Ethel (Dame Julie Andrews) and Norman Thayer (Christopher Plummer) are an old couple living On Golden Pond. Their daughter, Chelsea Thayer Wayne (Glenne Headly), is forty-two-years-old, and has never been married. She is dating a forty-five-year-old dentist, and brings him up to Golden Pond to meet her parents. Her boyfriend, Bill Ray (Sam Robards), has a fourteen-year-old son named Billy (Will Rothhaar), who comes along. Young Billy has been virtually raised by his mother, who is newly divorced from his father. The troubled child is left with the elderly Thayers for some time, as his father and Chelsea take off for a tour of Europe. Character-driven story about an elderly man coming to terms with his age, and the nearing of death; a middle-aged woman attempting to enter into a father-daughter relationship with her dad, whom she has never known closely; and a young teenager dealing with parental divorce.