Julie Christie

About:

Julie Christie was born into the dying days of British Rule in India. She grew up in the swelter of her father’s tea plantation, and was sent, as was the colonial habit, to England for her education. She was finished, to use the splendidly inappropriate phrase, in Paris but then chose to train for the theatre at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

Her career has the immensely rare and hard won distinction of being made up almost entirely of seminal or hugely successful movies, her CV reads like a film school syllabus. Having spent the first three or four years of her career on the British stage, she began her rise to the international esteem in which she is held with the leading role in the British television series A For Andromeda (1961) and followed this up with roles in two British comedies by Ken Annakin (1962). In 1963 however she was to slink her way into the public consciousness of the 1960s with her role in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar. This was followed by John Ford’s Young Cassidy (1965) and then in the same year Schlesinger’s second and inspired use of her talent and astonishing beauty in Darling, for which she won vast acclaim, an Oscar, a Bafta and stardom. It is faintly unbelievable that it was in the same year again that she made her next vast success – David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago.

She was now in a position to control her own career entirely, and she chose to make her next movie with Francois Truffaut – Farenheit 451 (1966). 1967 saw her return to Schlesinger for Far From the Madding Crowd and in 1968 she made Petulia with Richard Lester. Over the next few years she needed to make fewer films and was more interested in her long relationship with Warren Beatty. Nevertheless her roles in the seventies join the dots between some of the most important movies of the time – The Go-Between (1970), McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), Shampoo (1975), Heaven Can Wait (1978).

The cherry picking of roles has continued with movies including such classics as Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers (1984), Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), Alan Rudolph’s Afterglow (1997) and in 1995 she made a fêted return to the stage with the London revival of Harold Pinter’s Old Times.

She lives in London with the journalist Duncan Campbell.

Selected Filmography:

Doctor Zhivago
Farenheit 451 (1966)
The Go-Between (1970)
The Gold Diggers (1984)
Hamlet (1996)