Julie Christie, the British movie legend whom Al Pacino called "the most poetic of all actresses," was born in Chukua, Assam, India, on April 14, 1941, the daughter of a tea planter and his Welsh wife Rosemary, who was a painter. The young Christie grew up on her father's tea plantation before being sent to England for her education. Finishing her studies in Paris, where she had moved to improve her French with an eye to possibly becoming a linguist (she is fluent in French and Italian), the teenager became enamored of the freedom of the Continent. She also was smitten by the bohemian life of artists and planned on becoming an artist before she enrolled in London's Central School of Speech Training. She made her debut as a professional in 1957 as a member of the Frinton Repertory of Essex.

Christie was not fond of the stage, even though it allowed her to travel, including a professional gig in the United States. Her true métier as an actress was film, and she made her debut in the science-fiction television series A for Andromeda in 1961. Her first film was a bit part in the Ealing-like comedy Crooks Anonymous, which was followed up by a larger ingénue role in another comedy, The Fast Lady. The producers of the James Bond series were sufficiently intrigued by the young actress to consider her for the role that subsequently went to Ursula Andress in Dr. No, but dropped the idea because she was not busty enough.

Christie first worked with the man who would kick her career into high gear, director John Schlesinger, when he choose her as a replacement for the actress originally cast in Billy Liar (1963). Christie's turn in the film as the free-wheeling Liz was a stunner, and she had her first taste of becoming a symbol if not icon of the new British cinema. Her screen presence was such that the great John Ford cast her as the young prostitute in Young Cassidy (1965). Charlton Heston wanted her for his film The War Lord, but the studio refused her salary demands.

Although Amercan magazines portrayed Christie as a "newcomer" when she made her breakthrough to super-stardom in Schlesinger's seminal Swinging Sixties film Darling, she actually had considerable work under her professional belt and was in the process of a artistic quickening. Schlesinger called on Christie, whom he adored, to play the role of mode Diana Scott when the casting of Shirley MacLaine fell through. (MacLaine was the sister of the man who would become Christie's long-time paramour in the late 1960s and early '70s, Warren Beatty, whom some, like actor Rod Steiger, believe she gave up her career for. Her "Dr. Zhivago" co-star, Steiger -- a keen student of acting -- regretted that Christie did not give more of herself to her craft.)

As played by Christie, Diana is an amoral social butterfly who undergoes a metamorphosis from immature sex kitten to jaded socialite. For her complex performance, Christie won raves, including the Best Actress Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the British Film Academy. She had arrived, especially as she had followed up "Darling" with the role of Lara in two-time Academy Award-winning director David Lean's adaptation of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, one of the all-time box-office champs.

Christie was now a superstar who commanded a price of $400,000 per picture, a fact ruefully noted in Charlton Heston's diary (his studio had balked at paying her then-fee of $35,000). More interested in film as an art form than in consolidating her movie stardom, Christie followed up "Zhivago" with a dual role in Fahrenheit 451 for director 'Francois Truffaut', a director she admired. The film was hurt by the director's lack of English and by friction between Truffaut and Christie's male co-star Oskar Werner, who had replaced the the more-appropriate-for-the-role Terrence Stamp. Stamp and Christie had been lovers before she had become famous, and he was unsure he could act with her, due to his own ego problems. On his part, Werner resented the attention the smitten Truffaut gave Christie. The film is an interesting failure.

Stamp overcame those ego problems to sign on as her co-star in John Schlesinger's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, which also featured two great English actors, Peter Finch and Alan Bates. It is a film that is far better remembered now than when it was received in 1967. The film and her performance as the Hardy heroine Bathsheba Everdene was lambasted by film critics, many of whom faulted Christie for being too "mod" and thus untrue to one of Hardy's classic tales of fate. Some said that her contemporary Vanessa Redgrave would have been a better choice as Bathsheba, but while it is true that Redgrave is a very fine actress, she lacked the sex appeal and star quality of Christie, which makes the story of three men in love with one woman more plausible, as a film.

Although no one then knew it, the period 1967-68 represented the high-water mark of Christie's career. Fatefully, like the Hardy heroine she had portrayed, she had met the man who transformed her life, undermining her pretensions to a career as a movie star in their seven-year-long love affair, the American actor Warren Beatty. Living his life was always far more important than being a star for Beatty, who viewed the movie star profession as a "treadmill leading to more treadmills" and who was wealthy enough after Bonnie and Clyde to not have to ever work again. Christie and Beatty had visited a working farm during the production of "Madding Crowd" and had been appalled by the industrial exploitation of the animals. Thereafter, animal rights became a very important subject to Christie. They were kindred souls who remain friends four decades after their affair ended in 1974.

Christie's last box-office hit in which she was the top-liner was "Petulia" (1968) for Richard Lester, a film that featured one of co-star George C. Scott's greatest performances, perfectly counter-balanced by Christie's portrayal of an "arch-kook" who was emblematic of the '60s. It is one of the major films of the decade, an underrated masterpiece. Despite the presence of the great George C. Scott and the excellent Shirley Knight, the film would not work without Julie Christie. There is frankly no other actress who could have filled the role, bringing that unique presence and the threat of danger that crackled around Christie's electric aura. At this point of her career, she was poised for greatness as a star, greatness as an actress.

And she walked away.

After meeting Beatty, Julie Christie essentially surrendered any aspirations to screen stardom, or at maintaining herself as a top-drawer working actress (success at the box office being a guarantee of the best parts, even in art films.) She turned down the lead in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Anne of the Thousand Days, two parts that garnered Oscar nominations for the second choices, Jane Fonda and Geneviève Bujold. After shooting In Search of Gregory, a critical and box office flop, to fulfill her contractual obligations, she spent her time with Beatty in Calfiornia, renting a beach house at Malibu. She did return to form in Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1970), a fine picture with a script by the great Harold Pinter, and she won another Oscar nomination as the whore-house proprietor in Robert Altman's minor classic McCabe & Mrs. Miller that she made with her lover Beatty. However, like Beatty himself, she did not seek steady work, which can be professional suicide for an actor who wants to maintain a standing in the first rank of movie stars.

After this promising star, Julie Christie turned down the role of the Russian Empress in Nicholas and Alexandra, another film that won the second-choice (Janet Suzman) a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Two years later, she appeared in his landmark mystery-horror film Don't Look Now, but that likely was as a favor to the director, Nicolas Roeg, who had been her cinematographer on "Fahrenheit 451," "Far From the Madding Crowd" and "Petulia." In the mid '70s, her affair with Beatty came to an end, but the two remained close friends and worked together in Shampoo (which she regretted due to its depiction of women) and Heaven Can Wait.

Christie was still enough of a star, due to sheer magnetism rather than her own pull at the box-office, to be offered $1 million to play the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis character in The Greek Tycoon (a part eventually played by Jacqueline Bisset to no great acclaim). She signed for but was forced to drop out of the lead in Agatha (which was filled by Vanessa Redgrave) after she broke a wrist roller-skating (a particularly southern Californian fate!). She then signed for the female lead in American Gigolo when Richard Gere was originally attached to the picture, but dropped out when John Travolta muscled his way into the lead after making twin box-office killings as disco king Tony Manera in Saturday Night Fever and greaser Danny Zuko in Grease. Christie could never have co-starred with such a camp figure of dubious talent. When Travolta himself dropped out and Gere was subbed back in, it was too late for Christe to reconsider, as the part already had been filled by model-actress Lauren Hutton. It would take 15 years for Christie and Gere to work together.

Finally, the end of the American phase of her movie career was realized when Christie turned down the part of Louise Bryant in Reds, a part written by Warren Beatty with her in mind, as she felt an American should play the role. (Beatty's latest lover, Diane Keaton, played the part and won a Best Actress Oscar nomination.) Still, she remained a part of the film, Beatty's long-gestated labor of love, as it is dedicated to "Jules."

Julie Christie moved back to the UK and become the UK's answer to Jane Fonda, campaigning for various social and political causes, including animal rights and nuclear disarmament. The parts she did take were primarily driven by her social consciousness, such as appearing in Sally Potter's first feature-length film, "The Gold-Diggers" (1983) which was not a remake of the old Avery Hopwood's old warhorse but a feminist parable made entirely by women who all shared the same pay scale. Roles in "The Return of the Soldier' (1982) with Alan Bates and Glenda Jackson and Merchant-Ivory's Heat and Dust seemed to herald a return to form, but Christie -- as befits such a symbol of the freedom and lack of conformity of the '60s -- decided to do it her way. She did not go "careering," even though her unique talent and beauty was still very much in demand by filmmakers.

At this point, Christie's movie career went into eclipse. Once again, she was particularly choosy about her work, so much so that many came to see her, essentially, as retired. A career renaissance came in the mid-1990s with her turn as Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's ambitious if not wholly successful Hamlet. As Christie said at the time, she didn't feel she could turn Branagh down as he was a national treasure. But the best was yet to come: her turn as the faded movie star married to handyman Nick Nolte and romanced by a younger man in "Afterglow" (1997), which brought her rave notices. She received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance, and showed up at the awards as radiant and uniquely beautiful as ever. Ever the iconoclast, she was visibly relieved, upon the announcement of the award, to learn that she had lost!

Christie lived with left-wing investigative journalist Duncan Campbell (a Manchester Guardian columnist) since 1979, first in Wales, then in Ojai, California, and now in London's East End, before marrying in January 2008. In addition to her film work, she has narrated many books-on-tape. In 1995, she made a triumphant return to the stage in a London revival of Harold Pinter's "Old Times", which garnered her superb reviews.

In the decade since "Afterglow," she has worked steadily on film in supporting roles. Christie -- an actress who eschewed vulgar stardom -- proved to be an inspiration to her co-star Sarah Polley, the remarkably talented Canadian actress with a leftist political bent who also abhors Hollywood. Of her co-star in No Such Thing and The Secret Life of Words, Polley says that Christie is uniquely aware of her commodification by the movie industry and the mass media during the 1960s. Not wanting to be reduced to a product, she had rebelled and had assumed control of her life and career. Her attitude makes her one of Polley's heroes, who calls her one of her surrogate mothers. (Polley lost her own mother when she was 11 years old.)

Both Christie and Polley are rebels. Sarah Polley had walked off the set of the big-budget movie that was forecasted as her ticket to Hollywood stardom, Almost Famous, to have a different sort of life and career. She returned to her native Canada to appear in the low-budget indie "The Law of Enclosures" (2000), a prescient art film in that director John Greyson offset the drama with a background of a perpetual Gulf War three years before George W. Bush invaded Iraq, touching off the second-longest war in U.S. history. Taking a hiatus from acting, Polley went to Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Centre to learn to direct, and direct she has, making well-regarded shorts before launching her feature film debut, Away from Her, which was shot and completed in 2006 but held for release until 2007 by its distributor.

Polley, who had longed to be a writer since she was a child actress on the set of the quaint family show Road to Avonlea wrote the screenplay for her adaptation of Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" with only one actress in mind: Julie Christie. Polley had first read the short story on a flight back from Iceland, where she had made No Such Thing with Christie, and as she read, it was Julie whom she pictured as Fiona, the wife of a one-time philandering husband, who has become afflicted with Alzheimer's disease and seeks to save her hubby the pain of looking after her by checking herself into a home.

After finishing the screenplay, it took months to get Christie to commit to making the film. Julie turned her down after reading the script and pondering it for a couple of months, saying "No" even though she liked the script. Polley then had to "twist her arm" for another couple of months. But alas, Julie has a weakness for national treasures: Just like with Branagh a decade ago, the legendary Julie Christie could not deny the Great White North's Sarah Polley, and commit she did. Polley then found out why Christie is so reticent about making movies:

"She gives all of herself to what she does. Once she said yes, she was more committed than anybody."

According to David Germain, a cinema journalist who interviewed Christie for the Associated Press, "Polley and Christie share a desire to do interesting, unusual work, which generally means staying away from Hollywood.

"'It's been a kind of greed and a kind of egotism, but it's not necessarily wanting to avoid the Hollywood thing, but in fact, it incorporates wanting to avoid the Hollywood thing, because the Hollywood thing is so inevitably not original,' Christie said. 'It's avoiding non-originality, so that means you're really down to a very small choice.'"

The collaboration between the two rebels yielded a small gem of a film. Lions Gate Films was so impressed, it purchased the American distribution rights to the film in 2006, then withheld it until the following year to build up momentum for the awards season.

Julie Christie's performance in "Away From Her" is superb, and already has garnered her the National Board of Review's Best Actress Award. She will likely receive her fourth Academy Award nomination, and quite possibly her second Oscar, for her unforgettable performance, a labor of love she did for a friend.

We, the Julie Christie fans who have waited decades for the handful of films made by the numinous star: Would we have wanted it any other way? We are the Red Sox fans of the movies, once again rewarded with a world-class masterpiece by our heroine. Perhaps, like all human beings, we want more, but we have learned over the last thirty-five years to be content with the diamonds that are Julie's leading performances that she gives just once a decade, content to feel that these are a surfeit of riches, our surfeit of riches, so great is their luminescence.



Power (1986): $1,000,000
Petulia (1968): $400,000
Fahrenheit 451 (1966): $200,000
Darling (1965): $7,500

Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#26). [1995] Julie's father ran a tea plantation in Assam, India, where she grew up. The off-screen romance of Terence Stamp and Christie while they were filming Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) has been said to have inspired The Kinks' hit, "Waterloo Sunset", hence the line "Terry met Julie" in the song but Ray Davies of The Kinks who penned the song, in a 2004 interview, denied this, saying: "No, Terry and Julie were real people. I couldn't write for stars." Stamp later turned down the role of Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 (1966) due to his complicated emotions over co-starring with Christie, backing out of the role on the pretext of Julie receiving top billing. Oskar Werner subsequently played Montag. Was best friends with actress Sharon Tate. Brother Clive Christie is a professor of SouthEast Asian studies at Hull University. Director David Lean nicknamed her 'sunflower' for her beautiful personality and director John Schlesinger nicknamed her 'Trilby' after the 19th century novel about a lovable bohemian. Fluent in English, French, and Italian. Her idol is Marlon Brando. 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". Julie gave friend Sharon Tate a copy of Thomas Hardy's novel "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" with the inscription "For my Hardy heroine" (Julie had recently become a Thomas Hardy heroine in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)). Sharon gave the novel to her husband Roman Polanski shortly before her death. When Polanski later made the film Tess (1979) he dedicated it "For Sharon". The infamous dinner-party scene in Shampoo (1975) was completely improvised by Julie and Warren Beatty, much to the surprise of the rest of the cast and director Hal Ashby. Was once fashion designer Christian Lacroix's muse, he designed the pink chiffon gown with matching slippers that she wore to the 1971 Academy Awards, and continued to outfit her throughout her career. Ranked #34 in Celebrity Skin's 50 Sexiest Starlets of All Time. Ranked #9 in FHM magazine's '100 sexiest women of all time'. In an April 29, 1966 Life Magazine cover story, Christie named Sidney Lumet as the only American among a list of directors she'd like to work with. Twenty years later, she got her wish, appearing in the Lumet-directed Power (1986). Originally signed for the role of the Senator's wife in American Gigolo (1980) when Richard Gere was signed to the project, but quit when Gere was ditched in favor of John Travolta. Travolta later dropped out and Gere was hired for the film, but Christie was not offered the role that was eventually played by Lauren Hutton. Ironically, a rumor in the 1970s held that Christie and Hutton were lovers. Christie and Gere would eventually appear together in Sidney Lumet's Power (1986). Was considered as the first "Bond Girl" for Dr. No (1962). She was not chosen because she was considered to be too flat-chested by the producers. Lived with Warren Beatty from 1967 to 1974. Accompanied her long-time lover Warren Beatty on a trip to Russia which inspired him to write his Oscar-winning epic Reds (1981) which ultimately took him 13 years to write. Beatty had always planned to have Christie play the role of Louise Bryant, but when Reds (1981) began filming several years after the couple's breakup, Christie turned down the role and Beatty gave it to Diane Keaton. However, Beatty dedicated the film to Christie by hinting to her in his best director Oscar acceptance speech. "For Jules" can also be seen in the final credits of the film. Turned down the role of Lara in Doctor Zhivago (1965) at the time the most coveted role in Hollywood, several times before finally accepting. Her mentor, director John Schlesinger, envisioned a cast of Al Pacino, Julie Christie and Laurence Olivier for Marathon Man (1976). Pacino has said that the only actress he had ever wanted to work with was Christie, who he claimed was "the most poetic of actresses." Producer Robert Evans, who disparaged the vertically challenged Pacino as "The Midget" when Francis Ford Coppola wanted him for The Godfather (1972) and had thought of firing him during the early shooting of the now-classic film, vetoed Pacino for the lead, insisted on the casting of the even-shorter Dustin Hoffman instead! On her part, Christie -- who was notoriously finicky about accepting parts, even in prestigious, sure-fire material -- turned down the female lead, which was then taken by Marthe Keller (who, ironically, became Pacino's lover after co-starring with him in Bobby Deerfield (1977). Of his dream cast, Schlesinger only got Olivier, who was nominated for a "Best Supporting Actor'-Oscar. Pacino has yet to co-star with Christie. Has worked with director-screenwriter and actress Sarah Polley three times: co-starring with Polley in No Such Thing (2001) and the Goya Award-winning "La Vida secreta de las palabras" (aka The Secret Life of Words (2005)), and taking the lead in Polley's first feature film as a director, Away from Her (2006). Polley is one of the many co-workers impressed by not only Christie's talent, but her intelligence and independence. After appearing with her in No Such Thing (2001), Polley -- who lost her mom when she was 11 years old -- said that Julie had become one of her surrogate mothers. Her performance as Diana Scott in Darling (1965) is ranked #75 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Performances of All Time (2006). Turned down the role of Laura Fischer, Paul Newman's girlfriend, in The Verdict (1982). Subsequently, Charlotte Rampling was cast in the role. Al Pacino's favorite actress. Great admirer of Princess Diana of Wales and was extremely affected by her 1997 death. Became very close with director Robert Altman while filming McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). (Ironically, her lover and co-star Warren Beatty did not get along with Altman, primarily due to his use of overlapping dialog.) She later appeared as herself in Altman's 1975 classic Nashville (1975) and received an Oscar nomination starring in the Altman-produced Afterglow (1997), directed by Altman protégé Alan Rudolph. The two remained very close until Altman's death in 2006. Producer Joseph Janni, who produced four of Christie's earliest pictures (Billy Liar (1963), Darling (1965), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), and In Search of Gregory (1969)) and generally is credited, along with director John Schlesinger, in launching her career, created a complex tax shelter for Christie to insulate her earnings from the prohibitively high British tax rate during the 1960s. When the UK Inland Revenue finally investigated the tax shelter many years later, Inland Revenue officials declared it was one of the most complicated tax-avoidance scheme it had come across. Christie herself was cleared of any wrong-doing. She is a fan of actress Meryl Streep.