In 2012, when he was already well into his 80s, Christopher Plummer told NPR that he was busier than he had been in a long time—and that was okay with him. “You never stop learning how to act, both on screen and on the stage,” he said. “I feel like I’m starting all over again. Every sort of decade I feel this, and that’s very satisfying.”
The Oscar, Emmy and Tony Award-winning actor died Friday at his home in Connecticut. He was 91.
Plummer was ironically best known for playing Captain von Trapp in the wildly successful The Sound of Music—a movie he didn’t much like. “It is not my favorite film, of course, because I do think it borders on mawkishness, but we did our damn best not to make it too mawkish,” he told Fresh Air in 2007.

‘The Sound of Music.’
Plummer was “quite peeved,” explains NYU theater professor Laurence Maslon, when his voice was dubbed for songs in the film. (You’re actually hearing the voice of Bill Lee on Rodgers and Hammerstein classics such as “Edelweiss.”) “Christopher Plummer was a classically trained actor. He thought, quite rightly, he could do anything,” Maslon says.
Plummer told Fresh Air he was ultimately grateful for the film and its success, though in 2012 when Scott Simon asked him whether he ever found himself singing “Edelweiss” all these years later, his response was: “Of course not—are you mad?!”