American actress Charmian Carr, who played the eldest von Trapp daughter, Liesl in the 1965 iconic Hollywood musical The Sound of Music, died in Los Angeles on Saturday. She was 73. According to a BBC report, she had been suffering from a rare form of dementia.
In The Sound Of Music, directed by Robert Wise, Carr famously performed the song Sixteen Going on Seventeen. She had no training in singing or acting when she signed on for the role. After The Sound Of Music, she co-starred with Anthony Perkins in Evening Primrose, a one-hour musical written by Stephen Sondheim. It was aired on ABC Stage 67 in 1966. But soon after, she left the film industry to start an interior design firm in California.
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Carr also wrote two books on her experience of playing Liesl: Forever Liesl and Letters to Liesl. The real life Liesl, Agathe von Trapp, the eldest daughter of the Austrian family who inspired the film, died aged 97 in 2010. The von Trapp family fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 and performed music shows around the US. The last surviving member of the singing family, Maria von Trapp, died at 99 in 2014.