In Hawaii, Julie Andrews played a missionary wife in the 1820s, in an epic adapted from James Michener’s novel.
Hawaii was released in 1966, directed by George Roy Hill and based on the novel by James A. Michener. Julie Andrews played Jerusha Bromley, later Jerusha Hale, who marries the stern Calvinist missionary Abner Hale, played by Max von Sydow, and travels with him to Hawaii in the 1820s. The film followed the Hales as they tried to convert the Hawaiian people, while also showing the islanders’ own culture and the changes brought by newcomers.
Andrews’s Jerusha was the emotional centre of the story. She was warm, observant and increasingly aware of the gap between her husband’s rigid faith and the human world around them. Her performance gave the epic a domestic scale: the grand landscapes and historical sweep were balanced by a marriage, a family and a woman learning to think for herself.
Hawaii was a large production, and it was made at a time when Hollywood still believed in long, serious literary adaptations. It remains notable in Andrews’s career because it took her far from musical comedy and placed her in a demanding dramatic role, in a film that dealt with religion, colonialism and cultural change. It showed, again, that she was not content to repeat the success of Mary Poppins.