Christie, Julie

Actress

B orn Julie Frances Christie, April 14, 1941, in Chukua, Assam, India; daughter of Frank (a tea plantation foreman) and Rosemary (a painter, maiden name Ramsden) Christie; married Duncan Campbell (a journalist), November 2007. Education: Studied art in France; attended Brighton Technical College and Central School of Music and Drama, London, mid1950s.

Addresses: Agent—EndeavorAgency, 9601 Wilshire Blvd., 10th Fl., Beverly Hills, CA 90212. Home—London, England, and Llandyssil, Montgomeryshire, Wales.

Career

M ade stage debut with the Frinton Repertory Company, Essex, England, 1957; made television debut in the British series A for Andromeda, 1962. Film appearances include: Crooks Anonymous, 1962; The Fast Lady, 1962; Billy Liar, 1963; Young Cassidy, 1965; Darling, 1965; Doctor Zhivago, 1965; Fahrenheit 451, 1966; Far from the Madding Crowd, 1967; Petulia, 1968; In Search of Gregory, 1969; The Go-Between, 1970; McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971; Don’t Look Now, 1973; Shampoo, 1975; Nashville, 1975; The Demon Seed, 1977; Heaven Can Wait, 1978; Memoirs of a Survivor, 1981; The Return of the Soldier, 1982; Heat and Dust, 1983; Miss Mary, 1986; Power, 1986; Secret Obsession, 1987; Fools of Fortune, 1990; Dragonheart, 1996; Hamlet, 1996; Afterglow, 1997; No Such Thing, 2001; Snapshots, 2002; I’m with Lucy, 2002; Troy, 2004; Finding Neverland, 2004; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004; The Secret Life of Words, 2005; Away from Her, 2006; New York, I Love You, 2008.

Awards: Academy Award for best actress, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for Darling, 1966; award for best actress, New York Film Critics, for Darling, 1966; award for best actress, National Board of Review, for Darling, 1966; film award for best British actress, British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award, for Darling, 1966; Spirit Award for best female lead, Film Independent, for Afterglow, 1998; British film award for best actress, Evening Standard, for Afterglow, 1999; award for best actress, National Board of Review, for Away from Her, 2007; award for best actress in a motion picture, Screen Actors Guild, for Away from Her, 2008; Golden Globe Award for best performance by an actress in a motion picture drama, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, for Away from Her, 2008.

Sidelights

B ritish screen siren Julie Christie was one of the top-earning female stars of the 1960s and ’70s, commanding $400,000 per picture after causing a sensation in two major releases of 1965, Darling and Doctor Zhivago. In the first, Christie portrayed an amoral London beauty and earned an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role at the age of 24. The other film was a big-budget romance set during revolutionary-era Russia, and though it was panned by critics at the time it, too, became a cult classic over time. Christie appeared in a few major Hollywood films of the 1970s, but later went into semi-retirement, emerging from her sheep farm in Wales only occasionally. She earned her fourth Oscar nomination in 2008 for her role in Away From Her, the tale of a woman descending into the fog of Alzheimer’s disease.

Christie was born in 1941—though some sources also claim 1940 as the year of her birth—in the Indian state of Assam, where her father worked as a foreman on a tea plantation. When she reached elementary-school age, she was sent off to school in England, a separation she recalled as quite difficult. Her parents’ marriage eventually ended, and her mother settled in Wales, where Christie spent her time off from school. At the age of 16, she moved to Paris to study art, then returned to England for a course at the Central School of Music and Drama in London to train for the stage. She made her professional debut with the Frinton Repertory Company in Essex, England, and was hired for her first television role in the British science fiction series A for Andromeda in 1962.

After small roles in two British films, Christie was cast by an up-and-coming young English director, John Schlesinger, as the female lead in Billy Liar. The title character, played by Tom Courtenay, is a young man who endures a life so dreary that he imagines an entire fantasy world in his mind; Christie played Liz, the young woman who urges him to break free of his humdrum life. Her performance won rave reviews from critics, including a Times of London writer who asserted that, as Liz, Christie “has the rare quality of obliterating everything else from the screen whenever she walks across.”

Schlesinger also cast Christie in his next film, Darling, which became one of the most talked-about films of 1965. Its plot tracked the rise of a young English model, Diana, who dates her way up through the middle classes to immense wealth. Her conquests include a married television journalist (played by Dirk Bogarde), a callous advertising executive (Laurence Harvey) and, finally, an Italian prince. Half-comedy, half-tragedy, and a fully realized portrayal of the jaded values of the jet-set European lifestyle, Darling attempted to show that, though morals had loosened considerably, the world into which Diana plunges is a shallow and soulless one.

Darling baffled some critics, and not all of them assessed it as an Oscar-worthy performance. “The heroine, as played by Julie Christie, is a vigorous, vivacious sort, full of feline impulses and occasional disarming charms, but uncommunicative of the urges that make her tick,” declared New York Times critic Bosley Crowther. A reviewer for the Times of London, however, wrote that “Christie, with slender experience and tremendous potential, remains magnetically viewable throughout . And she captures the heroine’s qualities exactly: the emotional shallowness of the spoilt child and the effortless sensuality of the grown woman.”

Christie became the “darling” of the celebrity-movie-media axis with that role, her status as a new screen icon cemented further with her appearance in another major movie of 1965, Doctor Zhivago, which was released just before Christmas. Clocking in at three hours and 17 minutes, the $11 million film from director David Lean was the highly anticipated adaptation of a Boris Pasternak novel about the Russian civil war. Its title character, played by Omar Sharif, is a physician and poet whose loyalties are tested by the upheavals of the era. Christie was cast as Lara, the woman he loves and chases across war zones during the violent struggles that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Directed by David Lean, Doctor Zhivago featured stunning cinematography in its massive crowd and battle scenes, and sweeping images of vast wintry landscapes. It won five Academy Awards and was nominated in five additional categories, but Christie won her first Oscar for Darling, and caused somewhat of a stir at the April of 1966 ceremony when she wore wide-legged palazzo pants to the event, allegedly making her the first woman to accept an Academy Award statuette wearing pants. Later that year, her next picture, the screen version of the Ray Bradbury’s chilling science-fiction tale Fahrenheit 451, was released; this time, she worked with acclaimed French director François Truffaut, but the movie was a flop.

In 1967, Christie’s third movie with Schlesinger, Far from the Madding Crowd, co-starred her with British actor Terence Stamp, with whom she would become romantically involved. Adapted from the classic Thomas Hardy novel, Far from the Madding Crowd earned some abysmal reviews, but Christie’s portrayal of the willful nineteenth-century heroine Bathsheba Everdene would also later be judged in a more favorable light. Salon.com writer Stephanie Zacharek called it “a picture that captured the bleak beauty of Hardy perfectly . Christie again balances that graciously composed façade with an innocence that’s buried deep; she shows a kind of cautious openness to the world around her. What makes her Bathsheba so moving is that no matter how many trials she faces, she never seems to be on the verge of cracking.” During the making of Petulia, a bleak romance that paired her with George C. Scott as an adulterous California socialite, Christie became involved with Warren Beatty, one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading men known for his smoldering appeal both on-screen and off. For the next several years, the pair dated, shared a home in the pricey California beach enclave of Malibu, and made films together. They appeared in the 1971 Robert Altman western McCabe and Mrs. Miller, with Christie cast as the bordello owner who reluctantly falls for Beatty’s naïve McCabe. This was the only joint work of theirs filmed when they were still a couple; however, she appeared as a cosseted Hollywood housewife in Beatty’s 1975 debut as a screenwriter, Shampoo, in which he starred as a rakish hairdresser named George. Zacharek, the Salon.com writer, asserted that “Christie’s performance in Shampoo is one of the most mournfully luminous things ever put on film. Her vulnerability courses through the movie like a barely audible heartbeat, even when, or especially when, she’s trying to treat George indifferently.”

Christie’s last film with Beatty was Heaven Can Wait, a 1978 Oscar-winner about a man who dies before his time, but returns to earth in the body of someone else. By then she had worked with Altman again—in his 1975 classic Nashville—and made a movie with another acclaimed filmmaker, Nicolas Roeg, the cinematographer on four of her previous films. Known for his dark, somewhat disturbing films, Roeg cast Christie in Don’t Look Now, his 1973 story about a couple who move to Venice—a city built on water—to escape their grief over the drowning death of their young daughter. Canadian actor Donald Sutherland played her husband, and one of his intimate scenes with Christie is cited in histories of the screen as one of the steamiest ever committed to film; rumors even swirled that their liaison was actually real, a piece of gossip that all principals involved later denied.

A few years later, as her sojourn in California was coming to an end, Christie was slated to appear in American Gigolo, another drama noted for its steamy love scenes; the 1980 film made Richard Gere a household name, but his on-screen paramour was played by former model Lauren Hutton. Christie had dropped out of the project when John Travolta appeared to want to oust Gere for the lead, but when the role went to Gere anyway Christie was already committed to other projects. This was also the point in her life where she removed herself from the Hollywood scene by buying a piece of property in Wales—which she noted had been the only true childhood home she remembered—on which she ran a sheep farm. She emerged once a year or so to make a movie, and became increasingly involved in various political causes, including animal rights and nuclear disarmament. She would later give Beatty partial credit for awakening her interest in social justice, and, although the two were no longer a couple, he had reportedly wanted her to co-star with him in Reds, the 1981 epic of a real-life couple, John Reed and Louise Bryant Reed, both American Communists who devoted themselves to the cause of the Russian Revolution in the years following World War I. Christie declined the role, believing an American actor should play Bryant, and the role went to Diane Keaton instead. Beatty nevertheless dedicated Reds “to Jules.”

None of the movies that Christie appeared in after this period ever achieved the same social impact of her earlier works, and she usually steered clear of leading roles. Her credits during the 1980s and ’90s include the British India-set Heat and Dust from 1983 and Hamlet, the Kenneth Branagh-directed Shakespeare adaptation. Director Alan Rudolph convinced her to take the starring role in his 1997 movie Afterglow, which earned her another Academy Award nomination. She had a brief part as the mother of Brad Pitt’s Achilles in the 2004 epic Troy, and in a 2007 interview with the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane she described this particular job as “absolute heaven. I got to do one whole day in a Maltese bay, a blissful bay, sitting in one of those director’s chairs with Brad Pitt, who is a charming and thoughtful young man. What could be nicer?”

Christie also appeared in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 2004, and a year later in The Secret Life of Words with Sarah Polley. The younger star then persuaded Christie to take the lead role in what would be Polley’s directorial debut, Away from Her, in 2006. Based on an Alice Munro story titled “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” Away from Her was the heartwrenching tale of a woman diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease who decides to release her husband from the obligation of caring for her at home by moving into a care facility. The flaws in their longtime marriage re-emerge as Fiona’s memory falters and sometimes returns her to earlier, painful moments of her life. Christie was again nominated for an Oscar, and agreed to attend the event only reluctantly. As she told several journalists in the run-up the ceremony, she disliked the red-carpet chaos, especially the custom of wearing designer gowns and borrowed jewelry. “Models wear designer things, so you become like a salesperson,” she told Sunday Times journalist Garth Pearce. “There are actual signs outside the ceremony that say, ‘Turn around.’ Why? Because they want you to advertise the dress.”

A month before the Oscar ceremony, rumors arose that Christie had traveled to India with her long-time partner, Guardian columnist Duncan Campbell, where they were wed. In characteristic fashion, Christie refused to confirm the rumor. The couple live in Wales, but Christie also keeps a place in London—not in the posh part of the city, but in the gritty, artistic milieu of the East End. Later in 2008 she appeared in New York, I Love You, an anthology of New York City-set love stories featuring an immense cast of stars, from Blake Lively of Gossip Girlfame to Kevin Bacon. In one interview, Christie conceded that she likes making films, just dislikes the attendant publicity that is also part of the contractual commitment to the project for the lead actors. “I think celebrity is the curse of modern life, or at least advertising, which it is a branch of,” she told Tim Adams, a journalist with the London Observer. “And I don’t like being part of something dirty. I know that sounds prissy. But I talk to some young stars and say: Why do you do all these publicity things? They say they have signed up to it. I suppose I have never wanted to sign up.”

Sources

Periodicals

InStyle, April 1, 2003, p. 252.

Los Angeles Magazine, February 2008, p. 94.

New Yorker, May 7, 2007, p. 24.

New York Times, August 4, 1965; November 21, 1965; December 23, 1965, p. 21; April 18, 2007.

Observer (London, England), April 1, 2007, p. 4.

People, February 9, 1998, p. 119.

Sunday Times (London, England), February 3, 2008, p. 4.

Times (London, England), August 14, 1963, p. 11; September 16, 1965, p. 16.

Online

Biography Resource Center Online, Gale, 2008. “Julie Christie,” Salon.com, http://archive.salon.com/people/bc/2001/06/12/julie_christie/index.html (May 18, 2008).

—Carol Brennan