Sound of Music actor Nicholas Hammond reveals his take
on the film that launched his career. Photo:
Simon O'Dwyer
Philippa Hawker, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
''We went from being seven kids,'' remembers Nicholas Hammond,
''to being the seven most famous children in the world. And if we were on a
junket with the studio, it was Justin Bieber time.'' Playing Friedrich von
Trapp in The Sound of Music,
he was part of a movie juggernaut that is still going strong. More than 45
years on, he says, ''it seems more popular than ever''.
After the shared experience of making the movie and the rush of
sudden celebrity, the seven actors who played the von Trapps have stayed good
friends, constantly in touch over the years, ''part of each other's lives in a
very significant way''.
And, against popular expectations - ''people think it must be a
burden'' - they are all very happy to talk about what it was like.
Hammond, the child of an American father and an English actress
mother, was cast in his first movie at 10, Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies. His
first stage role was on Broadway at age 11, playing the son of Michael Redgrave
and Googie Withers.
On the advice of his agent, Hammond says, he took a break; he went
to university, and started over as an actor. He studied literature at
Princeton, then, on the day he graduated, he flew to Los Angeles and started a
movie at MGM, ''not as a child star, but as one of the adults on the set, with
Charlton Heston and Walter Pidgeon''.
Hammond played Spider-Man
in a TV series that ran from 1977 to 1979 which was, unlike the recent
Hollywood blockbusters, ''made for tuppence ha'penny, with no special
effects''. He is also often asked about his role in a famous Brady Bunch episode in
which he played a guy caught up in a Marcia Brady double-booking dating
dilemma. ''What with The
Brady Bunch, Spider-Man
and Sound of
Music, I have three cults going.''
After plenty of TV work in the 1970s and 1980s, he came to
Australia to play Dennis Conner in a 1986 mini-series about the America's Cup, and
decided to stay. Right now, he plays the Duke of Cornwall in the Melbourne
Theatre Company's Queen Lear,
which is about to open. For some years, he has been writing as well as acting -
a feature screenplay set in 1930s Shanghai which is scheduled to start shooting
early next year. And there's interest in a TV mini-series spinoff from a recent
play, Lying Cheating
Bastard.
Of all the questions that he has been asked about The Sound of Music, there is one he is still pondering: he was asked recently whether he felt a pressure to live up to the idealised screen vision of the von Trapp family.
Of all the questions that he has been asked about The Sound of Music, there is one he is still pondering: he was asked recently whether he felt a pressure to live up to the idealised screen vision of the von Trapp family.
He is well aware, he says, that child actors are often expected to
go off the rails: it's one of popular culture's favourite narratives. ''I
haven't really asked the others about this, but I think we all feel that we
don't want to let people down, or do anything that would shatter the belief
that it was a good family.
''So, has it limited my choices about what I've done? I'm still
trying to work that one out, but it's probably made me a bit more cautious than
I would have been. And a bit more private, over the years.''
As Friedrich von Trapp in The Sound of Music
(1965).
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