'I
HAD TO ESCAPE HOLLYWOOD’S MADDING CROWD!”
JULIE
CHRISTIE ON SCHAPPING GLAMOUR FOR SHEEP
By
GARTH PEARCE (EXPRESS Feb 28, 2015)
Julie
Christie is back on screen reliving one of her most triumphant moments in the
original 1967 film of Far From The Madding Crowd, released just weeks ahead of
a brand new version with Carey Mulligan in the starring role.
For
audiences it will be a chance to compare performances playing one of Thomas
Hardy's most memorable and feisty women, Bathsheba Everdene.
Christie,
then 27, was one of the world's biggest stars having won a best actress Oscar
two years earlier for Darling. Mulligan, 29, won a best actress Bafta for her
2009 role in the film An Education.
For
those who watched Christie's tantalising performance opposite her former lover
Terence Stamp playing army officer Troy - her other co-stars Alan Bates
(Gabriel Oak) and Peter Finch (William Boldwood) are both long dead - the only
question will be: why make another? For Christie it will be a memory of a
long-ago time on which she has firmly closed the door. She is pragmatic about
comparisons with the emergence of new stars. "Life is about youth,"
she told me. "It's all about the energy and surge of the young. That is
how it has always been."
Whatever
the judgment, Mulligan will have a long way to go to even match Christie's
phenomenal power. She became world famous for playing Lara in Dr Zhivago and
moved to Hollywood on the back of it.
There
was no let-up in the early 1970s. She co-starred with her equally famous lover
Warren Beatty and delivered the brilliant and disturbing Don't Look Now in
which her realistic love scene with Donald Sutherland is debated even today.
But she turned her back on fame, quit California for a farm in Wales and began
breeding sheep rather than tread the red carpet.
She
has since picked her films carefully, kept a low profile despite other Oscar
nominations for Afterglow (1997) and Away From Her (2006), quietly married her
long-term boyfriend Duncan Campbell and travels around London using her
pensioner bus pass.
Christie,
74, admits that she sometimes has difficulty recalling the past but when we met
she had no problem at all in remembering why she reshaped her life at the
height of her fame. It was all delivered with down-to-earth common sense.
"Hollywood
was against everything I had been brought up to appreciate," she said.
"My late mother Rosemary was wise and frugal, quite austere. She was
conscious about the environment, even in those days.
"I
always hang up my washing outside or even on a pulley. It's a complete waste of
energy to use dryers. My mother's hate of waste has filtered down to me
probably because I was a war baby. There was no waste in the war was there?
Everyone had to make do with what they had got.
"I
can't even talk about waste without being indignant. My introduction to
Hollywood was a society which used it, sniffed it and threw it away. We have
become a bit like that ourselves in Britain. There is an attitude among
successful people of spend and spend, flaunt and flaunt and don't think of
anyone else.
"The
world of celebrity didn't mean a single thing to my mum. Her attitude filtered
down to me, which is why I take all the celeb stuff with a pinch of salt.
"I
was able to re-read letters I had sent to her from LA which were all written
with a jocularity, along the lines of, 'You will really laugh at this mum.'
This was a time of big awards yet I would be like a schoolgirl writing, 'Guess
who I have just met?'"
Christie
not only met the biggest names in movies, she became one herself. But she is
casual about her own claim to fame.
As
for old boyfriend and Far From The Madding Crowd costar Terence Stamp, now 76,
she says: "I am still fond of Terry after all these years."
In
the 1960s he shared a flat with Michael Caine. "To see those two walking
into a club in the evening was absolutely fantastic," she enthuses.
"If you were with one of them it was thrilling."
As
for Warren Beatty, 77, once the best-known star and playboy in Hollywood, who
claimed he had once asked Christie to be his wife, she says: "I met such
interesting people with Warren who I would never have met otherwise.
"And
the film Shampoo [a 1975 romantic comedy set in 1968, in the 24 hours after
Richard Nixon wins the US presidency] stands the test of time. It was all down
to director Hal Ashby.
"I
cherish all those days but I "I cherish all those days but I couldn't hack
LA. Hollywood was a throwaway society run by publicity machines."
A
film she made in Venice, Don't Look Now, has been listed endlessly by film
magazines for including the sexiest scene in a major movie. So did they? Or
didn't they? "I could never tell anyone that," she says. "Can
you imagine losing that bit of mystique? Director Nic Roeg was wonderful at his
job."
But
Christie's personality, she claims, is not the kind that easily embraces the
hullabaloo around red-carpet events, premieres, parties and award ceremonies.
"I like a peaceful existence," she says. "Films have caused me
an enormous amount of anxiety because I don't have a lot of confidence.
"Making
them is very social. You have to be with people and you socialise all the time.
Actors like that on the whole but I was not born with that quality.
"I'm
very quiet and do not like to talk to more than two people at the same time.
Filming and being with film actors is like being in one long cocktail party
without the drinks. Acting took me away from real life to a pretend life. I
wanted the real life back."
SO
JULIE returned to Britain - "I could get all my favourite sauces,"
she says - bought the farm in Wales and rented what she describes as "a
room in an old warehouse" in London.
By
the time she met in 1979 her future husband Campbell, a journalist, she was
more interested in "Iother issues than just acting but she did continue to
work. "I wish I had been good with money," she admits. "But I'm
hopeless. I didn't fully understand what Raquel Welsh pointed out years ago
that showbusiness was two words, show and business.
"I
had some great earning years but it just went through my fingers. The truth is
that I had no real idea at the time of my biggest successes or what was really
happening.
"I
realised then that you can choose your own spotlight. Whenever I hear anyone
complaining about the strains and stresses of fame I always think, 'You can
stay at home if you don't like it.'
"For
my own part I hated being looked at, hated doing anything in public and hated
making speeches. That's why I am so impressed by some of the young actors who
take it in their stride."
And
what of her famous and beautiful looks? "I'm always tempted to have some
work done every time I look in the mirror," she says disarmingly.
"You
want to get your familiar face back when you see all the lines around your
chin, neck, eyes, mouth and your bloody arms and everything else. I know what I
look like and then I look in the mirror."
However
the future looks assured.
"I
prefer real life, whatever real life is," she says. "I no longer have
a career to build and I can get by. I consider myself a lucky woman."
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