Christie's breakthrough film role was in Billy Liar (1963). She came to international attention for her performances in Darling (1965), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and Doctor Zhivago (also 1965), the eighth highest-grossing film of all time after adjustment for inflation.[2] She continued to receive Academy Award nominations, for McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Afterglow (1997) and Away from Her (2007).
Christie was born on 14 April 1940[3][4] at Singlijan Tea Estate, Chabua, Assam, British India, to Rosemary, a Welsh-born painter and Frank, who ran the tea plantation where she grew up. She has a younger brother, Clive, and an older (deceased) half-sister, June, from her father's relationship with an Indian tea picker on his plantation.[5] At the age of six she was sent to live with a foster mother so she could attend a convent school in England.[6] Her parents separated when Julie was a child, and after their divorce, she spent time with her mother in rural Wales.[7]
She was baptised in the Church of England, 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 risqué joke that reached a wider audience than she had anticipated. After being asked to leave the Convent of Our Lady as well, she attended the all-girls Wycombe Court School, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, during which time she lived with a foster mother from the age of six.[7] At the Wycombe school, she played the Dauphin in a production of Shaw's Saint Joan. She went to Paris to finish schooling and learn French. She later returned to England and studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.[8]
Career
Early career
Christie made her professional stage debut in 1957, and her first screen roles were on British television. Her earliest role to gain attention was in BBCserialA for Andromeda (1961). She was a contender for the role of Honey Ryder in the first James Bond film, Dr. No, but producer Albert R. Broccoli reportedly thought her breasts were too small.[9]
After dual roles in François Truffaut's adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 (1966), starring with Oskar Werner, she appeared as Thomas Hardy's heroine Bathsheba Everdene in Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). After moving to Los Angeles in 1967 ("I was there because of a lot of American boyfriends"), she appeared in the title role of Richard Lester's Petulia (1968), co-starring with George C. Scott.[18] Christie's persona as the swinging sixties British woman she had embodied in Billy Liar and Darling was further cemented by her appearance in the documentary Tonite Let's All Make Love in London. In 1967, Time magazine said of her: "What Julie Christie wears has more real impact on fashion than all the clothes of the ten best-dressed women combined".[19]
1970s
In Joseph Losey's romantic drama The Go-Between (1971), Christie had a lead role along with Alan Bates. The film won the Grand Prix, then the main award at the Cannes Film Festival. She earned a second Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role as a brothel madam in Robert Altman's postmodern western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (also 1971). The film was the first of three collaborations between Christie and Warren Beatty, who described her as "the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person I had ever known".[7] The couple had a high-profile but intermittent relationship between 1967 and 1974. After the relationship ended, they worked together again in the comedies Shampoo (1975) and Heaven Can Wait (1978).
In the 1980s, Christie appeared in non-mainstream films such as The Return of the Soldier (1982) and Heat and Dust (1983). She had a major supporting role in Sidney Lumet's Power (1986) alongside Richard Gere and Gene Hackman, but apart from that, she avoided large budget films. She starred in the television film Dadah Is Death (1988), based on the Barlow and Chambers execution, as Barlow's mother Barbara, who desperately fought to save her son from being hanged for drug trafficking in Malaysia.[23]
Christie portrayed the female lead in Away from Her (2006), 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.[27] Polley has said 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.[28]
In July 2006 she was a member of the jury at the 28th Moscow International Film Festival.[29] 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. Critics singled out her performances as well as that of her co-star, Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, and Polley's direction. Christie's performance generated Oscar buzz, leading the distributor, Lions Gate Entertainment, to buy the film at the festival to release the film in 2007 to build momentum during the awards season.
Christie narrated Uncontacted Tribes (2008), a short film for the British-based charity Survival International, featuring previously unseen footage of remote and endangered peoples.[32] She has been a long-standing supporter of the charity, and in February 2008, was named as its first 'Ambassador'.[33] She appeared in a segment of the film, New York, I Love You (also 2008), written by Anthony Minghella, directed by Shekhar Kapur and co-starring Shia LaBeouf, as well as in Glorious 39 (2009), about a British family at the start of World War II.
In the early 1960s, Christie dated actor Terence Stamp.[15] She had a live-in relationship with Don Bessant, a lithographer and art teacher, from December 1962 to May 1967,[35] before dating actor Warren Beatty for seven on-and-off years (1967–1974).[7] Christie was also linked romantically with musician Brian Eno, record producer Lou Adler, director Jim McBride and photographer Terry O'Neill.[35][36]
Christie is married to journalist Duncan Campbell; they have lived together since 1979,[37] but the date they married is disputed. In January 2008, several news outlets reported that the couple had quietly married in India two months earlier, in November 2007,[38] which Christie called "nonsense", adding, "I have been married for a few years. Don't believe what you read in the papers."[39]
In the late 1960s, her advisers adopted a very complex scheme in an attempt to reduce her tax liability, giving rise to the leading case of Black Nominees Ltd v Nicol (Inspector of Taxes). The case was heard by Judge Sydney Templeman (who later became Lord Templeman), who gave judgement in favour of the Inland Revenue, ruling that the scheme was ineffective.[40]
^Although most sources cite 1941 as Christie's year of birth, she was in fact born in 1940 and baptised that year. First name(s) Julie Frances Last name Christie Baptism year:1940 Birth year: 1940 Place: Dibrugarh Presidency Bengal Mother's first name(s)- Mother's last name- Father's first name(s)- Father's last name Christie Baptism date: 1940 Birth date: 1940 Archive reference: N-1-606&607 Folio: #93 Catalogue descriptions: Parish register transcripts from the Presidency of Bengal Records: British India Office births & baptisms Category: Birth, Marriage, Death & Parish Records Record collection: Births & baptisms Collections from Great Britain
^Ewbank, Tim; Hildred, Stafford (2000). Julie Christie: The Biography. Carlton Publishing Group, London. pp. 1–2. ISBN978-0-233-00255-2. In the spring of 1940, meat rationing had just begun in England ... Vivien Leigh, an English actress born in Darjeeling, India, had on 29 February at a banquet at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles won the Best Actress Oscar for her role as Scarlett O'Hara ... Forty five days later, on 14 April, there was much cause for rejoicing for Frank and Rosemary Christie, a British couple living on a tea plantation in Assam in India, with the arrival of their first child, Julie Frances. ...
Canadian Film Awards 1968–1978, Genie Awards 1980-2011, Canadian Screen Awards 2012–present. Separate awards were presented by gender prior to 2022; a single unified category for best performance regardless of gender has been presented since.
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