Julie Christie — The Face of the British Sixties and Everything After

Biography

From Assam to Diana Scott's London

Born Julie Frances Christie on April 14, 1940, in Chabua, Assam, British India — the daughter of a tea plantation manager, educated in England from the age of eight, trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She worked in British television and theatre before John Schlesinger cast her in Billy Liar (1963), in which her few minutes on screen as Liz — the free-spirited young woman who briefly makes Tom Courtenay's fantasist believe escape is possible — generated more electricity than the rest of the film, and established the quality that would define her career: the sense that she had arrived from somewhere more interesting and was only passing through.

Schlesinger's Darling (1965) — Christie as Diana Scott, the beautiful opportunist who moves through a succession of men and careers without ever finding anything worth staying for — won her the Academy Award at twenty-five and made her the defining face of Swinging London: the era's aesthetic embodied in a person who saw through it completely. David Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965), released the same year, gave her Lara — the role the world saw and remembered as warmth — but the performance of Diana Scott is the more difficult and the more honest achievement.

Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) — Christie as Constance Miller, the opium-addicted madam who is the shrewdest business intelligence in a frontier town — is the American revisionist Western's finest female performance: a woman whose competence is absolute and whose self-protection is the only form of dignity the world she inhabits allows. Warren Beatty was her partner on and off screen for years; the professional collaboration produced their best individual work.

Sarah Polley's Away from Her (2006) — Christie as Fiona, the woman whose early Alzheimer's is dissolving her marriage from the inside out — gave her a fourth Oscar nomination at sixty-seven: the most complete dramatic performance of her career and the clearest evidence that the quality she had always had — the naturalism that looked like she wasn't performing — was not a function of youth but of the instrument itself. She continues to act selectively, lives in Wales, and is an outspoken political activist.

1940

Born in Assam, India; plantation family; England at eight; Central School

1963

Billy Liar — Schlesinger; Liz; a few minutes that generated everything

1965

Darling — Diana Scott; Oscar at twenty-five; Swinging London's face

1965

Doctor Zhivago — Lara; the global audience; Lean's epic scale

1971

McCabe and Mrs. Miller — Altman; the revisionist Western peak

2006

Away from Her — Polley; Fiona; fourth nom at sixty-seven

Present

Wales; selective work; political activism; still the instrument

Filmography

From Darling's Diana to Fiona's Forgetting

1965Drama · John Schlesinger · British New Wave

Darling

John Schlesinger's portrait of Swinging London — Christie as Diana Scott, the beautiful opportunist who moves through a succession of men, careers, and identities without finding anything worth the investment of staying. The Oscar at twenty-five; the most honest statement of what the 1960s were actually like for people who were living inside the myth they were creating.

Oscar Win

Diana Scott's tragedy — the woman who can read every situation she enters, who has the intelligence and the beauty to get anything she wants, and who cannot find anything she wants enough to stay for — is played by Christie with a naturalism that makes the character's emptiness feel like an environment rather than a moral position. The performance requires her to be simultaneously the most attractive and the least sympathetic person in every scene, and to make those qualities feel like expressions of the same characteristic rather than contradictions.

1971Western · Robert Altman · Warren Beatty

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Robert Altman's revisionist Western — Christie as Constance Miller, the English-born opium-addicted madam who arrives in the frontier mining town of Presbyterian Church and immediately understands it more clearly than everyone else. The finest female performance in the revisionist Western genre: the woman who is the film's only practical intelligence, playing her competence as a form of exhausted self-preservation.

Oscar Nom

Mrs. Miller's quality — the competence that is the only thing between her and the world's indifference, the opium that is the only thing between her and the competence's cost — is played by Christie as a specific, fully inhabited psychology rather than a type. Her final scene — Constance in the opium den while the town burns, physically present and psychologically elsewhere — is the film's most honest image: the woman who has been the only clear-eyed person in the story choosing, at its crisis, not to watch its conclusion.

2006Drama · Sarah Polley · Alzheimer's

Away from Her

Sarah Polley's debut feature — Christie as Fiona, the woman whose early Alzheimer's is dissolving her forty-four-year marriage from the inside out, who forms a new attachment at the care home while her husband watches. The fourth Oscar nomination at sixty-seven; the most emotionally precise portrait of dementia's effect on identity that film has produced; and the clearest demonstration that what Christie had was not a quality of youth.

Oscar Nom

Fiona's forgetting — the way the disease is removing not just memory but the specific texture of a relationship, replacing a husband with a stranger who loves her without the context that made the love what it was — is played by Christie with a precision that the role's difficulty makes remarkable: she must simultaneously be present and absent, recognisable and lost, which requires the actor to perform the dissolution of the self from the inside. She received the nomination at sixty-seven; the performance is the argument that the instrument had not diminished but deepened.

1965Epic Romance · David Lean · Pasternak

Doctor Zhivago

David Lean's Pasternak adaptation — Christie as Lara Antipova, the Russian woman whose relationship with the doctor-poet Yuri Zhivago spans the Revolution and the Civil War. The global audience's image of Christie; the performance that made her a film star of the first international magnitude; and the role that, compared to Diana Scott, demonstrates the range that the decade's biggest films required her to cover simultaneously.

Lara's quality is the opposite of Diana Scott's — the woman who is fully invested in everything she encounters, who loves completely and loses completely and survives by the force of that completeness — and Christie plays the emotional availability that Lean required without losing the specificity that made Diana Scott more than a type. The two films in the same year — Darling and Doctor Zhivago — constitute the fullest possible statement of her range, made before she was twenty-six.

Honors

One Oscar at Twenty-Five — Four Nominations Across Four Decades

Academy Award — Best Actress

1966

Darling

Won at twenty-five for Diana Scott — the most honest portrait of Swinging London's self-deception, played from inside it. The Oscar that recognised the British New Wave and the actress who defined its female presence simultaneously.

Oscar Won

Four Oscar Nominations

1966 · 1972 · 1998 · 2008

Darling · McCabe · Afterglow · Away from Her

Four nominations across forty-two years — from twenty-five to sixty-seven — each for a performance of entirely different character, confirming that the quality she had was not the quality of a decade but of an instrument that deepened rather than diminished with time.

4 Decades, 4 Noms

Billy Liar — The Introduction

1963

A Few Minutes That Changed Everything

Her few minutes as Liz in Billy Liar — the free-spirited woman who briefly makes Tom Courtenay's fantasist believe escape is possible — generated more electricity than the rest of the film. The introduction of a quality that Schlesinger immediately understood and built a career around, and that Darling two years later gave its fullest first expression.

The Introduction

The Selective Career

1963 — Present

Quality Over Volume

Her decision to work selectively — to take roles that interested her and decline the ones that didn't, regardless of commercial or career considerations — produced a filmography of unusual consistency and a public profile of unusual privacy. She lives in Wales and has said she prefers it to Hollywood, which is the most complete possible statement of priorities.

Selective · Private · Principled

Identity

The Naturalism That Looked Like Not Performing

The Naturalism

The quality that John Schlesinger found in Billy Liar and built two films around — the sense that she had arrived from somewhere more interesting and was only passing through — is not naturalism in the technical sense but something more fundamental: the absence of anything between the actor and the camera that would signal "I am performing." Diana Scott, Mrs. Miller, and Fiona are completely different people made from the same absence.

The Sixties Face

She became the defining face of the British Sixties while being constitutionally unsuited to any era's definition of anything — the quality that made her Darling's image of Swinging London is the same quality that made her McCabe's image of frontier pragmatism and Away from Her's image of forgetting. The face is consistently itself; the contexts change around it.

The Altman Partnership

Her work with Robert Altman — McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and The Company (2003) — demonstrates what the Altman method found in her instrument: the ability to be fully present without dominating the frame, to carry a scene's emotional weight while appearing to carry nothing at all. Mrs. Miller's competence is the finest use of this quality in the revisionist Western.

The Long Game

Away from Her at sixty-seven is the argument for the selective career: the instrument deepened rather than diminished, the naturalism that had defined her at twenty-five found more complex material at sixty-seven than it had at twenty-five, and the fourth Oscar nomination confirmed that the Academy had also noticed. She had chosen quality; quality had sustained itself.

Legacy

Darling and Away from Her — The Same Instrument, Forty Years Apart

Julie Christie's legacy is the four decades between the first and fourth nomination — Darling at twenty-five and Away from Her at sixty-seven — and the confirmation that the quality which made Diana Scott the most honest portrait of the Sixties was the same quality that made Fiona's forgetting the most emotionally precise portrait of Alzheimer's in cinema. The instrument didn't change; the material got harder, and the instrument was equal to it.

She lives in Wales and works selectively and is an outspoken activist on political causes. The selective career — the refusal to take roles that didn't interest her regardless of commercial consequence — produced a filmography of unusual consistency and a legacy of unusual dignity: the work that exists is almost all worth watching, which is more than most four-decade careers can claim.

Academy Award Won

Darling, 1966 — age 25

Oscar Nominations

Across 42 years

Age at Fourth Nomination

Away from Her, 2008

Years of Screen Career

1962 to present

60+