Scottish/Canadian actress who played one of the children in The Sound of Music

Born: December 3, 1949;

Died: December 24, 2017

HEATHER Menzies, who has died of cancer aged 68, had only one truly significant film part and she was in her teens when she did it. But the role of Louisa von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1965) ensured her of celebrity status for the rest of her life.

In an attempt to shake off the wholesome image of the Austrian girl frolicking around Alpine meadows with Julie Andrews and chirruping away about female deer and a needle pulling thread, Menzies took roles in horror movies and even posed nude for Playboy magazine.

But it is as the second oldest daughter in The Sound of Music that she will be most widely remembered.

She was born in Toronto. But as the name Heather Menzies suggests her family were Scottish. Her father George worked for the General Accident insurance company in Perth, fought with the 51st Highland Division in Normandy, was captured and spent most of the Second World War as a POW.

After the war, George and his wife Mary emigrated to Canada and George worked as a commercial artist. However they were living in Los Angeles when their daughter Heather auditioned for The Sound of Music. She had shown promise as a ballerina, but her acting and singing was limited mainly to school productions.

She was just 13 at the time. “I had to stand in front of a piano and sing a song I had prepared,” she later recalled. “I had never had a singing audition and I have never had one since. It was awful.”

In writing the original stage version of The Sound of Music, Rodgers and Hammerstein were inspired by the true story of the von Trapp family’s escape from the Nazis in Austria to neutral Switzerland.

It opened on Broadway in 1959 and ran for three and a half years. But 20th Century Fox were taking a big gamble by spending $8 million on a film version at a time when cinema seemed to be dying.

Director Robert Wise saw hundreds of juvenile actors before choosing seven to play the children, including Menzies. She was understandably excited by the prospect – even though she thought initially that the film was going to be made in Australia with Julie Harris as the female lead!

The film won five Oscars and by the late 1960s it had overtaken Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing film of all time. It was one of the first films commercially released on video in the 1970s and more recently sing-along screenings have given it a whole new lease of life.

Menzies made lifelong friends during shooting in Austria and at the Fox studios in California. “We kind of grew up together,” she said. With every reissue, new format and significant anniversary, The Sound of Music Seven, as the children were dubbed, would be brought back together to share their memories.

Menzies was soon working with Julie Andrews again, playing her sister in the epic Hawaii (1966), she had guest roles in various television series, she played a woman whose boyfriend turns into a snake in Sssssss (1973) and was persuaded that a nude spread in Playboy would help promote the film.

She felt it was tastefully done, but recalled that it did not go down to well with her Presbyterian parents. “They were horrified,” she said. “It took quite a time to calm them down, although it gave my family back in Scotland quite a laugh.”

Menzies was proud of her Scottish roots and had a link to the Clan Menzies on her website. She was a regular visitor. “Whenever we go over, we are lucky to get out of Glasgow, there are so many relatives to visit,” she told one interviewer in 2001.

When her father died she came back to Perth to scatter his ashes. “I think that after the war, there was a migration of people who were down and looking for a new way of life,” she said. "The funny thing is, for the rest of their lives my parents regretted leaving behind everything and everyone they loved.”

She married for the first time when she was 19, but was divorced within a few years. In 1975 she married the actor Robert Urich, who she met when they made a commercial for corned beef hash together.

Menzies continued to act, mainly in television, throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. She was the female lead in the short-lived sci-fi series Logan’s Run (1977-78) and she cemented her reputation with horror fans when she starred in Joe Dante’s low-budget movie Piranha (1978).

After her husband died in 2002, she spent much of her time working for the Robert Urich Foundation, raising money for cancer research and support. She is survived by a son and two daughters.

Charmian Carr, who played the oldest daughter Liesl in The Sound of Music, died last year. The actors who played other five von Trapp children are still alive.

BRIAN PENDREIGH