Maria Von Trapp: Last Member of Von Trapp Family who Inspired The Sound of Music Dies

The last of the Trapp Family Singers, who inspired The Sound of Music, has died at the age of 99.

Maria von Trapp, passed away on Tuesday at her home in Vermont,

Confirming the reports her half-brother Johannes said: "She was lovely woman who was one of the few truly good people. There wasn't a mean or miserable bone in her body. I think everyone who knew her would agree with that. Maria had a wonderful life and while we will miss her, the memories of her will live on."

Maria was the third child of Georg von Trapp and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead.

The 1959 Broadway musical The Sound of Music was based loosely on a 1949 book by Georg von Trapp's second wife, also named Maria, who died in 1987.

It tells the story of an Austrian woman who married a widower with seven children and taught them music.

As a child, Maria and her brother and sisters fled from Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, after touring Europe as the Trapp Family Singers. They won widespread acclaim and went on to perform in the US for a three-month tour.

Her siblings Rupert, Hedwig, Johanna, Martina, Werner and Agathe, who died in 2010, emigrated to America the following year when the Second World War broke out.

They settled in Stowe, Vermont, where they opened a ski lodge with "sweeping mountain vistas reminiscent of their beloved Austria".

Maria, who was portrayed as Louisa in the film by child actress Heather Menzies, played accordion and taught Austrian dance with her sister Rosmarie at the lodge.

She wrote in a biography posted on the Von Trapp family's website that she was surrounded by music growing up.

"Father played the violin, accordion and mandolin. Mother played piano and violin," she wrote. "I have fond memories of our grandmother playing the piano for us after meals."

The story of the musical family was dramatised for the much loved Rogers and Hammerstein film starring Julie Andrewsand Christopher Plummer, which won the Oscar for best picture.

While the film was inspired by the real life story some details were not exactly as they happened.

There were in fact, ten singing siblings, not seven as portrayed in the film. Maria once revealed that the family did not escape on foot over the mountans, but took a train to Austria.

She also stated that her father, was "a kind man who loved music," unlike the captain portrayed in the film by Plummer, as a stern disciplinarian.

Maria Von Trapp, her husband Georg, Hedwig von Trapp, and Martina von Trapp are interred in the family cemetery at the Lodge.