As ‘Sound of Music’ turns 60, we watched it with the NC man who played the film’s villain
It’s not the most famous of the Rolf scenes in the 1965 movie-musical “The Sound of Music” — we’ll get to those in a minute — but it’s the one that best depicts Liesl von Trapp’s 17-going-on-18 boyfriend’s shift from good guy to bad guy.
Rolf Gruber, wearing a brown Nazi uniform, hands a telegram to Liesl to pass on to her father, The Captain, and coldly says, “See that he gets it.” In an effort to warm him back up, Liesl replies, “Don’t you want to come over tonight and deliver it yourself?” But Rolf maintains his stern demeanor.
“I am now occupied with more important matters,” the blond teen said, flatly, “and your father better be, too, if he knows what’s good for him.”
As this scene plays out on his television set, longtime Concord resident Daniel Truhitte jeered at the screen.
“Booooooo!”
When he then laughed, he did so sheepishly, because he was kind of booing himself. The 81-year-old Truhitte was in fact the young man who portrayed Rolf in the beloved film classic, which is based on the true story of a nun (Julie Andrews) who fell in love with a widowed Austrian naval captain (Christopher Plummer) and his children on the eve of World War II — and which celebrates the 60th anniversary of its original theatrical release on Sunday.
His only film role until an unexpected return to acting a couple of years ago, it just so happens that in playing Rolf, Truhitte (pronounced TRUE-it) became one of the more notorious movie villains of that particular Hollywood era.
The bad-guy label has stuck, much to his amusement. Mostly.
“The kids would get together to do shows, whether it was Oprah or whatever. But they never really included Rolf. You know, I was always an outsider, and they would always cut the bad guy. People wouldn’t get over it! ‘I’m an actor, man! I’m not that guy. Gimme a break!’ ” he says, chuckling.
Truhitte recalled another time when he got an autograph from David Prowse, the actor who played Darth Vader in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, along with this personalized message: “Dan, somebody’s got to be the bad guy!”
What’s ironic is that Truhitte is one of the nicer guys you’ll ever meet.
A song and dance ‘Rolf’ is familiar with
Warmth emanated from his person when he welcomed us into the secluded Concord home he shares with his wife of 32 years, Tarealia, and a kind smile rarely left his face — even if the topic of conversation during our first visit with him was nothing new.
After all, he’s told the story of how he got the part in the first place a million times.
“I was in LA and I remember they were talking about the part of Rolf. Everybody else was cast,” Truhitte said. “I didn’t know anything about it. But I told my agent I’d like to maybe go for that. So he sent me over there to 20th Century Fox, and I went to the sound studio, and there must have been about 200 or 250 blond guys. I really wasn’t blond. At the time my hair was really dark. I didn’t sing for ’em, I didn’t dance for ’em, didn’t do anything. (And after that) I never heard a thing.”
As the studio struggled with casting the role, however, his agent finagled a meeting with director Robert Wise.
“Bob liked my looks,” Truhitte continued. “They sprayed my hair blond … and he gave me the last scene in the picture, ’cause that was the one that was the problem. They couldn’t get anybody that … could come across and really be believable as a Nazi at the end of the picture. ... That’s the reason I got the part. … I could make it believable.”
Perhaps the only thing Truhitte has been asked as many times as he’s been asked about how he landed the job? “Where did your life take you after the movie?”
Well, first, he explained for the millionth time, it was into the military. “I had such a guilt complex about being a Nazi, I joined the Marine Corps,” joked Truhitte. “I was in boot camp when the movie opened. They wouldn’t let me out. So first time I saw it I was with a bunch of Marines ... in New York.”
In the years that followed, he opened a dance studio; worked as a singer and dancer in Las Vegas; toured the U.S. as “Can-Can” movie star Juliet Prowse’s lead singing and dancing partner. Then around 1990, he moved to the Charlotte area, where he met and married Taurelia — after her first husband died — and taught acting, dance and voice for many years. (He has three adult sons from a previous marriage, she has three adult daughters.)
Of course, he’ll freely admit, his professional claim to fame is his involvement in one of the most successful movie-musicals of all-time. And of course, people have spent a lifetime making a song-and-dance about it. So he knows the drill in these interviews.
But at the end of our initial get-together, Truhitte agreed to do something he’d never done before with a journalist: watch “The Sound of Music” with one.
These are a few of our favorite things
“We usually watch it every year,” Daniel Truhitte said as Tarealia cued up ABC’s most recent Christmastime broadcast of the movie on their DVR, when we came back for our second, much-longer visit. “We’ve seen it probably 50 times,” she guessed.
Then the 20th Century Fox logo appears on the screen and she announced: “Here we go...”
Over the course of the next three-plus hours, including the fast-forwarding over the holiday commercial breaks, the gentle North Carolina retiree who played the wicked German teenager shared a variety of reflections on and remembrances of his time spent making the 60-year-old movie classic.
To paraphrase the song: These are a few of our favorite things that Truhitte said.
1. “Every time I see it, I always feel the same thing: It’s nice being captured in my youth,” he said, after seeing his younger self appear in his first scene, in which he delivers the first of two telegrams that he’ll bring to the von Trapp house during the movie. “But I remember every bit of it. It was so intense to be in front of cameras like that in this crucial of a picture. Very intense. I didn’t get a lot of direction, though. … Basically, he (Robert Wise) let me do what I wanted to do.”
2. “Oh, here comes a magic moment. … That place was beautiful,” Truhitte said, as he watched himself and actress Charmian Carr, the actress who portrayed Liesl, move toward the gazebo in which they’ll flirt and dance while singing their famous duet, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” Asked how it makes him feel to watch the scene, he added: “Joyful. Thankful. Appreciative. ... To be able to see this acting and this scene that’s been such a part of my life ... it does have an effect on me. And it always is a little different the older I get. Of course, now I’m looking at it 60 years ago — and it’s still magical.”
3. “I was capable of doing a lot of more advanced stuff,” he said of Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood’s choreography of the gazebo routine, “but that wasn’t the idea of the dance. It was just to have fun and enjoy it, with a little style, without being overly performed.” And asked how he’d evaluate his vocal performance, he replied, “It was perfect for that role. And I had been studying with a (vocal coach) who taught with a very forward, more lyrical production and placement of the voice. So it worked perfectly for this. ... Good articulation, good vibrato — I’m pleased with it.”
4. “We’ll have to talk about that,” Truhitte said, grinning slyly, when asked whether he had a crush on Carr. He chuckled, then said, in seriousness, “Not really. No. We had a lot of respect for each other, but I just did not have an attraction to her. I mean, she was a pretty girl, pretty eyes, but I didn’t want to get involved in anything like that. (The rule) I’d always been taught as an actor: ‘You’re better off not to get too personally involved with your leading lady.’” He cleared his throat, and paused before adding, with another sly grin: “Not that I always (followed) it. ... But not her. She liked The Captain, I think.” Worth noting: Truhitte was 20 years old, not 17, when the movie was shot — and Carr was 21, not 16.
5. “I’ve remembered that aaaall my life,” he said of the moment during filming when he and the then-29-year-old star Andrews revealed their respective ages to each other. Although they had no interaction on screen, he described her as “absolutely wonderful. She worked with (Carr) and I on our dance ... and we used to talk voice technique. She basically sang the way that I had been taught.” Truhitte and Andrews are actually the oldest surviving cast members from the movie; five of the children are still alive, but everybody else who appeared in a role of even moderate significance is now gone.
6. “They said it was too saccharine-sweet. So guess who got to be the paprika?” he said of Ernest Lehman’s decision to alter the character of Rolf and his relationship to Liesl from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1959 stage musical. As he watched the movie’s second telegram scene, in which the character of Rolf turns cold toward Liesl, Truhitte added: “But overall, it was better, ’cause it was more realistic.” (In the end, of course, Rolf betrayed Liesl and her family to serve the Nazi Party.) And then there was this kicker: “If I get to do ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen,’ I’ll play a nasty Nazi,” Truhitte said, chuckling.
7. “I think I did all I could with it,” Truhitte said, shrugging, after the climactic scene in which Rolf literally blows the whistle on the von Trapp family as they try to make their escape. “When (The Captain) said, ‘You’ll never be one of them,’ then it flipped a switch, and then I turn him in ... The reaction that you saw, (the filmmakers) were very pleased with it. And ... it was one of the most recognizable parts and a very important part in the overall film. So I feel very pleased. ... I pulled it off, didn’t I? You hate me, don’t ya?”
8. “No, but I wish I did,” he replied when asked if he had any souvenir props from the movie. “I wish I had the bike,” he said, referring to the one upon which Rolf rides to and from the von Trapp home delivering his telegrams. “I wish I had the whistle. ... I mean, I’ve become famous. How many times have you heard about ‘blowing the whistle’?”
9. “When I look back on my life and where I am, I think I’ve made the right decisions,” Truhitte said of his choice to forgo a movie career after “The Sound of Music.” “’Cause even if I’d done four or five more films — so what? ... I’ve got one film, and that’s all I needed to do was that film.” (In 2023, however, he returned to movie-acting with a role in independent production company Salty Earth Pictures’ “Stand in the Gap”; then he returned to act in Salty Earth’s “One by One” last year. Later this year, the same company plans to release a documentary he will star in, titled “A Life of Music: The Daniel Truhitte Story.”)
10. “It’s a part of America, part of our history, part of our culture, that film,” he said, noting “The Sound of Music’s” inclusion in the Library of Congress’ National Film and National Recording registries. “Could I ask for anything more? ... I mean, people love that picture and you never really get tired of it. You always see something new.”
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This story was originally published February 27, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "As ‘Sound of Music’ turns 60, we watched it with the NC man who played the film’s villain."
