Julie Christie

Julie Christie (born April 14, 1940 or 1941, Assam, India) is a British film actress renowned for a wide range of roles in English and American films of the 1960s and ’70s, as well as for her offbeat, free-spirited personality.

Early life and films

Christie was born on an Indian tea plantation that her father managed, and she was educated in England and France. She studied acting at London’s Central School for Drama and made her stage debut in 1957. Her first major film role was in director John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (1963). In 1965 she found stardom and won an Academy Award for playing a self-destructive fashion model in Schlesinger’s Darling. That same year she appeared as the romantic heroine Lara in David Lean’s enormously successful screen adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

Christie played dual roles in director François Truffaut’s 1966 production of Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and portrayed the Thomas Hardy heroine Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), her final theatrical film with Schlesinger.

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Popularity in the 1960s and ’70s

At the peak of her popularity, Christie made it a point to resist easy money and to be leery of fame. Often shunning the lure of mediocre Hollywood projects, the actress opted instead to play interesting roles in a series of films by respected international directors such as Lean, Truffaut, Richard Lester, Robert Altman, and Nicolas Roeg.

Christie was comfortable in both contemporary and period pieces; in Lester’s Petulia (1968), she gave the defining performance of a 1960s free spirit, and in Altman’s period western McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), she won another Oscar nomination for her portrait of a tough, unflappable madam. In Roeg’s disturbing psychological thriller Don’t Look Now (1973)—a film that has become something of a cult classic—Christie turned in what was perhaps her most emotionally layered performance to date as a woman haunted by the deaths of her daughter and husband yet determined to maintain her poise and dignity.

Her romance with American actor, producer, and director Warren Beatty was echoed on-screen in three noteworthy films: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shampoo (1975), and Heaven Can Wait (1978).

Christie appeared only sporadically in films during the 1980s, finding few compelling roles for an actress in her 40s. A notable exception was her performance in the 1983 made-for-television adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play Separate Tables.

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The 1990s and beyond

In the 1990s Christie returned to the filmgoing public’s attention with her acclaimed portrayal of Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1996). She received her third Academy Award nomination for her role as a world-weary retired screen actress in Afterglow (1997).

Christie’s subsequent films include Troy (2004), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and Finding Neverland (2004). She received a best actress Oscar nomination for her role as a woman with Alzheimer disease who forgets about her husband and falls in love with another man in Away from Her (2006), based on a short story by Alice Munro. She later portrayed the grandmother in Red Riding Hood (2011), an adaptation of the well-known folktale, and an erstwhile radical political activist in Robert Redford’s thriller The Company You Keep (2012). In 2017 she narrated the drama The Bookshop, though her work was uncredited.