- "I hope this isn't going to be another interview in which under instruction from your editor you interrogate me for an hour about whether I have had a facelift."
- The great frustration of Julie Christie's life is that her face has often got in the way of things she knows to be more important. Today is no exception. She is in Belfast, where her new film is being shown at the city's film festival, and typically embarrassed that a picture of her has pushed Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley's historic meeting off the front pages of the morning paper. No Oscar-winning film star has ever been more sceptical about limelight. Warren Beatty, who met her in 1965, and with whom she formed Hollywood's most glamorous couple for seven on and off years described her as 'the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person I had ever known'. Four decades later, indelible traces of both attributes persist.
- Unlike almost every other actor I have met, Christie seems to find it almost impossible to dissemble on cue, and so she is happiest talking about almost anything but herself. At every opportunity she diverts our conversation towards extraordinary rendition, or the situation in Iran, or the rise of China, with an enthusiasm and curiosity that seems not so much a tactic as a temperamental necessity.
- The thing about Christie's face, as Polley's camera dwells on it, is that everyone has known it young, as Lara in Dr Zhivago and Bathsheba in "Far from the Madding Crowd" and Liz in "Billy Liar". She dislikes being interviewed, she tells me, in part because she has noticed how "People are cross somehow, underneath, that I am not the person that I was. They feel like I am letting them down in some way. I sometimes feel they dislike me for appearing with all my lines and wrinkles. As a culture we seem unable to embrace change in people without being harsh about it."
- I wonder why she was reluctant to take the role in Polley's film, and she suggests that generally speaking she is happier doing almost anything but making films these days. It is not the work itself, but the way the project takes over her life after it is finished. "I think celebrity is the curse of modern life, or at least advertising, which it is a branch of. And I don't like being part of something dirty. I know that sounds prissy. But I talk to some young stars and say: why do you do all these publicity things? They say they have signed up to it. I suppose I have never wanted to sign up."
She talks of the shadow life that exists in her cuttings file, as something "disgusting" to her, "like having chewing gum in your hair always." It struck her first when she made "Far From the Madding Crowd". "I was staying with a friend, and this journalist came to see me, and my friend kindly made a plate of sandwiches for us, and the journalist wrote: 'Christie's maid came in with sandwiches.' in an attempt to show I was being pampered. I just thought: how very cruel." A lot of her life since then, and certainly since she left Hollywood at the end of the Seventies has been a pretty successful attempt at what she calls 'de-celebritisation'.
- "Even in the Sixties, especially then, I was always deeply anxious," she says. "I never felt that I was cool enough, or that I was dressed right. Silly things. I was fearful. I did all the things you do, it wasn't that I didn't try lots of things. But I could never quite get away from this anxiety all the time."
- Each of the men changed her in different ways, she suggests, but Beatty (her co-star in "Shampoo", and "McCabe & Mrs Miller") affected her the most. "He gave me a political perspective, which I am very grateful for. I loved the way, say, that he would go to baseball matches and stand up in the interval and talk about getting rid of guns. He would be this little tiny figure in this big baseball stadium, and I would be looking down at him, I thought he was wonderfully courageous for doing that."(Beatty returned this compliment by dedicating his political labour of love, "Reds", 'To Jules'.)
By the end, though, the late Seventies, she had to escape. " thought I was going mad there. You do fall into LA, you slip into it." The closest thing she had to home lay in the remembered magic of the few summers she had shared with her mother in Wales when she first returned from India. So she bought a basic farm near Montgomery in north Wales, and invited some friends to stay with her, which is how she has lived most of her life since.
A lot of her sense of purpose has come from a desire "to keep faith in protesting what you believe to be wrong"; the causes to which she has devoted a good deal of her life since have included campaigns against nuclear waste and for animal rights. She is currently most involved working with the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture. Helen Bamber, its founder, is her inspiration. "If people do nothing else they should read Helen's book." (SEE BELOW)
Her political work - 'conferences, demonstrations, fund-raising, whatever' - brings her to London, where she has a house she also shares with friends in the East End. Otherwise she likes to be in Wales. "I have always lived in group situations that are not quite communal," she says. "I think it is important to cook on your own, for example, but I have always shared the place with friends. People who have come and gone and had children and so on. I have a family with three children there at the moment." She won't name names."You have to have that in the country; you have to share responsibility for animals and houses and kids."
- It must be weird, I suggest, to see the famous faces of friends now old, as weird as it is to look in the mirror? She smiles. "In the Sixties you did not know you were going to get older. But you do and you are. People become much dearer. When I see someone like Warren, with his four kids, there is that wonderful recognition of the life we have led. And a terrific sense of mortality, which is like a blessing almost: you suddenly realise what life is about." She quotes something that her director, Sarah Polley, has said: "Memory is the way you make sense of love."
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I wonder which particular moments her own memory clings most readily to? "Well, they nearly always involve a chap and nature," she says briskly. "I'm not going into detail but 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." I fear just for an instant Christie might start to cry when she says this, but she laughs loudly instead.
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