Oscar Seasoning: Meet Jocelyne LaGarde, the One-Movie Star Who Made Oscars History

With one movie, Jocelyne LaGarde broke Oscars records and gave historic representation to indigenous people on-screen.

The Oscar nominations will be announced next week, and we all have our fingers grossed for Lily Gladstone to make history and become the first indigenous American person to receive a Best Actress nod. Gladstone’s work in Killers of the Flower Moon is perhaps my most beloved performance of 2023, and if there was any justice in Hollywood, many of the other Native actors in the movie would be receiving awards attention. Indigenous people are shockingly underrepresented by cinema, even by the standards of other marginalized groups. According to Wikipedia, only two indigenous people have ever won competitive Oscars, and one of them is currently being investigated for potentially lying about her ancestry. It’s not as though Native stories have been absent from the screen, but we’re more likely to have seen a ton of white people with painted faces or narratives that prioritize the white saviour over those they colonized. Gladstone's work reminded me of a little-known Oscar story I thought would be worth digging into for this newsletter. The very first indigenous person to receive an Oscar nomination made history in a number of ways but her name has mostly been forgotten. It's time to talk about Jocelyne LaGarde.

In 1966, Jocelyne LaGarde became the first indigenous person ever to be Oscar-nominated (Merle Oberon, an actress of Sri Lankan and Māori descent but passed as white for her entire career, was nominated for Best actress in 1935 for her performance in The Dark Angel.) What makes LaGarde’s nomination all the more historic is that she got it for her debut performance. It was also her last role, and to this day, LaGarde is the only actor to have been Oscar-nominated for their sole on-screen appearance. she lost to Sandy Dennis for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, one of the evening's big victors and a representation of the New Hollywood banging on the windows of an industry afraid of change. While LaGarde's nomination was a sign of progress, the film she appeared in was very much a relic of the past.

Hawaii was the kind of grand and undeniably bloated historical epic that Hollywood loved, even if general audiences did not. By 1966, the industry was in a state of intense flux between the end of the old-school studio system and emergence of hot young independent talents. Grand productions still brought in audiences, like The Sound of Music, which essentially saved Fox from ruin, but change was in the air. We were only a year away from Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate blowing the doors off a dust-covered business. As anti-war protests and youth culture dominated America, young people flocked to foreign films and rock music while Hollywood doubled down on obscenely budgeted roadshow titles that felt hilariously out of step with the times. This was how we got an Oscars ceremony in 1968 where Bonnie and Clyde was nominated for Best Picture alongside Dr. Doolittle (Mark Harris’ book Pictures at a Revolution goes into this in great detail and you should read it now.) The idea with films like Hawaii was to give an inimitably Hollywood experience that couldn’t be replicated on TV or by those damn weiner kids trying to take over the industry. That means we get a lushly directed take on a complicated period of history that, by and large, nobody really liked.

Hawaii, directed by George Roy Hill of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fame, was based on the doorstopper historical novel of the same name by James Michener, which was published in 1959, the year Hawai’i became the 50th U.S. state. Michener was a Pulitzer Prize winner thanks to his short story collection Tales of the South Pacific, which was the basis for the musical South Pacific. While lavish in its historical detail, Hawaii is fiction, taking inspiration from real-life figures to narrativize the region’s dense lore and culture. It was a major bestseller, listed as one of the biggest-selling books in America for both 1959 and 1960. The book was praised at the time for its in-depth research, although a lot of it is more inspired by Polynesian folklore than anything archeologically provable. Over the course of almost 1000 pages, Michener covers millennia of Hawai'ian history, from its very creation from volcanic eruptions all the way up to the bombing of Pearl Harbour. To the surprise of nobody, when the book was optioned, it was decided that the entire novel could not be condensed into a feature film.

Hill's film, co-written by formerly blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, was based on the book's third chapter, “From the Farm of Bitterness”, which covered the settlement of the island kingdom by its first American missionaries. All of this was still raw history for Hawai’ians and remains a dark stain on world history. Making a film about it while the wounds were still open seemed iffy, to say the least, especially since the focus of the narrative was the arrival of Christianity and that being seen as a positive change for the locals. The history of missionaries f*cking up marginalized communities could fill up a book as long as Michener’s novel and then some. And, while Michener’s book is dedicated to telling the story of Hawai’i from the perspective of Hawai’ians, Hollywood was less concerned with such things. White people sold more tickets, apparently.

While the story is about the colonization of Hawai’i, the film Hawaii is, of course, about the colonizers. Max Von Sydow, who had broken out into Hollywood success following a string of Bergman classics, played Abner Hale, a minister who volunteers to be a missionary for the Hawai'ian people and bring Christianity to their islands. He marries a young woman named Jerusha, played by Julie Andrews, because all missionaries must be wed, but she's in love with the roguish whaler Captain Hoxworth (played by a definitely-not-sober Richard Harris.) They go to Lahaina, Maui, and meet Malama Kanakoa, the local ruler who is curious about Christianity but hesitant to relinquish tradition in favour of Christ. She is married to her brother, making her son both her child and her nephew (incest was common among Hawai'ian royals.) On her death bed, Malama agrees to be baptised a Christian, in the hopes of doing the right thing for her people.

To give Hawaii the most minute sliver of credit, they were active in their efforts to cast Polynesian actors in major roles. At least it's not blackface? Again, the bar is low. The major Polynesian character of the story was Malama, the Ali-i Nui (the high chief of Hawai'ian nobility.) Hill and the producers wanted someone authentically Polynesian (if not necessarily Hawai’ian) and needed a woman who was also large and commanding. Initially, the studio had wanted to cast Juanita Hall, the Tony Award-winning star of South Pacific, but Hill rejected the idea because he felt it would have been inappropriate for an African American woman to take on a Polynesian role.

The task of finding such a person fell to legendary casting director Marion Dougherty. As she wrote in her autobiography, the search requited them to get out of America and go to Tahiti and Tonga. They met with many non-professionals but nobody seemed right until they got to Tahiti and were told to meet with the LaGarde family in the port town of Papeete. Jocelyne Bredin LaGarde was 41 years old, six foot one inch in height, and weighed, according to Dougherty, over three hundred pounds. Dougherty described her as being beautiful, charming, and not intimidated by nosey Americans. She also didn’t speak a word of English.

Jocelyne was born in 1924. Her mother had died when she was a child so she and her sister were adopted by their French aunt Anna, who worked for a telephone company on the island. She grew up close to her family and, because her mother left her children shares in vanilla crops on Tahiti, she didn't have to work. She wasn't exactly thrilled when Dougherty and Hill asked her if she'd be interested in being in a movie. According to Dougherty, when asked via their translator about the opportunity to go to Hawai’i and film, she said, "Jamais!" (Never!)

Dougherty quotes an interview LaGarde later gave in the Honolulu Advertiser, saying that she felt sorry for these Americans when they told her they wouldn't be able to start filming Hawaii without casting the role of Malama. This makes it seem like, perhaps, a touch of blackmail was involved in getting LaGarde to leave home and join an expensive Hollywood movie. Dougherty said, "Honestly, I think Jocelyne, who had a great heart, was just intrigued with the idea. When we told her she would have only two months to learn English and that Leonne would help her accomplish that, this regal woman couldn't resist the challenge and accepted our offer." She proved to be a fitting choice to play a royal, as she was descended from Tahiti’s last reigning queen, Pomare IV, although she seemed uninterested in talking about it (The Honolulu Star-Bulletin detailed her enquiring, "What's royalty?" when asked about her ancestry.)

LaGarde left Tahiti for the first time in her life, and Dougherty makes a lot of comments about how baffled this Polynesian woman was by modern America (and about her weight, which we’ll get to later.) She ended up learning all of her lines phonetically. Leonne Cave, her translator, worked with her every day to memorize Malama's dialogue, using a tape recorder to keep track of her progress. The director was pleased with her work, although he was also overwhelmed with other issues regarding the production. The budget was ballooning, heavy rain and tidal alerts made location shoots near-impossible, and the American military camped on the reserve next door to their production were big on firing practices all day, every day.

Hill was even fired then rehired after producer Walter Mirisch tried to replace him with Arthur Hiller. It was the Polynesian actors who revolted and refused to work with another director. LaGarde threatened to quit too, telling the producer that she wouldn't work with any other director aside from Hill. He seemed to be very attentive towards his actors, far more so than a production this size would typically allow. In her autobiography, Julie Andrews claims it was LaGarde herself who staged a cast walkout in support of Hill. The producers tried to harangue LaGarde by telling her she'd never work in Hollywood again if she walked away. This didn't work given that she had no real desire for an acting career and had nothing to lose if she left and went back to Tahiti. Hill was rehired and production resumed.

Hollywood doesn’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to depicting Hawaiian people and its culture, or using the islands as a location, either for itself or for other places. As Charles Memminger wryly noted in Honolulu Magazine, "Hawai‘i has served as a glorified backlot for Hollywood where directors and producers—unencumbered by factual details of actual life in the Islands—could weave their unlikely tales of love, war and heat rash amid stunning tropical beauty." That's often led to make-up languages used for indigenous characters (often played by white people in make-up), Hawai'i being a vague stand-in for all things "exotic", and lots of coconut bras and plastic palm trees.

George Roy Hill's biographer described Malama, the character played by LaGarde, as "the most sympathetic and 'complete' woman in Hill's films." She is a leader of her people torn between tradition and modernity, the latter of which she has very little control over thanks to the colonizing missionaries and governmental meddling. LaGarde clearly struggles with the language barrier but she is an undeniably compelling on-screen presence. She is the matriarchal force of the story (a fictional detail given that the Kingdom of Hawai’i was never a matriarchy, something that Delia Caparoso Konzett noted in the book Hollywood's Hawaii to be a "historical distortion.")

The portrayal of the Hawai’ian people is also rife with stereotypes, reducing them to incestuous “savages” who are sexually promiscuous and naturally suspectable to the tricky words of the invading white people. Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times eagerly takes note of how the film features "the spectacle of beautiful native maidens (for the first time in a Code-approved Hollywood spectacle) who do not wear bras." While the white lead, the dedicated follower of Christ, calls out the ways that his fellow missionaries use their agenda as a way to make money from the Hawai’ian lands, his ultimate mission isn't scrutinized all that much. The mass deaths of Hawai’ians from imported diseases they have no immunity to is shown as a tragedy but the Christianization of the country isn't condemned. The film seeks to divorce the well-meaning central characters from the wider rot they participate in. As Konzett writes, Hawaii portrays its people as being "susceptible to colonization" while the white missionaries are sad about the damage they've contributed to but are ultimately seen as the good guys.

There’s also much to discuss in terms of how LaGarde’s body is depicted. Much is made about the fact that she is a larger woman, certainly taller and heavier than the typical white female movie-star. The fetishizing of indigenous women’s bodies has a long and sordid history. Indigenous women (whether played by actual indigenous actresses or otherwise) are frequently oversexualized, as decades of tacky Pocahontas Halloween costumes can attest to, while more mature women are typically reduced to asexual motherly figures. LaGarde is introduced to the film hoisted onto a ship like a horse in a moment that encourages the audience to laugh, both at the supposed silliness of this tradition and at LaGarde's size.

In her book The Pacific Muse, Patty O'Brien writes that LaGarde's first appearance in Hawaii emphasizes "the hefty weight that so fixated 19th-century observers of Polynesia's chiefly women prior to their adoption of Victorian style. The cinematic treatment of these older women clearly displays the links between nubility and sympathetic portrayals." Almost every major review made note of her weight in some form. Macleans called her “a great fat goddess of fertility” with “an enormously assured performance.” The Los Angeles Times' headline said "She's Very Big in and On Film." Malama is the most sympathetic and understandable character in the entire movie, but she’s still, on some level, meant to be gawked at.

Hawaii premiered on October 10, 1966 to mixed reviews, but it was a commercial hit, the biggest movie of the year according to Box Office Report (exact numbers for grosses of this period are, admittedly, tough to confirm.) It received seven Oscar nominations but went home empty-handed. Jocelyne LaGarde was the only actor nominated for the movie. She took home the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. Marion Dougherty accompanied her to the ceremony.

After Hawaii, details on LaGarde's life become much harder to find. She seems to have returned home to Tahiti and continued her life as it was before Hollywood came a-knocking. She told a London newspaper that she had no plans to return to acting "because I have had no offers." LaGarde regularly visited Hawai'i in the years following the movie, and spent time there in 1972 to receive medical treatment for complications from diabetes. She had one foot amputated around this time and was fitted with a prosthesis. After that, she lived a quiet life back in Papeete with her family until she died in 1979. She was 55.

If the Academy Awards are about celebrating stories then Jocelyne LaGarde had one hell of a story to herald. It’s a mixture of Hollywood fairy-tale, industry paradigm shift, old-school colonialism, and personal power play (come on, the absolute queen move of making one movie, getting Oscar-nominated, then retiring to live your old life? That’s the dream right there.) LaGarde is mostly talked about as an anomaly, the woman who broke a record then fell into obscurity, a matter exacerbated by the fact that the movie she was in kind of sucks. Still, as one of a tiny handful of indigenous people recognized by the Academy, she deserves her spotlight.

Since then, only a scattering of indigenous people from across the planet have received Oscar nominations: Keisha Castle-Hughes and Yalitza Aparicio in Best Actress; Chief Dan George and Graham Greene in Best Supporting Actor; Taika Waititi won Best Adapted Screenplay for Jojo Rabbit (and is the only indigenous person with multiple nominations); the legendary Wes Studi received an honourary award in 2019. Lily Gladstone could join their ranks on Tuesday (and she’d better otherwise I’m setting fire to the Kodak Theatre!)

Gladstone has been candid in discussing the abysmal representation for Native Americans in Hollywood. As she reminded us in her Golden Globes speech, Native actors were told to say their lines in English then they were run backwards to sound vaguely exotic. Indigenous storytellers are plentiful, even if the mainstream seems hesitant to invest in them. Martin Scorsese can make Killers of the Flower Moon but its success hasn't helped Gladstone get her film with Erica Tremblay, Fancy Dance, attention from distributors. Progress remains maddeningly incremental in Hollywood when it comes to basic visibility of marginalized groups. So, it’s always encouraged to shout from the rooftops about those who break through the ceiling and get their voices heard.

Thanks for reading. I’ll have lots of thoughts for Oscar seasoning next week because the nominations drop on Tuesday, plus I want to share all my brain vomit on both Poor Things and The Zone of Interest! The next issue of the Gossip Reading Club will be available for all subscribers on Sunday.

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