Julie Christie
Julie Christie at the Guadalajara International Film Festival in 1997
Born	Julie Frances Christie (1941-04-14) 14 April 1941 (age 71) Chabua, Assam, British India
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1961–present
Spouse	Duncan Campbell (2007-present)

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Julie Frances Christie (born 14 April 1941) is a British actress. Born in British India to English parents, at the age of six Christie moved to England, where she attended boarding school.

In 1961, she began her acting career in a BBC television series, and the following year, she had her first major film role in a romantic comedy. In 1965, she became known internationally as "Diana Scott" in the film Darling, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar. That same year she also played the part of "Lara" in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago.

Early life[link]

Christie was born on 14 April 1941 in Singlijan Tea Estate, Chabua, Assam, India, then part of the British Empire. She is the elder child of Rosemary (née Ramsden) and Frank St. John Christie.^[1] Her father ran the tea plantation where she was raised. Her mother, from Hove, was a painter. ^[1] Christie has a younger brother, Clive, and an older half-sister, June, from her father's relationship with an Indian woman, who worked as a tea picker on his plantation.^[2] Christie's parents separated during her childhood.

She was baptised in the Anglican church and studied as a boarder at the independent Convent of Our Lady school in St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, after being expelled from another convent school for telling a risque joke which reached a wider audience than originally anticipated. After being asked to leave the Convent of Our Lady as well, she later attended Wycombe Court School, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, during which time she lived with a foster mother from the age of six.^[3]

After her parents' divorce, Christie spent time with her mother in rural Wales.^[3] As a teenager at Wycombe Court School, she played the role of the Dauphin in a school production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. She later studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama^[4] before getting her big break in 1961 in a science fiction series on BBC television, A for Andromeda.

Career[link]

Early career[link]

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 dropped out of the film.^[5]

Christie became known internationally in 1965 after Schlesinger cast and directed her in her role as an amoral model in Darling. Christie appeared as Lara Antipova in David Lean's adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (1965), and as Daisy Battles in Young Cassidy, a biopic of Irish playwright Seán O'Casey, co-directed by Jack Cardiff and (uncredited) John Ford. In 1966, she was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role when she played a double role in François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and won the Academy Award for Best Actress and BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Darling Later, she played Thomas Hardy's heroine Bathsheba Everdene in Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and the lead character, Petulia Danner, in Richard Lester's Petulia (1968).

In the 1970s, Christie starred in smaller films such as Robert Altman's postmodern western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), with Warren Beatty, where her role as a brothel 'madam' gained her a second Best Actress Oscar nomination, The Go-Between (again co-starring Alan Bates, 1971), Don't Look Now (1973), Shampoo (1975), Altman's classic Nashville (also 1975, in an amusing cameo as herself opposite Karen Black and Henry Gibson), Demon Seed (1977), and Heaven Can Wait (1978), again with Beatty. She moved to Hollywood during the decade, where between 1967 and 1974 she had a high-profile but intermittent relationship with Warren Beatty, who described her as "the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person I had ever known."^[3]

In 1979, she was a member of the jury at the 29th Berlin International Film Festival.^[6]

Following the end of the relationship with Beatty, she returned to the United Kingdom, where she lived on a farm in Wales. 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.^{[citation needed]}

Later work[link]

Christie at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival

Christie appeared as Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. Her next critically acclaimed role was the unhappy wife in Alan Rudolph's domestic comedy-drama Afterglow, which gained her a third Oscar nomination.

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.

Christie portrayed the female lead in Away from Her, a film about a long-married Canadian couple coping with the wife's Alzheimer's disease. Based on the Alice Munro short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain", the movie was the first feature film directed by Christie's sometime co-star, Canadian actress Sarah Polley. She took the role, she says, only because Polley is her friend.^[7] On her part, Polley said that Christie liked the script but initially turned it down as she was ambivalent about acting. It took several months of persuasion by Polley before Christie finally accepted the role, which was written with her in mind.^{[citation needed]}

Debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2006 as part of the TIFF's Gala showcase, Away from Her drew rave reviews from the trade press, including the Hollywood Reporter, and the four Toronto dailies. The critics singled out the performances of Christie and her co-star, Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, and Polley's assured direction. Her luminous performance generated Oscar buzz, leading the distributor, Lions Gate Entertainment, to buy the film at the festival to release the film in 2007 in order to build up momentum during the awards season.^{[citation needed]} On December 5, 2007, Christie won the Best Actress Award from the National Board of Review for her performance in Away from Her.^[8] She also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role and the Genie Award for Best Actress for the same film. On January 22, 2008, Christie received her fourth Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role at the 80th Academy Awards. She appeared at the ceremony wearing a pin calling for the closure of the prison in Guantanamo Bay.^{[citation needed]}

In 2008, Christie narrated Uncontacted Tribes, a short film for the British-based charity Survival International, featuring previously unseen footage of remote and endangered peoples.^[9] Christie has been a long-standing supporter of the charity,^[10] and in February 2008, was named as its first 'Ambassador'.^[11]

Christie then appeared in a segment of the 2008 film New York, I Love You, written by Anthony Minghella, directed by Shekhar Kapur and co-starring Shia LaBeouf, as well as in Glorious 39, a film about a British family at the beginning of World War II. In 2011, she played a "sexy, bohemian" version of the grandmother role in Catherine Hardwicke's gothic retelling of Red Riding Hood.^[12]

Personal life[link]

In the early 1960s, Christie dated actor Terence Stamp. She became engaged to Don Bessant, a lithographer and art teacher, in 1965,^[13] before dating actor Warren Beatty (1967–1974). In November 2007, aged 66, Christie quietly married^[14] The Guardian journalist Duncan Campbell, her partner since 1979.

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,^[15] as well as Reprieve.^[16]

Filmography[link]

Theatre[link]

• Cries From The Heart (2007)

Royal Court Theatre

• Old Times (1995)

Wyndhams Theatre & Theatr Clywd

• Suzanna Andler (1997)

Chichester Festival Theatre (and on tour, Bath, Oxford, Richmond and Guildford)

• Uncle Vanya (1973)

Broadway

• The Comedy of Errors (1964)

RSC

Frinton Repertory of Essex (1957)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Julie Christie

• Julie Christie at the Internet Movie Database
• Julie Christie at the Internet Broadway Database
• Julie Christie at the TCM Movie Database
• Julie Christie at AllRovi
• Julie Christie biography and filmography at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• BBC: Actress Christie on Alzheimer's role
• Julie Christie: Beauty that never fades in The Independent
• After years living as a recluse, Julie Christie is suddenly the talk of Hollywood again
• Oscar winner and nominee Julie Christie talks about getting older
• Daily Mail article on Christie
• "Indian sister who haunts actress Julie Christie"
• "Julie Christie writes about the re-release of 'The Animals Film'"
• "Playing a part against injustice: interview with Julie Christie