Agathe von Trapp dies - in 'Sound of Music' family

Baltimore - — Agathe von Trapp, the eldest daughter of the von Trapp family made famous in "The Sound of Music," died of congestive heart failure Tuesday at a hospice care facility. She was 97 and lived in Brooklandville, Md.

Accounts in the Baltimore Sun said that for the past five decades, after she and her siblings stopped performing as the Trapp Family Singers, she lived a quiet life as "a virtual recluse" in Glyndon, Md.

The article noted that in the movie that dominated the Academy Awards for 1965 and broke box-office records, she came out of her shell at "16 going on 17," but the reality of her life was different.

"It's very strange for me; I've been living a very quiet life. All of a sudden, these people want to see me," she said at the time she published her autobiography, in which she sought to set the record straight between fact and fiction.

She wanted people to know that her father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, a widowed Austrian aristocrat who was played by Christopher Plummer in the film and Theodore Bikel on Broadway, was not cold, unfeeling and distant. She insisted he was a kind and loving father.

"Agathe von Trapp cried when she saw the show at its Broadway opening in 1959. She would have been just as enchanted as the rest of the audience had the characters' last name been Miller. But this was her family's name, and it was not her family's story," the 2003 Sun story said.

Among other changes, the children's first names and sexes had been changed. In real life, Ms. von Trapp had an older brother, but in the musical the eldest child was a girl, Liesl.

As the eldest daughter, Agathe von Trapp had assumed that was her. But as a teenager she never had a boyfriend, much less a telegram-delivering Nazi.

"In those days, people didn't date like they do here, and teenage boys didn't deliver telegrams," she explained in 2003.

Ms. von Trapp said the nun (played by Mary Martin and later Julie Andrews) who became her stepmother was not a governess. She was a tutor for one of the von Trapp sisters, who was too weak from scarlet fever to make a 45-minute trek to school. And the children were quite well versed in music by the time they met Maria, who went by the nickname Gustl.

Ms. von Trapp said the family did not cross the Alps to escape Austria. They crossed the street and boarded a train.

Agathe von Trapp was born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She sang with her siblings until she was 43. For a while, she went by "Miss Trapp," dropping the "von" in an attempt to fend off questions about whether she was part of that family. When asked anyway, she sometimes said no.

Survivors include a brother, Johannes von Trapp; and three sisters, Maria, Eleanor and Rosemarie, all of Vermont.