Christopher Plummer, a patrician Canadian who starred as widower Captain von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews in the blockbuster 1965 musical The Sound of Music and in 2012 became the oldest actor to win an Oscar, has died at the age of 91, Deadline Hollywood reported on Friday.

Plummer passed away peacefully at his home in Connecticut with his wife Elaine Taylor at his side, the publication said.

Plummer, an accomplished Shakespearean actor honoured for his varied stage, television and film work in a career that spanned more than six decades, was best known for his role in The Sound of Music, which at the time eclipsed Gone With the Wind (1939) as the top-earning movie ever.

Plummer flourished in a succession of meaty roles after age 70 — a time in life when most actors merely fade away. He claimed a long-awaited Academy Award at age 82 for his supporting performance in Beginners as an elderly man who comes out of the closet as gay after his wife’s death.

“You’re only two years older than me, darling,” Plummer, who was born in 1929, purred to his golden statuette — first given for films made in 1927 and 1928 — at the February 2012 Oscars ceremony. “Where have you been all my life?”

Plummer became the oldest actor to win a competitive Academy Award — supplanting Jessica Tandy and George Burns, who both were 80 when they won theirs.

But for many fans his career was defined by his performance as an stern widower in The Sound of Music — a role he called “a cardboard figure, humourless and one-dimensional”. In his 2008 autobiography In Spite of Myself, Plummer refers to the movie with the mischievous acronym “S&M”.

It took him four decades to change his view of the film and embrace it as a “terrific movie” that made him proud.

Director Robert Wise’s wholesome, sentimental film follows the singing von Trapp family and their 1938 escape from the Nazis. Plummer’s character falls in love with Andrews, portraying a woman hired to care for his seven children. The movie won the Academy Award as best picture of 1965.

“Originally I had accepted Robert Wise’s offer simply because I wanted to find out what it was like to be in a musical comedy,” Plummer wrote in his book. “I had a secret plan to one day turn ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ into a Broadway musical. ‘S&M’ would, therefore, be a perfect workout in preparation for such an event.”

He said he had never sung before in my life — “not even in the shower” — before taking a role that included crooning the song Edelweiss. He blamed his own “vulgar streak” for the desire to star in a big, splashy Hollywood extravaganza.