Julie Christie
Trained for the stage at Central School, after an Indian childhood and English education, she first became known as the artificially created girl in TV's A for Andromeda (1961), before making her cinema debut in 1962 in two amusing, lightweight comedies directed by Ken Annakin, Crooks Anonymous and The Fast Lady.
Schlesinger cast her as the silly, superficial, morally threadbare Diana of Darling (1965), for which she won the Oscar, the British Academy Award and New York Critics' award, and which is now powerfully resonant of its period, and again as Thomas Hardy's willful Bathsheba, in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), with other 60s icons, Terence Stamp and Alan Bates. Her Lara intermittently illuminates David Lean's lumbering Dr Zhivago (UK/US, 1965) and the color cameras adored her.
Notwithstanding her beauty, she continued to make the running as a serious actress in demanding films such as Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1971), as the bored upper-class woman who ruins a boy's life by involving him in her sexual duplicities; Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (UK/Italy, 1973), with its famously erotic love scenes between Christie and Donald Sutherland; and in three US films with Warren Beatty: Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), as a tough Cockney madame out west, Shampoo (1975) and Heaven Can Wait (1978).
She was greatly in demand, but became much more choosy about her roles as her own political awareness increased. This means that some of her later films - Memoirs of a Survivor (d. David Gladwell, 1980) and the documentary The Animals Film (d. Victor Schonfeld, 1981), The Gold Diggers (1984), Sally Potter's feminist take on several Hollywood genres - were seen by comparatively few people.
However, the talent and the beauty remained undimmed in such British films as Return of the Soldier (d. Alan Bridges, 1982), Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (UK/US, 1996) as Gertrude, and, in the US, Afterglow (d. Alan Rudolph, 1997), for which she was Oscar-nominated. In 1995, she returned to the stage in a revival of Harold Pinter's Old Times, to laudatory reviews.
Julie Christie Facts
Birth Name | Julie Frances Christie |
Occupation | Actress |
Birthday | April 14, 1941 (82) |
Sign | Aries |
Birthplace | Chukua, Assam, India |
Height | 5' 4" (1m63) How tall is Julie Christie compared to you? |
Awards | 2008 Golden Globe Awards: Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama (for Away from Her) |
2008 Screen Actors Guild Awards: Best Female Actor in a Leading Role (for Away From Her) | |
1966 Academy Awards: Best Actress (for Darling) |
Selected Filmography
The Miracle Maker | ||
Troy | ||
Dragonheart | ||
Hamlet | ||
Doctor Zhivago | ||
Red Riding Hood | ||
Demon Seed | ||
Finding Neverland | ||
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