MY LIFE IN 10 PICTURES

Look back at Julie Christie’s storied hollywood career

“FROM MY earliest days, I remember a fear of failure, a continuing pain,” revealed Julie Frances Christie about her childhood in England. “I felt permanently in disgrace. I was always naughty, letting the side down, being sent home…. No one ever told me I was original or worthwhile.” Of course, once she became a sex symbol of the swinging ’60s with Darling and a movie star in films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Heaven Can Wait alongside onetime beau Warren Beatty, that all changed. But Julie still had her doubts. “The face that stared out at me from newsstands didn’t seem like my own.” It would explain why she’d eventually retreat from Hollywood — picking and choosing roles carefully while becoming more politically active and increasingly comfortable making a quieter life for herself in the Welsh countryside with her husband, journalist Duncan Campbell. “I prefer real life, whatever real life is,” explained Julie, who turns 80 on April 14. “I no longer have a career to build and I can get by. I consider myself a lucky woman.”

1

1963 BILLY CLUB “I love my freedom — that’s why I’m so scared of what

Billy Liar could lead to,” she said upon her breakthrough’s release. “I mean if it’s good, and I’m good, it’s almost a trap really. I’ve never had the guts to turn down films. If I’m good and the offers get bigger and better, and the pressure is put on, what then? I’ll have to start thinking about the dark roots showing through and my nails needing another coat of varnish.”

2

1965 SPIN DOCTOR

“In the village where I live,” Julie once explained, “people see [Doctor Zhivago] over and over again. It’s a treasure for them. I used to get very cross when people would bring it up, but that was my stupidity for distancing myself from it…. I’m sort of objectively, incredibly grateful to everything about that film, it’s just that — subjectively, I tend to fall asleep a little bit when I watch it. “

3

1966 OH

DARLING Julie won the Oscar for Darling, yet “it was the last thing I even thought of. Especially being in England where people [didn’t] exactly crowd around watching the Oscars. But I don’t think I’d ever watched an Oscar presentation at that point. It was something to do with another country. It didn’t terribly interest me. I remember, the only reason I even went to Hollywood is because I wanted to go to the desert.”

4

1973 LOOK BACK “I loved the squirming bits and all those things you don’t see,” said Julie of her memorable love scene with Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now. “God, I thought it was absolutely lovely. [It captured that moment] you know you don’t exist, the other person perhaps doesn’t even exist. It’s just bodies that are existing.”

5

1975 HAIR AND THERE “I met such interesting people with Warren who I would never have met otherwise,” reflected Julie concerning her Shampoo co-star and onetime love Warren Beatty. “I cherish all those days but I couldn’t hack LA. Hollywood was a throwaway society run by publicity machines.”

6

1986 MORE POWER TO YOU Before starring with Richard Gere in Power, she turned down the role opposite him he hit American Gigolo. “I just thought the man [in the film] was getting a rotten deal,” mitted Julie, who doesn’t seem to regret the

sion. “I know the sorts of things that appeal me do not appeal the way that Forrest Gump s. I really like ambiguity and I really like all s of complexity.”

7

1996 ROLE WITH IT “As an actor, like anyone else, you may have had some of those experiences once or twice, or even all of them over and over again,” said Julie of her process. “Unlike Gertrude [her role in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet], I’ve never had a son, let alone a son who’s turned around and killed someone in front of me, but I’ve experienced things that I think involve the same emotions.”

8

1997 AFTER THOUGHTS With Afterglow, she lost out on a second Oscar to Helen Hunt. But Julie remained unfazed. “I honestly didn’t think I was going to [win], and I’d have been appalled if I had because my life would have been even less anonymous…. I’m resolutely not carried away with hype; not just hype to do with me, but the general hype that surrounds every aspect of life.”

9

2006 BURIED AWAY Upon playing a woman losing her memory in Away From Her, Julie reflected on the moments to which she clings. “They nearly always involve a chap and nature…. There is a strong sense of sexuality, always, because that is the life force, the thing that memory retains. There are quite a few of those moments in my head, anyway.”

10 2012 KEEP PEACE Robert Redford said she “did everything she could to prevent me casting her” in The Company You Keep. The reason? “I like a peaceful existence. Films have caused me an enormous amount of anxiety because I don’t have a lot of confidence…. Filming is like being in one long cocktail party without the drinks.”