Film star lovers, iconic roles and the lost years

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Britain's Garbo: Julie Christie is an intensely private person

McCabe and Mrs Miller: Christie with Warren Beatty

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Julie Christie's Oscar nomination for Away From Her, her third time on the shortlist since she won the statuette for Darling in 1966, has thrust her back into the spotlight she so dislikes.

There is a dislocation between Christie's career as a film star and her distaste for fame but then her life has always been short on certainty and stability.

Christie was born in India in 1941, and after the death of her teaplanter father her painter mother moved to Wales. Julie herself had been sent to an English convent school aged six, but completed her education on the Continent, where she fell in with a bohemian set and considered becoming an artist.

Her acting debut was at Frinton rep but her real coming out was on screen in the 1961 TV series A for Andromeda, as a beautiful and other-worldly organism.

Review: Away From Her

Christie became known as "the face of the Sixties" through such decade-defining movies as Billy Liar, Darling and Petulia, even though she said she never felt "cool" enough for the swinging set she supposedly represented.

But sumptuous period pieces such as Dr Zhivago, Far From the Madding Crowd and The Go-Between fixed her in the public mind as an actor and style icon. That and her love affairs with Terence Stamp and, later, Warren Beatty.

Her relationship with the radical Beatty ignited her own activism but seemed to kill her interest in film. Although they worked together effectively in their seven off-and-on years together, most notably on McCabe and Mrs Miller, her best work in this period was in Nicolas Roeg's masterfully unnerving Don't Look Now, featuring the now-infamous sex scene with another sometime boyfriend, Donald Sutherland.

At the end of the Seventies she abandoned any pretence of cinematic careerism, left America and bought a farmhouse in Wales. This became a base for a fluctuating menagerie of people and animals, and for her own political activities opposing nuclear waste and fighting for animal rights.

She still acted occasionally, in films with a political agenda and in Sidney Lumet's 1986 thriller Power. But for most of the Eighties and early Nineties she was effectively retired, Britain's Garbo. It was a surprise when she decided to make her West End debut, in Harold Pinter's Old Times, in 1995.

But persuasive directors coaxed her back to the screen. The years having endowed her mystique with an imperious edge, she was a convincing Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet, affecting in Alan Rudolph's Afterglow in 1997, devastatingly haughty in Marc Forster's Finding Neverland in 2004. In Sarah Polley, the former actress who wrote and directed Away From Her, she seems to have found a kindred spirit who wants to play things her way.

Christie has no children but has lived, on and off since 1979, in Wales and America and the East End of London, with the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell. "I've never been keen on the idea of living with one person all the time," she said recently, although she added wryly that playing an Alzheimer's sufferer might have changed her mind.

 

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