Christie, Julie

CHRISTIE, Julie

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Nationality: British. Born: Julie Frances Christie in Chukua, Assam, India, 14 April 1941. Education: Studied art in France, attended Brighton Technical College and Central School for Music and Drama, London. Career: 1957—acting debut on stage with Frinton Repertory Company, Essex; early 1960s—on British TV, including title role in serial A for Andromeda ; 1962—film debut in small part in Crooks Anonymous ; 1963—first lead role in Schlesinger's Billy Liar ; 1984—in TV mini-series Entscheidung am Kap Horn. Awards: Best Actress Academy Award, Best Actress, New York Film Critics, and Best British Actress, British Academy, for Darling, 1965. Agent: International Creative Management, 40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019, U.S.A.

Films as Actress:

1962

Crooks Anonymous (Annakin) (as Babette La Vern)

1963

The Fast Lady (Annakin) (as Claire Chingford); Billy Liar (Schlesinger) (as Liz)

1965

Young Cassidy (Cardiff and Ford) (as Daisy Battles); Darling (Schlesinger) (as Diana Scott); Doctor Zhivago (Lean) (as Lara)

1966

Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut) (as Linda/Clarisse)

1967

Far from the Madding Crowd (Schlesinger) (as Bathsheba Everdene); Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (Whitehead—doc)

1968

Petulia (Lester) (title role)

1970

In Search of Gregory (Peter Wood) (as Catherine)

1971

The Go-Between (Losey) (as Marian Maudsley); McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman) (as Mrs. Miller)

1973

Don't Look Now (Roeg) (as Laura Baxter)

1975

Shampoo (Ashby) (as Jackie Shawn); Nashville (Altman) (as herself)

1977

The Demon Seed (Cammell) (as Susan Harris)

1978

Heaven Can Wait (Beatty and Henry) (as Betty Logan)

1981

Memoirs of a Survivor (Gladwell) (as "D"); The Animals Film (Schonfeld and Alaux) (as narrator)

1982

The Return of the Soldier (Bridges) (as Kirry Baldry); Les Quarantièmes Rugissants (de Chalonges)

1983

Heat and Dust (Ivory) (as Anne)

1984

The Gold Diggers (Women Make Movies ) (Potter) (as Ruby); Separate Tables (Schlesinger—for TV) (as Mrs. Shankland/Miss Railton-Bell); Broadside: Taking on the Bomb (doc for TV) (as narrator); Why Their News Is Bad News (for TV) (as narrator)

1985

Champagne amer (Vert)

1986

Miss Mary (Bemberg) (as Mary Mulligan); Power (Lumet) (as Ellen Freeman)

1987

Agent Orange: Policy of Poison (Iverson—doc) (as narrator); Yilmaz Güney: His Life, His Films (Cousins-Mills—for TV) (as narrator); Secret Obsession (Vart)

1988

La Memoire Tatouée (Behi) (as Betty); Dadah Is Death (Deadly Decision ) (London—for TV) (as Barbara Barlow); Vater und Sonhe (Fathers and Sons ; Sins of the Fathers ) (Sinkel—for TV)

1990

Fools of Fortune (O'Connor) (as Mrs. Quinton)

1991

Short Step (Babenco)

1992

The Railway Station Man (Whyte—for TV) (as Helen Cuffe)

1996

Hamlet (Branagh) (as Gertrude); Dragonheart (Cohen) (as Aislinn)

1997

Afterglow (Rudolph) (as Phyllis Mann)

1999

The Miracle Maker (Hayer, Sokolov—for TV) (as God)

2000

Belphégor (Belphegor, Phantom of the Louvre ) (Salomé)

Publications

By CHRISTIE: articles—

Interview in Photoplay (New York), September 1971.

Interview with B. R. Rich, in American Film (New York), May 1983.

Interview with Karen Jaehne, in Cineaste (New York), vol. 15, no. 2, 1986.

Interview with A. Cockburn, in American Film (New York), January/February 1986.

Interview with Brian Case, in Time Out (London), 12 February 1997.

On CHRISTIE: books—

Callan, Michael Feeney, Julie Christie, London, 1984.

Murphy, Robert, Sixties British Cinema, London, 1992.

On CHRISTIE: articles—

Focus on Film (London), Autumn 1973.

McCreadie, M., "Valuelessness and Vacillation in the Films of Julie Christie," in Journal of Popular Film (Bowling Green, Ohio), vol. 6, no. 3, 1978.

Ciné Revue (Paris), 30 August 1979 and 2 July 1981.

Klein, Andy, filmography in American Film, February 1990.

Stars (Mariembourg), Autumn 1993.

Sight & Sound (London), May 1996.

On CHRISTIE: film—

Star, short directed by Alan Lovell, 1966.

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Julie Christie became an international star in the decade her performances seemed to celebrate. (And a lot of Christie's star appeal was tied into her youth and associated with the rebellious youth of the 1960s.) Her characters defied convention, joyfully reveling in zoom-lensed sensuality in Billy Liar, selfishly courting the high life in Darling, impetuously pursuing dangerous whims in Petulia. But in the morally schizoid world of 1960s cinema, screenwriters often exacted a high price for their characters' sexual liberation. For such films—epitomized by her Oscar-winning Darling —Julie Christie was the perfect actress.

Her particular talent appeared double-edged. Her model's beauty and the slick style in which she was photographed (especially by John Schlesinger), invited the viewer to admire her characters and to covet the glossy worlds they inhabited. But as Darling and later The Go-Between strikingly confirm, numerous Christie performances gradually reveal the enigmatic frost initially concealed by her characters' husky-voiced charm, thus permitting the viewer to accept, even enjoy, their eventual comeuppance.

Starring roles in three prestigious but overproduced adaptations of novels—two historical (Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd ), the third futuristic (Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 )—reflect Christie's career-long resistance to typecasting. Dual performances as Oskar Werner's dreadful, book-hating wife and his magnificent, book-loving mistress in Fahrenheit 451 might have broadened public perception of her acting range, but fade into the film's pretentious moralizing, and are smothered by Truffaut's apparent discomfort with an English-language film.

Three roles in early 1970s pictures underline more vividly her rejection of glamorous roles in favor of challenging, literate scripts filmed by brilliantly quirky directors. All three movies—Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Losey's The Go-Between, and Roeg's Don't Look Now —thrive on narrative ambiguity, and rebel against the filmic genres from which they are derived—Western, English romance, and gothic thriller, respectively—through consistent frustration of audience expectations. In all three, her identity as a star is submerged. In The Go-Between and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (a second Oscar nomination), Christie disappears from view for considerable stretches of time; in Don't Look Now she is offscreen for more than a quarter of the film. In the movie The Go-Between, adapted by Harold Pinter from L. P. Hartley's complex novel, her performance is integrated with the remarkable ensemble playing of its all-British cast. Yet in all three films, Christie dominates the frame when she is in it, and she displays a depth and range of acting skill, that in her 1960s work, seemed almost secondary to her beauty.

With enviable control, inner torment pokes through to disclose the characteristic Christie embodiment of the clash between illusion and reality in all three women: frizzy-headed prostitute Mrs. Miller (opposite Warren Beatty's McCabe) in the eccentric, elliptical world of Robert Altman; radiant aristocrat Marian Maudsley who, by The Go-Between 's end, reveals unforgivable streaks of cruelty; and Laura Baxter, haunted by her husband's and daughter's deaths in the terrifying, fractured universe of Don't Look Now, but regal as she musters her emotional resources. More recently, Christie played a mother in the 1988 television movie Dadah Is Death. It was a part most would not identify with her early screen persona. She starred in this fact-based story about an Australian woman's efforts to clear her son of drug charges in Malaysia. It was not a glamorous or offbeat role, but Christie played it with the same kind of intensity.

Christie is committed to political and social causes which, since Heaven Can Wait, have increasingly determined the roles she accepts: nuclear disarmament (Memoirs of a Survivor ; Broadside: Taking on the Bomb, a television documentary); animal experimentation (The Animals Film ); and feminism (The Gold Diggers, directed by Sally Potter and produced by a crew comprised entirely of women). The specialized, uncommercial nature of the films she tends to select, and her conscious shedding of the star image, have combined in recent years to limit Christie's audience to that of art houses and cinema societies. The single exception is Heat and Dust, in which the actress portrays a young woman searching for clues to her great-aunt's life in India, where Christie herself was born. Like The Go-Between, it uses the past to reflect upon the present; as in the three films of the early 1970s, Christie is offscreen for long periods. And like other Christie films, its source is a rich literary text, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novel of the same name, a further example of the actress's discriminating taste.

—Mark W. Estrin, updated by Linda J. Stewart