by Tony McKibbin

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Julie Christie, aware that the roles she received in the sixties owed more than a little to the attractiveness of the facade, has had a curious relationship with beauty ever since. The beholder, one shouldn't forget, is even more fickle than that which is beheld. It isn't enough for an actress to look after face and the body, there are also the dissenting voices to worry about. David Thomson in his Biographical dictionary, for example, who reckons Christie is "obvious in her efforts, lacking in either gaiety or insight, and most serious of all, gawky, self-conscious, and lantern-jawed." But there was a period some years ago, in the late seventies and early eighties, when Christie didn't seem too interested in how she looked, and the viewer more willing to accept her attractiveness for what it has always been: comely, capricious and, yes, a touch gawky. Underneath the soft focus and the make-up, Christie's had the air of a young woman pushed to the front of the crowd, rather like the scene in Billy Liar (1963) where she is cajoled into a comedian's photo opportunity. She was only twenty two at the time (she was born in India in 1941; and studied at the Central School of Drama), and the film's director, John Schlesinger became her mentor: "we understood alot about each other's weaknesses and that bound us together".

She would work twice more for Schlesinger during the sixties, in Darling(1965) for which she won an Oscar, and Far from the Madding Crowd(1967), which earned her a roasting. Time Out's critic has stated, "for some mysterious reason, the notion that she could play classic roles was one that persisted for several years". Other period movies included Dr. Zhivago(1965) and The Go-Between(1971), and the reason may have been her ingenuousness: that her ungainly manner, her unpractised smile, her indistinct hair and the smattering of freckles were somehow out of step with the forthright decade in which she lived. And yet how could such an idea hold up when Darling is perhaps the quintessential sixties film? Her Diana, though, hasn't the ambition of those other sixties go-getters: Bond, and the photographer in Blow Up, or even the working-class heroes who use all their energy to stay put, like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning's Arthur Seaton and Colin in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. No, Diana is buoyed up by her own boredom, and swept along by the enthusiasm of others. She meets up with Dirk Bogarde's married tele-journalist, and later on allows herself to be seduced by Laurence Harvey's jetsetter. He helps her with a nominal career in film and advertising; come the end of the film she's a married woman - a princess in far-flung Europe, pining for home and more bored than ever.

Christie has seen something of herself in the role: "At that time I was not only selfish and superficial but also lazy", but the parts still came, and Christie, by accident or design rarely picked a bad film. Darling is slick, Dr. Zhivago is heavy, Far From the Madding Crowd slightly out of her reach, and The Go-Between lumbering, but they were all made by quality film-makers searching out their own modicum of truth. She was also in Richard Lester's fascinating Petulia(1968), a fragmented take on 68: San Francisco is the film's setting, and Christie is the beaten wife of an impotent rich kid. She has an affair with a recently estranged surgeon, but seems unable to make decisions. Christie captures well the vacillating emotions of the time, where the here and now mitigates reason and purpose. Her cooing, breathless voice, tremulously indecisive, reflecting not only her eponymous role in Lester's movie, but also many of her roles before and since.

Tough has rarely been her thing. Though that would be to ignore McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), where she plays a hardened cockney madam who runs a bordello out of the American North West. She's practical enough to reserve her dreams for the opium pipe, and constantly warns Warren Beatty's blowhard not to mess with the wrong people. McCabe and Mrs Miller was made around the same time as The Go-Between, but it seems, like Petulia, a contemporary film, no matter that Altman and Losey's films were both set at the turn of the century. One sensed a move away from prestige cinema towards murkier, experimental work, of which Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now(1973) was one of the most distinctive. Roeg had already photographed Christie in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451(1966) as well as Far From the Madding Crowd and Petulia and he's an artist acutely aware of the subtle psychological shifts in a persona. It was as if Roeg could see in Christie a yearning for the metaphysical, characters who have a need for material escape. There is the scene in Billy Liar, where she discusses with Billy the importance of the private, fantasy life, and in Far From the Madding Crowd Bathsheba's so besotted by the dashing Sergeant Troy, that as he charges at her with his sword, she's but within half an inch of loosing her life. In Truffaut's film she plays the central character's conformist wife, but more strikingly also the free-thinking book-lover Clarisse, a woman who must live on the fringes of a society given over so completely to the practical.

In Don’t Look Now Roeg casts her well. Laura Baxter is in Venice with her husband, trying to get over the death of their young daughter. Baxter throws himself into his work as a restorer, Laura finds refuge in two old ladies, owe of whom tells Laura her daughter is safe. Laura tries to persuade her husband of the woman's psychic powers, but he is absorbed in his own efficient, problem-solving world, and leaves Laura to her beliefs. Roeg uses a rough outline of Christie’s persona — how often has Christie played women at a loss with what to do with themselves? — and some of the actresses own pathetic concerns. "We live in this wonderful, crazy world where nobody knows what’s going to happen next.......this dreadful demand for pre-knowledge." An actress more given to will-power would have altered the film’s tone, demanded a greater spiritual presence to be confronted by, but Don’t Look Now’s brilliance rests in its elusive sense of an added dimension to the world that requires a psychic antenna attuned to the scrambled signals Roeg throws out...