Julie Christie, the Face of the Sixties Who Kept Walking Away

Julie Christie

Photo: news service / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 14, 1940 Chabua, Assam, British India
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Troy, Finding Neverland
Awards	Academy Award · 2 BAFTA · Golden Globe · SAG Award · Genie

Sarah Polley needed several months to get Julie Christie to say yes. Christie liked the script and still turned it down, because the thing she was being asked to do, act in a film, was the thing she had spent most of her life doing as little as possible. When she finally agreed to play Fiona, a woman slipping into Alzheimer’s in Away from Her, she gave the performance that brought her a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild award and a fourth Oscar nomination. It was a late reminder of something her fame tends to bury. The most photographed English face of the Sixties belonged to someone deeply unsure she wanted the job.

That doubt has deep roots. Christie grew up on a tea estate in Assam, in the north-east of what was then British India, where her father ran the plantation and her Welsh-born mother painted. At six she was sent to England to live with a foster mother and attend convent school, and she was asked to leave two of them, one after a risqué joke travelled further than she intended. A spell in Paris gave her fluent French. The Central School of Speech and Drama in London gave her a trade, and she worked in repertory theatre in Essex before television found her in the BBC science-fiction serial A for Andromeda.

Her film career turned on someone else’s exit. John Schlesinger cast her in Billy Liar in 1963 only after Topsy Jane dropped out, and gave her a few minutes on screen as Liz, the free spirit who offers Tom Courtenay’s daydreamer an escape to London he cannot bring himself to take. Those minutes were enough. Two years later Schlesinger fought a studio that wanted Shirley MacLaine to put Christie at the centre of Darling, as a model who trades her way up through London society. The role won her the Academy Award and the BAFTA for Best Actress.

The same year David Lean cast her as Lara in Doctor Zhivago, still among the most profitable films ever made once inflation is counted. Life magazine called 1965 the year of Julie Christie, and in 1967 Time argued that what she wore moved fashion more than the ten best-dressed women combined. She played two roles for François Truffaut in Fahrenheit 451 and returned to Schlesinger as Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd. Then she moved to Los Angeles.

The American years produced her most durable work. In Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller she played an opium-smoking brothel keeper with a sharper head for business than the man who hires her, and earned a second Oscar nomination. Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between, opposite Alan Bates, took the top prize at Cannes. Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, in which she and Donald Sutherland play parents grieving a drowned daughter in wintry Venice, topped a 2017 Time Out poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics as the greatest British film ever made. With Warren Beatty, her partner until 1974, she went on to make Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait after the relationship had ended.

The canonised version of Christie, the golden girl of Swinging London, gets her wrong. Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker that audiences wanted to watch her for her looks more than for her acting, and the image-making of the decade encouraged that reading. Beatty, who knew her better, called her the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person he had ever known. The nerves explain more of the career than the beauty does. She turned down at least four parts that went on to earn Oscar nominations for the actresses who accepted them. As a career strategy, that looks like waste. As a decision about how to live, it is entirely consistent.

She went back to Britain in 1977 and settled on a farm in Wales. The films of the next two decades were few and deliberate, among them Merchant Ivory’s Heat and Dust, shot in the India of her childhood. In 1996 she played Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh‘s Hamlet, and a year later Alan Rudolph’s Afterglow, in which she plays an unhappy wife opposite Nick Nolte, brought a third Oscar nomination. BAFTA gave her its Fellowship that same year.

The new century offered visibility on her own terms. She appeared briefly as Madam Rosmerta in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and played Kate Winslet‘s mother in Finding Neverland, a part that earned a BAFTA nomination. Then came Polley and Away from Her, adapted from an Alice Munro story and played opposite Gordon Pinsent, the film in which her restraint finally read as a method.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cQ-yGCyjyM

Her last fiction role came in Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep, released in 2012, as a former radical who has spent decades underground. Since then she has narrated Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop in 2017 and spoken on camera in Mothers of the Revolution, a 2021 documentary about the Greenham Common women’s peace camp she supported in the 1980s. In 2008 Survival International, the charity that campaigns for tribal peoples, named her its first ambassador.

Christie, born on 14 April 1940, has kept her private life almost entirely out of interviews. Her partner from 1979 was the Guardian crime reporter Duncan Campbell; they later married and stayed together until his death in May 2025. She speaks French and Italian, does not eat meat, and has campaigned for decades on animal welfare and the environment.

No new role has been announced, and nothing in how she has spent the past decade suggests one is coming. That silence is the last entry in a consistent record. Revival screenings keep putting Darling and Don’t Look Now in front of audiences born long after she made them, and what they find is an actress who looks into the camera as if she has somewhere else to be. Most of the time, she did.