Background
CHRISTIE, Julie was born on April 14, 1940 in Assam, India. Daughter of Frank St, John and Rosemary (nee Ramsden) Christie.
CHRISTIE, Julie was born on April 14, 1940 in Assam, India. Daughter of Frank St, John and Rosemary (nee Ramsden) Christie.
Educated at the Central School of Drama, she first came to attention in the TV serial A for Andromeda, in 1962.
After a bright debut in an otherwise crushing comedy, The Fast Lady (62, Ken Annakin), she was ostentatiously introduced as the spirit of swinging, libertarian youth in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar (63). The acclaim that greeted that performance is bewildering, for Christie lacks exactly the qualities of grace, spontaneity, and humor that the part required. She is, sadly, obvious in her efforts, lacking in either gaiety or insight and, most serious of all, gawky, self-conscious, and lantern-jawed. She grins rather than smiles, and her movements are either nervously darting or ponderous. Nonetheless, she has had a career of dramatically sudden success.
After the mishmash of Young Cassidy (65. Jack Cardiff and John Ford), she won an Oscar for her callow work in Schlesinger’s Darling (65) and then gazed plaintively out of David Lean’s Dr Zhivago (66). She is plainly numb in Truffauts Fahrenheit 451 and becalmed by Hardys classic status in Far From the Madding Crowd (67, Schlesinger). Attempts to extend her range have confirmed her limitations: Petulia (68, Dick Lester); In Search of Gregory (69, Peter Wood). But she is tough, world weary, and a real actress with her then lover, Warren Beatty, in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (71, Robert Altman). She attempted the selfish aristocrat in Losey’s The Go-Between (71) and still seemed gauche, limited, and overextended. After that she played the wife in a rapt, consuming love scene with Donald Sutherland in Don ’t Look Now (73, Nicolas Roeg); Shampoo (75, Hal Ashby); a walk-on as herself in Nashville (75, Robert Altman); verv harassed in Demon Seed (77, Donald Cammell); and the token love interest in Heaven Can Wait (78, Warren Beatty and Buck Henry).
That was a kind of Hollywood farewell. In the years since, she has been unpredictable, giving herself to adventurous and politically radical ventures, yet still beautiful if the story needed it: she narrated The Animals Film (81, Victor Schonfeld), an animal-rights documentary; she played in the Doris Lessing adaptation Memoirs of a Survivor (81, David Gladwell); The Return of the Soldier (81, Alan Bridges); The Gold Diggers (83, Sally Potter); Heat and Dust (83, James Ivory'); Separate Tables (84, Schlesinger) for TV; Power (86, Sidney Lumet); Miss Mary (86, Maria Luisa Bemberg); Fools of Fortune (90, Pat O’Connor); and was reunited with Donald Sutherland in The Railway Station Man (91, Michael Whyte).
Since then, she has had a part in Karaoke (96, Renny Ryre); she played Gertrude in Hamlet (96, Kenneth Branagh); she had a fond, generous role in Afterglow (97, Alan Rudolph); Belphegor—Le Fantome du Louvre (01, Jean-Paul Salome); No Such Thing (01, Hal Hartley); The Hermit of Amsterdam (01, Rudolf van den Berg).