Julie Christie
Natural beauty

A look into the life of an ageless beauty, with a touch of class
Movie moguls were always keen to sanitize their stories into high gloss fantasies back in the 40’s and 50’s. But the mid-60’s and 70’s led the assault against the censores causing breach in the Hollywood Production Code. The 70’s films were forging a new acting style. It had the appearance of realism. But, actually, it revealed something in the natural behaviour of people, that hadn’t been seen on the screen beofre, the turth behind the posture. And a new breed of stars was born.

Hollywood has long admired British actresses for their poise, their versatility, their connection to the Great British acting tradition, and the touch of class only a royal subject can bring to a role. One of the movie birds who represented the British invasion of the swinging mid-60’s and 70’s at its liveliest was the attractive, mod, Julie Christie who was being recognised for the unusual star she was.

Conservatory trained but the antithesis of the Maggie Smith School of Big Gestures, she stalked the London streets in miniskirts to play an existentially challenged jet-setter in Darling. The film, which garnered her the Academy Award as best actress for 1965, was a provocative and stylish expose of 60’s mod-model times, trendsetting visually and thematically. Christie has brought to the screen some of Hollywood’s most tragically hip heroines, from the beautiful, elusive Lara who made Omar Sharif shiver with desire in the snowy epic Doctor Zhivago (1965) to the drug-addicted madame in 1971’s McCable and Mrs. Miller (an Oscar nominated role ) to the unstable mistress Warren Beatty works into a lather in 1975’s Shampoo.

The film world treated her shimmering return to the screen in Afterglow (1997) like a second coming with an Academy Award nomination by the New York Film Critics Circle. She eventually lost out the Best Actress Award to Helen Hunt for As Good As It Gets. As an actress, however, Christie has always presented a bottomless reservoir for directors to plumb.

She was born 1942 in Assam, India, where her father managed a tea plantation. At 7, she was sent back to England to attend boarding school. Within two years of graduating from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, she made her film debut in Crooks Anonymous (1962) and followed it with Fast Lady. Christie became famous as a free-spirited small-town girl in Billy Liar (1963). Moving to Los Angeles in 1967 sealed her star status. Her films during the 60’s and 70’s, some of which were major hits, include: Far From The Madding Crowd, Fahrenheit 451, Petulia, Young Cassidy, Don’t Look Now (Tricky, adult herror drama with intensely erotic relationship with Donald Sutherland), Demon Seed, The Go Between, Heaven Can Wait, In Search of Gregory.

In the 80’s, she scaled back her career dramatically, happily relinquishing the celebrity she has called a nonhuman status. She settled outside the tiny Welsh village of Landyssil, tailoring her career to her convictions. Her films during this period were a mixed lot-some meaty, some cameo, some insignificant: Dadah Is Death, Heat and Dust, Memoirs Of A Survivor, Miss Mary, The Power (with Richard Gere), Memoirs of the Soldier (Interesting psychological premise with first-rate cast including Glenda Jackson and Ann Margret); Secret Obsession, Sins Of The Fathers and the totally uncommercial film The Gold Diggers produced by a bunch of neophyte women producers.
In between films, she has campaigned against nuclear power, taken courses in politics and history and travelled the world from Nicaragua to Russia. Julie began to raise her consciousness. She championed environmental issues, narrated documentaries about Agent Orange and animal rights. Her companion for the past twenty years has been British investigative journalist, Duncan Campbell. Hollywood regards Christie “as a little eccentric”. She claims she doesn’t need anyone. In London, she sports a rain coat and glasses and passes off incognito like a librarian.

In British plays, she refuses to take a separate curtain call and will never have her name above the other players on the programme.

The revival of the awards “Will change nothing about her” says director, Robert Altman, “She doesn’t have the conventional ambitions of movie actresses wanting publicity, prizes and money. She seldom discusses her old movies, claims she actively does not seek out scripts and says her favourite form of acting is narrating audio books’’.

She was a unique beauty with an aristocratic Focus, sensually pouting lips and blue eyes shaded with melancholy. At 56, there are still traces of the revolutionary beauty she was 30 years ago. She has resisted plastic surgery, save for a little work on her jawline. At this year’s awards function she remarked, “Its very frustrating coming to America where people who are older than you appear to be younger. That is really, really undermining.”

Her character in Afterglow is resplendent rather than pathetic as a women aching so deeply for her estranged daughter that the infidelities of her husband cause only second sorrow. With Julie the role became a dimensional human being as opposed to a type. She is natural because she is never aware of the camera. “I have no sense of its presence,” she says. Its the camera that seeks and captures her every nuance.

In addition to Afterglow, she’s done some smashing work in the 90’s. The London stage play Old Times (1996), films Dragonheart and Hamlet (both 1996), In Fools Of Fortune (1990) she was outstanding. This soap opera, set in Ireland, chronicles the horrible experience of an Irish family at British hands before and after World War II. In Railway Station Man (1992), she gave another cracker jack performance in a powerful tale.

Julie has admitted that when she left Hollywood it was with a heart bruised by a string of broken affairs. The most famous, certainly, was Warren Beatty, at the time Hollywood’s swingingest bachelor. They met in 1967 and Warren was crazy about her. But by the time they played ex-lovers in 1975’s Shampoo, the romance was kaput.

A close associate sums her up best with, “Julie Christie has taken a very particular pathway. It hasn’t always been an easy one, but it has been an interesting one. No matter how dramatic a role is, Julie is always in and out of character at the snap of a finger. Thats because the world outside of Hollywood is what really matters most to her.”

Compiled by Ian Edwards.