Sunday 13 December 2009

“What are fears but voices airy?"



On this, the 80th birthday of the lovely Christopher Plummer, what better way to celebrate than with a piece from his most lauded film The Sound Of Music?

In the actual movie, Mr Plummer's voice was dubbed, but here is a rare clip that features his own voice. As he says in his autobiography, In Spite of Myself:
"Daunting is not a strong enough word to describe it. Julie and I stood side by side in a small glassed-in cubicle facing two microphones. Surrounding our prison cage sat 75 musicians like hungry jackals waiting to pounce, led by their keeper, Irwin Kostal.

"Warbling softly into a mike is far more difficult than singing full out in a theatre as I was later to discover. One is much more likely to catch and collect "frogs" in the throat, whereas projecting usually gets rid of them. I tried so hard not to look like a complete basket case. Julie, sensing my nerves, took hold of my hand and held it throughout the session. It must have taken her days to recover the use of it afterwards, I had squeezed it so hard.

"No matter how diligently I'd slugged away at my lessons, I was still untrained as a singer. To stay on a long-sustained note was, for me, akin to a drunk trying to walk the straight white line, whereas you can bet the very first cry that Julie let forth as she emerged from her mother's womb was in perfect pitch! Listening to the playback, there was no disputing we were on separate planets. In the end, Robert Wise managed to hire someone to take care of my elongated passages, and the balance was somewhat restored."

Despite his fifty-year film career - everything from The Fall of the Roman Empire, through The Return of the Pink Panther, to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - he will forever be remembered for being "Captain Georg von Trapp", and generations love him for it!

Christopher Plummer on IMDB

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