(Credit: YouTube still)
Wed 17 December 2025 21:30, UK
There aren’t many actors in cinema history who’ve been called universally beloved, because even the most wholesome stars in the business can have some skeletons in their closet. Julie Andrews comes pretty close, though, even if there was still one co-star who went against the grain and hated her guts.
The most obvious question is also the most simple: how can anyone hate Julie Andrews? The term ‘national treasure’ gets bandied around too much these days, and Judi Dench is more likely to punch you for saying it to her than treating it as a term of endearment, but the Sound of Music star fits the bill.
She’s never been caught up in a scandal or controversy, and she didn’t even appear in what would have been the most near-the-knuckle R-rated release of her career after confessing that she was too high on pain medication to accept a role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which is nothing if not ironic.
Andrews did try to play against type on the odd occasion, but when John Wayne, of all people, called her out for thinking she could be something she wasn’t, it was clear that it was doomed to fail. Most of her collaborators on both sides of the camera have nothing but praise for the legendary performer, and it makes sense that the one star who disagreed was known for being a bit of a bastard.
As the saying goes: if you run into an arsehole in the morning, you ran into an arsehole, but if you run into arseholes all day, then you’re the arsehole. With that in mind, since he’s the only co-star who didn’t get along with Andrews on set, it wouldn’t be unfair to assume that in the case of 1966’s Hawaii, Richard Harris was the arsehole.
He might have been one of his era’s most gifted thespians, but he was also a cantankerous drunk. Harris didn’t hesitate in denigrating his colleagues, or even people he didn’t know, with Kirk Douglas, Tom Cruise, and Michael Caine three of the Hollywood icons who ended up in the hard-living Irishman’s firing line.
With her last four pictures before their team-up being Mary Poppins, The Americanization of Emily, The Sound of Music, and Torn Curtain, perhaps Harris thought that Andrews was buying into her own hype a little too much. In her defence, she’d won an Oscar, two Golden Globes, delivered a performance she considered her best, and worked with Alfred Hitchcock across that quartet, so maybe she had a point.
Harris told his biographer, Michael Feeney Callan, that he had “rarely, if ever, experienced such hatred for a person.” That wasn’t out of the ordinary for him to say, since he hated quite a few people and wasn’t shy in letting them know about it, but Julie Andrews? Surely not, and it makes you wonder what she did.
According to him, “She was condescending and mean” throughout the production. “I’m sure she saw how much I was enjoying myself, and I thought that annoyed her,” Harris explained. “She would say something, all quiet and conspiratorial, to the director, and I would should, ‘Did you say something, Jules?’ Which just pissed her.” Even the most beloved figures have enemies, it would seem, and for Andrews, it was Harris.
Related Topics