Heights together

A my Usherwood believes Louise Hillary was more than a match for her mountaineer hero husband.

“She certainly wasn’t your typical 50s housewife,” says the former Shortland Street star of the woman she plays in Hillary, the six-part drama about the life of Sir Edmund Hillary.

“Louise was actually a climber as well, which I think a lot of people don’t realise. She had grown up tramping and hiking and camping and was very outdoorsy.

“I think that’s probably what they saw in each other. I think they were both attracted to a sense of adventure and travel. When she started going to Nepal with him – after he climbed Everest – she would often take a girlfriend with her and they would go climbing in the Himalayas as well.”

However, it might come as a surprise to some people that while Hillary (played in the series by Amy’s long-time friend and pantomime co-star Andrew Munro) was considered a hero around the world, he was too shy to propose to Louise, then studying at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Ed Hillary left it to his future mother-in-law to pop the question for him by phone from Auckland.

The couple married in September 1953, soon after his ascent of Mt Everest.

They had three children – Peter (born 1954), Sarah (born 1955) and Belinda (1959). In 1975 while en route to join Hillary in the village of Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital, Louise and Belinda were killed in a plane crash near Kathmandu airport shortly after takeoff.

It was, says Amy, challenging to portray a woman who died before she was even born.