The Making of The Sound of Music

Julie's co-star Christopher Plummer was a teenager when he first fell in love with acting in his hometown of Montreal. After years of stage and screen work, he signed on to do The Sound of Music, and Julie says she was nervous about meeting him at first. "I was in awe of this gentlemen," she says. "[He was] a very, very famous dramatic actor, and here I was just a musical songstress."

Christopher says he didn't exactly see it that way. "I'd fallen in love with her in My Fair Lady on Broadway, so I had a crush on her forever," he says.

Still, Christopher wasn't thrilled with the role of Captain von Trapp at first. "I wanted to do a musical, and that was what attracted it to me," he says. "But the part as written was not exactly Hamlet. ... There was not enough humor in it."

So Christopher got together with screenwriter Ernie Lehman to get "some meat off the bones." "And it turned out to be quite all right," he says.

One of the main concerns Christopher says he had with The Sound of Music was that it had the potential to be too sappy. "It was pretty delicate stuff because it could have run overboard and become very mawkish and sentimental," he says. "So one day I called it, well, 'The Sound of Mucus.'"