Secret Indian wedding for Julie Christie, the Oscar-nominated marriage hater

But at the age of 66, Julie Christie has finally bowed to convention and secretly wed her long-time partner, journalist Duncan Campbell.

The Oscar-nominated actress recently told her only brother Clive that the pair, who have been together 28 years, held the ceremony in India two months ago.

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Clive Christie, a retired university lecturer from Aberystwyth, 40 miles from his older sister's farm in Montgomery, mid-Wales, confirmed yesterday that the wedding had taken place.

Asked whether he attended the event, he replied: "No, we didn't have any involvement."

It is not clear what form the marriage took. If it was in a register office, it would be recognised in Britain but a religious ceremony would have no legal effect.

Miss Christie earned her Oscar nomination, and has already won the Screen Actors' Guild Award for Best Actress, for her poignant portrayal of an Alzheimer's sufferer in Away From Her.

It was in 1965 that she won her first Oscar for the John Schlesinger film Darling, although her most famous performances were in Dr Zhivago, also 1965, and Don't Look Now in 1973.

She turned her back on Hollywood in the Seventies when her affair with Warren Beatty ended. She has since described being a celebrity as 'like always having chewing gum stuck in your hair".

Friends say she did not tell the family about the marriage until after it happened.

One said: "The news slowly spread when people got together to celebrate Christmas. Julie and Clive are not all that close. Julie has a lot of hippie-ish Left-wing views and her brother is an academic who went to Cambridge and is much more Rightwing. As such they don't have an awful lot in common.

"Julie will just turn up sometimes with Duncan, giving Clive no warning at all. It's that kind of relationship. She is very private and quite distant from her family. So for Clive to find out she'd actually got married after the event is not all that unusual."

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The Welsh friend added: "Julie's a funny girl. None of us knows why she has gone back into acting.

"She never seemed all that comfortable with the limelight and seemed to put it all behind her to fight her various causes. But now that she's back on screen, she certainly seems to be doing well."

Asked about the wedding yesterday, Duncan Campbell, who works for the Guardian, reacted by saying simply: "Really? Well, I never get into stories like that."

The actress chose the country of her birth as the wedding venue. Her father Frank St John Christie ran a tea plantation in Assam and in April 1941 his wife, Welsh painter Rosemary Ramsay, gave birth to Julie Frances, their first child.

Julie had an early convent school education in India, was at public school in Britain from the age of seven and went on to a Parisian boarding school.

But she always gravitated to the bohemian life. When Campbell moved to the U.S. to be the Guardian's west coast correspondent, she moved with him to the hippie-influenced enclave of Ojai in California.

They now divide their time between her ramshackle farmhouse in Montgomery and a flat in Spitalfields, East London.

There she is known by the neighbours for her eccentric lifestyle, which includes hauling around a pensioner's shopping trolley and, politically correct as always, using the bus to get around.

THE TALE OF TWO DUNCAN CAMPBELLS

The more famous Campbell is an investigative reporter and former assistant editor of the New Statesman.

He was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in 1978 in the so-called 'ABC trial' along with Time Out journalist Crispin Aubrey and former signals intelligence corporal John Berry.

They received non-custodial sentences for revealing secrets including the existence of the eavesdropping centre GCHQ.

The other Campbell has been a reporter on the Guardian for 21 years. As fiercely private as his wife, he previously worked for the now defunct London Daily News and City Limits.

Campbell also did stints on Time Out and LBC radio before taking up his current post.