Julie Christie

Julie Frances Christie, born on 14 April 1940 at the Singlijan Tea Estate in Chabua, Assam, British India, is a British actress whose career spans stage, television, and film. Her father, Frank St John Christie, managed the tea plantation where she grew up, and her mother, Rosemary, née Ramsden, was a Welsh-born painter. Christie has a younger brother, Clive, and a deceased older half-sister, June, who was born of her father's relationship with an Indian tea picker. Her parents separated during her childhood, and following their divorce she spent periods with her mother in rural Wales.

At the age of six, Christie was placed with a foster mother in England to attend school. She was baptised in the Church of England and enrolled as a boarder at the Convent of Our Lady in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, having previously been expelled from another convent school after a risqué joke she told spread beyond its intended audience. She was subsequently asked to leave the Convent of Our Lady as well, and went on to attend the all-girls Wycombe Court School in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, where she played the Dauphin in a school production of Shaw's Saint Joan. She later traveled to Paris to complete her schooling and study French before returning to England to train at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

Christie made her professional stage debut in 1957, and her earliest screen work appeared on British television. She first attracted wider notice in the BBC serial A for Andromeda in 1961. Her film career began with two comedies for Independent Artists, Crooks Anonymous and The Fast Lady, both released in 1962. Her breakthrough came the following year with Billy Liar, in which she played Liz, the friend and would-be lover of Tom Courtenay's title character. Director John Schlesinger had cast her only after another actress dropped out, and the role earned Christie a BAFTA Award nomination and led to a contract with producer Nat Cohen.

The year 1965 proved transformative for Christie's career. She appeared as Daisy Battles in Young Cassidy, a biopic of Irish playwright Seán O'Casey co-directed by Jack Cardiff and John Ford. That same year, her portrayal of an amoral model in Darling, again directed by Schlesinger and co-starring Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey, brought her international recognition. Schlesinger had insisted on Christie for the lead after the studio had preferred Shirley MacLaine. The performance earned Christie both the Academy Award for Best Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best British Actress in a Leading Role. Also in 1965, she played Lara Antipova in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago, adapted from Boris Pasternak's novel, which became one of the highest-grossing films of all time when adjusted for inflation, ranking eighth as of 2019. Life magazine designated 1965 as "The Year of Julie Christie."

Christie continued to build a distinguished filmography through the late 1960s. She took dual roles in François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 in 1966, starring alongside Oskar Werner. In 1967 she appeared as Bathsheba Everdene in Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel. After relocating to Los Angeles in 1967, she starred in the title role of Richard Lester's Petulia in 1968, opposite George C. Scott.

The 1970s brought further acclaimed work. In Joseph Losey's The Go-Between in 1971, Christie starred alongside Alan Bates in a film that won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. That same year, Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller cast her as a brothel madam, earning her a second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. The film marked the first of three collaborations with Warren Beatty, with whom she maintained a high-profile relationship between 1967 and 1974; they later worked together again in Shampoo in 1975 and Heaven Can Wait in 1978. In 1973, Christie appeared in Nicolas Roeg's thriller Don't Look Now, based on a story by Daphne du Maurier and co-starring Donald Sutherland, for which she received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. A 2017 poll of 150 film industry figures conducted by Time Out magazine ranked it the greatest British film ever made. Also in 1973, Christie appeared on Broadway in the play Uncle Vanya. Christie returned to the United Kingdom in 1977, settling on a farm in Wales, and in 1979 served as a jury member at the 29th Berlin International Film Festival.

In the 1980s, Christie concentrated on smaller, non-mainstream productions, including The Return of the Soldier in 1982 and Heat and Dust in 1983. She took a major supporting role in Sidney Lumet's Power in 1986, alongside Richard Gere and Gene Hackman, and starred in the television film Dadah Is Death in 1988, playing Barbara Barlow, a mother who fought to prevent her son's execution for drug trafficking in Malaysia.

Following a lengthy absence from screens, Christie returned in 1996 with the fantasy film Dragonheart and appeared as Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. Her role as an unhappy wife in Alan Rudolph's Afterglow in 1997 earned her a third Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. That same year, she received the BAFTA Fellowship in recognition of her lifetime achievement in film. Christie appeared in Finding Neverland in 2004 and received a fourth Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her performance in Away from Her in 2007.

Among the accolades Christie has accumulated over her career are an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Six films in which she appeared are ranked among the British Film Institute's BFI Top 100 British Films of the 20th century.