What Would Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer Change About 'The Sound of Music?'

It’s been 50 years since Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer tied the knot onscreen in The Sound of Music, the 1965 film musical about the von Trapp family singers and their flight from the Nazis. In celebration of the film’s golden anniversary, Vanity Fair reunited its two stars and asked them a surprising question: If each of them could go back and change one thing in The Sound of Music, what would it be?

“I would have changed me altogether and gotten somebody else,” said Plummer, 85, prompting Andrews to chastise, “Oh, shut up.”

As for Andrews, 79, who starred as singing nun–turned–stepmother Maria von Trapp, she said she would “probably change a couple of renditions of how I sang something, because it always feels wildly high to me when the movie begins.”

Watch a clip from The Sound of Music.

Many fans wouldn’t change a thing about The Sound of Music, a film that was critically derided upon release (seriously, even the New York Times panned it), but went on to win five Oscars including Best Picture and is now considered a classic. In Vanity Fair, Andrews (a virtually unknown 28-year-old actress when the film was made) says that she was intimidated by Plummer at first, who played father of seven Captain Georg von Trapp. “He was such a hugely great actor that when he was cast in Sound of Music all I could think was, ‘How will I ever live up to that?’” Andrews admitted. “But we had a very good time. We never had a cross word, nothing.” (Plummer concurred, saying of Andrews, “She may be a terrible martinet, but she’s not an unpleasant one.”)

Plummer, who received his first Oscar in 2012 for Beginners, told Vanity Fair that he gained so much weight on location for The Sound of Music that his costumes had to be let out. “I had so much time on my hands, that’s why I got so fat. I drank so much and ate all those wonderful Austrian pastries,” Plummer recalled. “When I got to shooting, [director] Robert Wise said, ‘My God, you look like Orson Welles.’”

While critics have often accused The Sound of Music of being too saccharine, Andrews said that Plummer rescued the film from an excess of sickly sweetness. “There were so many potentially cloying possibilities. You were the glue that bonded us all together because you wouldn’t allow that and I tried not to,” she told her co-star.

“It’s easier for [the Captain], of course,” Plummer noted, “because he was a bit of a bitch.”

Read the full interview from Vanity Fair’s March issue.

Image credit: Everett