Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews spent sixty years carrying The Sound of Music in completely different ways — she with the open-hearted embrace of someone who understood immediately what the film meant to the people who loved it and who has always honored that meaning with generosity and with grace, he with the affectionately ironic distance of someone who needed to maintain a certain separation between himself and a role so beloved that it threatened, for a period, to define him more completely than any artist of his range and his ambition was willing to accept. The famous nickname, the self-deprecating complaints about the sweetness, the mock-horror at being associated with singing nuns and dancing children — all of it was the performance of a man who loved the film and loved his co-star and needed the world to understand that he was more than the sum of those Austrian hillsides, even as the hillsides remained, stubbornly and permanently, the first thing most of the world reached for when his name came up.

What existed between Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews beneath the sixty years of professional separation and occasional reunion was one of the most genuine and most privately sustained friendships in the history of Hollywood — two people who had made something extraordinary together at the beginning of both their careers and who carried the memory and the affection of that making forward through every decade that followed with the particular care of people who understood that some things are rare enough to be worth protecting. The reunion that took place before his death — the coming together of two people who had been finding their way back to each other across sixty years of extraordinary parallel lives — was witnessed by the people close to both of them with the particular emotion that arrives when something that has always been incomplete finally, gently, completely resolves. Julie Andrews has described it with the specific, unguarded tenderness of someone who understood in the moment that she was living something she would carry for the rest of her life — and the fans who have loved both of them since 1965 are finding that her description of that final reunion is the most beautiful and the most heartbreaking thing either of them has ever given the world.