‘Sound of Music’ Child Stars Give Update on Their Bond 60 Years Later (Exclusive)

Since it debuted on screen in 1965, The Sound of Music has been embraced again and again as a film favorite by multiple generations across the globe who recognized something of their own clans in the tightly knit bonds of the von Trapps. But for the seven young actors who were cast as the von Trapp children, that sense of familial collection has been profoundly real for 60 years, as the five surviving “siblings” exclusively explain to PEOPLE.

“These guys are the people I’ve known longest in my entire life,” Debbie Turner, who played Marta in the film when she was just 7 years old, explains. Over the course of six decades, she and her faux-family members have remained quite close. “The older we get, the less faux it is. I think these guys are truly my sisters and brothers. We’ve got history that nobody else can talk about. We go back,” she adds.

Turner, 69, remains in regular contact with her on-screen brood that also includes Angela Cartwright, 73 (Brigitta); Nicholas Hammond, 75 (Friedrick); Duane Chase, 74 (Kurt); and Kym Karath, 67 (Gretl). Additionally, the film siblings included Charmian Carr (Liesl), who died in 2016 at age 73, and Heather Menzies (Louisa), who died the following year at age 68.

“The five of us – there’s five of us now – we have been through so much together, and we are like a family. We call ourselves Non-Trapps,” Cartwright jokes. “We’re like a family that’s all over the world in separate places — and we are! From Australia all the way to Los Angeles and Middle America, and yet we all come together.”

“We’re like just a family again. We pick up where we left off,” she continues. “We were just in Florence, Italy, for a showing of The Sound of Music in front of this Italian audience.”

While Hammond says they may “only physically reconnect as a group maybe every five or 10 years now,” he notes that “a week doesn’t go by” that he doesn’t get an email or a text message “from at least a couple of them.”

“You’re constantly thinking of each other, and we’re very aware of each other’s lives,” he explains.

“We know we’ve been through a lot with each other: we’ve been through marriages, we’ve been through divorces; we’ve been through the deaths of family members and deaths of now two of our siblings from the film. And those are huge things,” he adds.

Hammond says that the film’s 60th anniversary celebrations — as well as leading lady Julie Andrews‘ upcoming 90th birthday on Oct. 1 — have sparked a constant round of text exchanges among the group as they plan to travel back to original filming locations in Salzburg, Austria, to mark the occasion. “There’s a flurry of, ‘Well, what restaurant do you want to go to?’ and ‘What are we going to do when we’re not working?’ and ‘When are we going to do the birthday greeting for Julie?’ And so it feels like we see each other a lot more than we do.”

Despite being just 5 years old when the film was shot, Karath agrees that their bond cannot be broken.

“I loved my Sound of Music siblings – I still love them!” she tells PEOPLE. “And it was such a gift to be given six siblings. My sister and brother were 16 and 15 years older than I was, respectively, so I almost grew up as a little bit of an only child. So I suddenly had all of these siblings…And yeah, they’ve remained in my life forever.”

The cast often showed up for each other at major milestone events, Karath explained. “Nicky — Nick Hammond – took me to my first prom because my mother did not trust anybody else with me at that point. And she thought she could trust Nicky — and she could trust Nicky.”

“Angela and I were buddies – we still do stuff on the side,” Turner adds. “When Heather was around still, she and I used to ski together up in Utah because she had a beautiful place up in Deer Valley. And our lives just kind of intermeshed.”

Karath, too, shared an extremely close relationship with Menzies. “Our mothers became best friends during the filming, and so we spent so many Christmases and Thanksgivings and birthday celebrations together,” Karath remembers. They were so close, in fact, that as Menzies’ romantic relationship with her future husband, actor Robert Urich, deepened, she introduced him to Karath’s parents to get their approval,

“So I met Bob in the very beginning and watched [as their lives] unfolded, and her son, Ryan, when they just adopted him,” Karath recalls, “And then she and Robert Urich became the godparents of my son, Eric.”

“I don’t know how many times we shopped for clothes for Sound of Music events, and laughed our heads off,” Karath chuckled, including an utterly unexpected encounter abroad. “We ran into one another in a restaurant in Paris. And the joy was so loud…I was living in Paris at the time and homesick, so running into Heather was just amazing.”

Chase confirms that they constantly sought each other out over the decades, refusing to lose that connection.

“When we had the chances to get together, either on our own or because we were out in the field doing promo, we just always stayed in touch,” he says. “Even when I moved up to Santa Barbara, I’d drive down to L.A., and I’d stay with Heather and Bob, and they would get together with Angie or Kymie and Debbie. And we just kind of bounced around in terms of who we saw at the time, when we had the time.”

Although Carr was 21 when The Sound of Music was filmed, she also held a special place in the hearts of her significantly younger costars. “Charmy was so beautiful and so glamorous, and she just was permanently like an older sister to me,” Karath says.

Karath notes that Carr “was always very concerned and protective” of both her and her son with special needs.

The Thrill of It All actress teared up when recounting a moving memory of Carr, who suffered from a rare form of dementia that gradually impaired her communication skills, “One of the last times we went out together, we went to her favorite restaurant, and her illness had really taken over,” she recalls. “But I was not worried about going out with her because I was so accustomed to being around someone who had verbal compromise. So she brought her little machine where she could type on it, and painstakingly, she typed, ‘How’s Eric?’ So she was a sister and a protective, wonderful, gorgeous human being.”

The group has shared all their highs and lows, just like any family.

“I spoke at Charmian’s memorial funeral, and all of us were there, and that was terribly sad,” Hammond also recalls. “And because I’m in Australia, I couldn’t get to Heather’s, but we come together at good times and bad times like a family.”

Also, like many families, there are certain divisions and hot-button topics that they choose to avoid. “We have extremely diverse points of view politically, and we just leave politics off the table. We do not discuss it,” Hammond says. “I know that one or two of them have opinions that I would never, ever agree with, and I’m sure they feel exactly the same way about me, but I love them and they’re my sisters.”

Something they’re all in agreement about is their admiration for their adult costars, Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Plummer died in 2021 at age 91, and his cinematic offspring remembered him warmly.

Karath recounts reconnecting with Plummer shortly after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, when he was performing in a fundraiser for firefighters organized by Paul Newman at the Westport County Playhouse. “When I went backstage, Paul Newman threw his arms around me and said, ‘Come, hurry! Your father’s been pacing the floor. He’s been so excited to see you!’ So cute!” she remembers. “And Paul brought me into Chris, and then Chris threw his arms around me and was so excited to see me.”

Turner also remembers her last encounter with Plummer, during a cast reunion on The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. “We had a wonderful dinner spread that they had put on for us the night before, and I sat next to him and we talked about all kinds of stuff.” 

“I had this picture for him that my mom had taken,” she reveals. “Julie had thrown a pool party for us after the movie was over, and there’s a picture of he and I standing next to the pool, and he’s just like Hollywood: a tan guy in a little bathing suit with a cigarette — I mean, just posing, and I’m like this little kid going, ‘Hi!’ ”

“And I had a copy made of it and I gave it to him and I said, ‘Well, this was one of my fondest memories,'” she adds. “So he was quite thrilled to have that picture.”

During the filming of The Sound of Music, Cartwright said Andrews was a genuinely maternal figure for all of the younger actors. “She just had this kind of mothering relationship with us, and when we were between takes, she would sing, she would teach us songs, we would dance, and she was part of that,” Cartwright shares. “She didn’t go off to her dressing room. She was a real part of us being a family. It shows. I think that’s such an important part of why this movie is so successful.”

Cartwright says she adores the off-screen Andrews, who’s not as sweet and sugary as her on-screen persona suggests. “She’s sassy and fun, and it’s not like she’s this prissy little person,” she laughs. “She’s real, she’s just great. I love her!”

“She’s a lovely human being and we’ve stayed in contact all the years,” agrees Karath, who recalls a touching moment years after the film when Andrews’ maternal qualities again came to the forefront at a crucial moment in Karath’s life.

“My mother was dying, and we were planning a party for her, and my mother always liked to look beautiful, and so she wanted to go to the hair salon,” Karath explains. For reasons she still can’t explain, she bypassed her own regular salon and went to a salon nearby that Andrews frequented. 

“Julie was there, and Julie took one look at my face — one, I’m not kidding — and she said, ‘Are you okay, darling?’” Karath recounts. “And I said, ‘No.’ My mom is dying.’ And she threw her arms around me and hugged me so hard. It was the best hug. And she said, ‘You’re strong and you’ll be okay, darling.’ ”

“It was such kindness and such depth. So I will love her forever, and I have loved her forever,” she adds.

For the first time ever, The Sound of Music is now available worldwide in 4K Ultra HD Digital & Blu-ray disc. Featuring remastered sound, restored visuals and bonus content.