The Sound Of Music's real "Maria Von Trapp".

On location at the Trapp Family Lodge, my colleague, John Willis interviewed Maria von Trapp, also known as Baroness von Trapp. She was the stepmother and matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. In 1926, while still a schoolteacher at the abbey, Maria was asked to teach one of the seven children of widowed naval commander Georg von Trapp. Seeing how much she cared about his children, he asked Maria to marry him, although he was 25 years her senior. Frightened, she fled back to Nonnberg Abbey to seek guidance from the Mother Abbess. The Mother Abbess advised Maria that it was God's will that she should marry the Captain; since Maria was taught always to follow God's will, she returned to the family and told the Captain she would marry him. She later wrote in her autobiography that on her wedding day she was blazing mad, both at God and at her husband, because what she really wanted was to be a nun: "I really and truly was not in love. I liked him but didn't love him. However, I loved the children, so in a way I really married the children. I learned to love him more than I have ever loved before or after." In 1949, she wrote The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. The story served as the inspiration for the 1956 West German film The Trapp Family, which in turn inspired the Broadway musical The Sound of Music (1959) and the 1965 film of the same name, starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer.