Heather Menzies
Actress who played Louisa von Trapp in The Sound of Music and went on to pose for Playboy
HEATHER MENZIES, who has died of brain cancer aged 68, played Louisa von Trapp, the third child of the family, in The Sound of Music. She was cast in the film in 1964 at 14, having had no experience beyond a part in a television sitcom. More than 200 children were seen for the roles of the seven siblings, with those rejected including the young Mia Farrow, Kurt Russell and the Osmonds.
The director Robert Wise was drawn by Heather’s blonde hair, as he wanted the family to look as Aryan as he imagined Austrians were. This was only one of many liberties that he, and the musical on which the film was based, took with history in the name of dramatic license.
Heather’s actual counterpart was called Maria Franziska, but it was deemed that audiences would be confused by her sharing a name with Julie Andrews’s character, so this was changed. Indeed, in real life she was a brunette, and the second child of Georg von Trapp’s first marriage.
She had contracted scarlet fever and it was her need for a tutor that brought the former nun Maria Augusta Kutschera into the family orbit, a full decade before the events confected for the film. Kutschera and von Trapp married in 1927, had three more children not seen on screen, and eventually left Nazi Austria – not climbing every mountain but on a train to Italy.
None of this of course mattered to the young Heather Menzies, and what makes the film such a schmaltzy delight is the evident happiness of the young cast. “We forgot that we were making a movie,” she would say later.
Many of the children remained friends afterwards. She and Angela Cartwright, who played Brigitta, enjoyed swapping around shoes left out to be shined in the Salzburg hotel where they stayed. They also teased Wise by turning up in the middle of shooting the dinner scene where Julie Andrews meets her charges pretending to have cut off their hair.
Her most vivid memory of filming was when Kym Karath, who played youngest child Gretl, was sick over her after swallowing too much water falling into the lake in the rowing boat scene. Despite the disdain of its star Christopher Plummer for The Sound of Music, which he dubbed “S and M”, it went on to win five Oscars and to become the highest grossing film to date.
Heather Menzies was born in Toronto on December 3 1949. Her parents were Scottish and had immigrated shortly after the war, much of which her father, an artist, had spent as a prisoner of the Axis.
By the time that Heather was 14, the family had moved to Vancouver, then Florida, and finally California. She later complained that they never stayed long enough for her to have any friends except for her sister, though once they were in Los Angeles she insisted on having ballet and acting lessons.
Following the success of The Sound of Music, she was able to buy her family a house, but as she grew up she began trying to escape the film’s shadow. Soon after returning from Austria, she and Julie Andrews were cast as sisters in Hawaii, based on James Michener’s novel. Through Michael Douglas, she met fellow actor John Cluett, whom she married just after turning 20.
The pair were divorced after four years, however, this coinciding with her decision to pose for Playboy, scandalising her parents, who were strict Presbyterians. “It didn’t work,” she said of her gambit, and indeed her later career as an actress never took flight either.
She appeared in plays, commercials and in guest roles on television shows of the era, such as The High Chaparral and Alias Smith and Jones, but substantial roles in the cinema eluded her.
In 1973 she featured in the low-budget snake horror SSS (1973), with Dirk Benedict, and then in Piranha (1978), which nipped her career in the bud. Her highest profile role came as Jessica 6 in the short-lived television series of the sci-fi drama Logan’s Run (1977).
She met her second husband, the actor Robert Urich, while they were both filming an advertisement for corned beef. They married in 1975, and he went on to become known for television roles such as the private eye Spenser.
He died of a rare cancer in 2002 and, as a survivor of ovarian cancer herself, latterly she had largely dedicated her time to a medical foundation in his name.
Their son and two daughters survive her.
Heather Menzies, born December 3 1949, died December 24 2017