 45 years.

Dame Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and the seven actors who played the Von Trapp children in the Oscar-winning movie, have agreed to appear together on the ‘Oprah Winfrey Show’ on Oct 29.

It could be the only time all nine of them ever appear together in public and fans have inundated the show with desperate pleas to be in the audience.

“Someone please help. I may actually fly there and camp at the door and beg to be let in! I’ll clean toilets, shampoo carpets, do anything,” The Telegraph quoted one fan as saying.

Canadian, Shakespearean stage actor Plummer, now 80, declined to attend a reunion on the 40th anniversary in 2005 but, earlier this year, he embraced the film as “a really good movie of its kind” and Dame Julie’s best.

“It is not a film which I detest. The press have always got that wrong. I didn’t hate the movie at all. I just didn’t think my role was terribly exciting,” he said.

In the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, he played the anti-Nazi widower Captain Georg von Trapp, who hires a mischievous trainee nun called Maria, played by Dame Julie, as a governess in pre-war Austria.

Charmian Carr, who played eldest daughter, Liesl, is now a grandmother of two, recalled how it rained non-stop during filming in Salzburg, and Dame Julie kept being blown over by a helicopter carrying the camera as she danced in the hills for the opening scene.

Carr also described how five-year-old Kym Karath, who played Gretl, the smallest Von Trapp, ate so much chocolate while filming that it was nearly impossible to carry her upstairs at the end of the “So long, farewell” number.

Karath later grew up into what Dame Julie described as a “gorgeous looking Monroe-esque young lady”, while Heather Menzies, who played Louisa, also appeared in a series of television roles, and in Playboy magazine.

Angela Cartwright, the English-born actress who played Brigitta von Trapp, went on to star in the television series ‘Lost in Space’ and Nicholas Hammond, who played Friedrich, played Spiderman on US television before moving to Australia.

Two of the child actors abandoned show business shortly after ‘The Sound of Music’ came out in 1965.

Debbie Turner, who was Marta, went back to school and then opened a successful floral design company.

Duane Chase, who starred as Kurt, pursued a degree in geology and now lives in Seattle with his wife, a former Austrian nanny. (ANI)