The Sound Of Music star Nicholas Hammond talks to Janie Smith about his new documentary which tells what really happened to the von Trapp family.
You would be hard-pressed to find someone who could not sing along to at least one song from The Sound Of Music, but the story of the real von Trapp family is a lesser-known tale.
The 1965 film starred Julie Andrews as Maria, a would-be nun who is sent to be a governess to Baron Georg von Trapp’s seven children. She later marries the Baron and the family flees Nazi influence in Austria.
Actor Nicholas Hammond played Friedrich von Trapp, the eldest son of the family, and met the real Maria, when the film was being made.
Nearly 50 years later, he is helping to tell the story of the people on which the film is based.
He co-wrote, co-produced and presented the documentary Climbed Every Mountain, which features interviews with the notoriously private remaining family members who live in the United States.
“I know the von Trapps well,” says Hammond. “I’ve known them for many years and they are very reluctant to let anybody on to their property or to let anybody film them. They are constantly getting requests from all around the world to do shows about them or having news stories done and they’re very private people.
“Because I’ve had a long-term relationship with them, there was an element of trust there and it was something I wanted to respect.
“They were quite happy for their real story to be told, kind of warts and all, because in many ways I think they felt a little bit frustrated by the movie.
“Things like their birth mother who is not mentioned in the film and that their father was really a very kind and lovely man who they all adored. That’s all quite different from the story that the film tells.”
The documentary is about what happened to the von Trapps once they arrived in America as refugees and how they went on to tour the country as the Trapp Family Singers.
Hammond says the background of Maria is “a bit of a mystery, a bit of a detective story” because very few records of her life exist
