Christopher Plummer Dead: Julie Andrews Honors ‘Sound of Music’ Co-Star

Acting legend Christopher Plummer passed away peacefully on Friday morning at his Connecticut home at 91. His wife, Elaine Taylor, said that the cause of death was a head injury after a fall. Plummer’s longtime manager, Lou Pitt, released a statement announcing his death.

“Chris was an extraordinary man who deeply loved and respected his profession with great old fashion manners, self-deprecating humor and the music of words,” Pitt said, as reported by Deadline. “He was a National Treasure who deeply relished his Canadian roots. Through his art and humanity, he touched all of our hearts and his legendary life will endure for all generations to come. He will forever be with us.”

Plummer’s Sound of Music co-star, Julie Andrews, commented on Plummer’s death on Friday afternoon. “The world has lost a consummate actor today,” Andrews, 85, said in a statement to Us Weekly. “And I have lost a cherished friend. I treasure the memories of our work together and all the humor and fun we shared through the years. My heart and condolences go out to his lovely wife Elaine, and his daughter Amanda.”

Plummer and Andrews worked together on the beloved musical in 1965, and established a lifelong friendship in the process. While Plummer disliked the sentimental film, he eventually came around to its charms. Plummer and Andrews did an interview with Vanity Fair in 2015 and he expressed an opinion that had been changed by time.

“As cynical as I always was about The Sound of Music, I do respect that it is a bit of relief from all the gunfire and car chases you see these days. It’s sort of wonderfully, old-fashionedly universal,” he explained. “It’s got the bad guys and the Alps; it’s got Julie and sentiment in bucketloads. Our director, dear old Bob Wise, did keep it from falling over the edge into a sea of treacle. Nice man. God, what a gent. There are very few of those around anymore in our business.”

“He was such a hugely great actor that when he was cast in Sound of Music all I could think was, ‘How will I ever live up to that?” Andrews said of Plummer in the same interview. Andrews told Diane Sawyer that while the two of them had crushes on one another while filming, they were never romantically involved. “We were never an item, as they say,” she said. ‘But now we are the best of friends. We became the best of friends, and that’s lovely … probably because we weren’t an item.”