Born April 14, 1941 in Chukua, Assam, India, Julie Frances Christie is a British actress. Her first brush with fame came via a BBC television series, A for Andromeda. She made her film debut in Crooks Anonymous (1962). Her first major film role was in Billy Liar (1963). In 1965, she won an Oscar for her role in Darling. She picked up her second Oscar nomination for McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and her third for Afterglow (1997).
Julie is the daughter of a tea planter and his Welsh wife Rosemary, who was a painter. The young Christie grew up on her father’s tea plantation before being sent to England for her education. Finishing her studies in Paris, where she had moved to improve her French with an eye to possibly becoming a linguist (she is fluent in French and Italian), the teenager became enamored of the freedom of the Continent. She also was smitten by the bohemian life of artists and planned on becoming an artist before she enrolled in London’s Central School of Speech Training. She made her debut as a professional in 1957 as a member of the Frinton Repertory of Essex.
She made her screen debut in the science-fiction television serial “A for Andromeda” (1961) in 1961. Christie’s first major film role was in The Fast Lady, a 1962 romantic comedy. She first gained notice as Liz, the friend and would-be lover of the eponymous Billy Liar (1963) played by Tom Courtenay. The director, John Schlesinger, cast Christie only after another actress – Topsy Jane – dropped out of the film. It was 1965 when Christie became known internationally. Schlesinger directed her in her breakthrough role, as the amoral model Diana Scott in Darling, a role which the producers originally offered to Shirley MacLaine. Christie won numerous awards for Darling, not the least of which were the British Film Academy award and the American Oscar.
Her star further ascended into box-office heaven when she was cast in the big-budget Doctor Zhivago (1965), in which she gave a radiant performance as the tragic Lara. She followed this with a dual role in Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1967) and a starring turn in John Schlesinger’s acclaimed 1967 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. Roles of wildly varying quality followed, until in 1971 Christie began a professional and romantic liaison with Warren Beatty. The romance was over within a few years, but Beatty and Christie ultimately worked together on three major films of the 1970s: McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Shampoo (1975), and Heaven Can Wait (1978).
Following the end of the relationship with Beatty, she returned to the United Kingdom, where she lived on a farm in Wales. Never a prolific actress, even at the height of her fame and bankability in the 1960s, Christie made fewer and fewer films in the 1980s. She had a major supporting role in Sidney Lumet’s Power (1986), but generally avoided appearances in large budget films and appeared in non-mainstream films. She narrated the 1981 feature documentary The Animals Film (directed by Victor Schonfeld and Myriam Alaux), a campaigning film against the exploitation of animals. Christie made a brief appearance in the third Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, playing Madam Rosmerta. That same year, she also appeared in two other high-profile films: Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy and Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland, playing Kate Winslet’s mother. The latter performance earned Christie a BAFTA nomination as supporting actress in film.
In November 2007, aged 66, Christie quietly married The Guardian journalist Duncan Campbell, her partner since 1979. She has owned a farm in Montgomeryshire, Wales, since the late 1970s, where she spends most of her time, when not ‘at home’ she splits her time between north London and Louth, Lincolnshire. She is active in various causes, including animal rights, environmental protection, and the anti-nuclear power movement and is also a Patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Reprieve.
Julie Christie Photo Gallery
