The Sound of Music actress Charmian Carr has died at the age of 73.
She played the eldest von Trapp daughter Liesl in the movie.
Charmian Carr died in Los Angeles after complications from a rare form of dementia, her representative said.
The role of Liesl in the 1965 movie includes the famous song Sixteen Going on Seventeen.
After leaving the film industry, Charmian Carr ran an interior design company in California.
Charmian Carr’s mother had arranged for her to audition for the role, although she had had no singing or acting lessons.
The Sound of Music was a massive hit, at the time surpassing Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing movie of all time.
Charmian Carr later wrote two books on her experience, Forever Liesl and Letters to Liesl.
Kym Karath, who played Gretl in the movie, tweeted: “She has been like a sister throughout my life.”
The real life Liesl, Agathe von Trapp, the eldest daughter of the Austrian family who inspired the movie, died in 2010 at the age of 97.
Maria von Trapp, the last surviving member of the Trapp Family Singers, the group whose story inspired The Sound of Music, has died at the age of 99, her family announced.
Maria von Trapp died at her home in Vermont on Tuesday, her brother, Johannes von Trapp, told the Associated Press.
Johannes von Trapp said she was a “lovely woman who was one of the few truly good people”.
Maria Von Trapp and her family fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 and ended up performing around the US.
Their story eventually inspired the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music, and subsequent 1965 hit film.
It tells the tale of a young woman who leaves an Austrian convent to become a governess to the seven children of a naval officer widower, Georg von Trapp.
Maria Von Trapp and her family fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 and ended up performing around the US
Maria von Trapp was the second-oldest daughter of Capt von Trapp – with his first wife – and was portrayed as Louisa in the musical.
Her family moved to the US state of Vermont in 1942 after visiting during a singing tour, and later opened a lodge in the town of Stowe, which they still operate.
Writing in a blog post on the lodge’s website, Maria von Trapp described how it was her ill health as a child that led her father to employ a governess to teach her and her siblings.
“She came to us as my teacher and after three years became our second mother,” she said.
Marianne Dorfer, a family friend who runs the von Trapp Villa Hotel in Salzburg told the Austrian Times that Maria von Trapp had suffered from a weak heart since childhood.
She said it was because of Maria’s ill heath that her father decided to hire a governess.
“That of course then led to one of the most remarkable musical partnerships of the last century,” she added.
The Sound of Music was based loosely on a 1949 book by the governess, who became Capt von Trapp’s second wife and died in 1987.
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The Sound of Music costumes have sold for $1.3 million at a Hollywood memorabilia auction in California.
The outfits included the main costume worn by lead character Maria, played by Julie Andrews.
The costume was described by auction house Profiles in History as “a heavy brown homespun Austrian-style dress with a wheat-colored homespun blouse.”
Floral lederhosen worn by the Von Trapp children also went under the hammer.
The Sound of Music costumes have sold for $1.3 million at a Hollywood memorabilia auction in California
The Sound of Music, a story of a singing Austrian family trying to escape the Nazis prior to World War II, won five Oscars in 1966.
Julie Andrews told Oprah Winfrey in a 2010 interview that the cast had no idea the film would be so successful when it was first released.
“It made my career. It was that big of a movie,” Julie Andrews said.
Other auctioned items included a painting of Tara from Gone With The Wind, used in the film’s opening sequence. It fetched $270,000.
A diving helmet from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea sold for $75,000.
And a costume worn by James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in his final scene of the final episode of The Sopranos, sold for $22,000.
The costume was placed in the auction before James Gandolfini died of a heart attack last month at the age of 51.
