Julie Christie

Julie Frances Christie (born 14 April 1941) is a British actress. A pop icon of the "swinging London" era of the 1960s, she has won the Academy, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild Awards. Christie's first big-screen roles were in Crooks Anonymous and The Fast Lady (both 1962), and her breakthrough was in 1963's Billy Liar. In 1965, she won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Diana Scott in Darling. That same year, she starred as Lara Antipova in Doctor Zhivago, the eighth highest grossing film of all time after adjustment for inflation. In the following years, she starred in Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Petulia (1968), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Don't Look Now (1973), and Heaven Can Wait (1978). Christie's acting work became low-key in the 1980s. Her late career includes Oscar-nominated performances in the independent films Afterglow (1997) and Away from Her (2006). --- Christie was born on 14 April 1941 in Singlijan Tea Estate, Chabua, Assam, British India, the elder child of Rosemary (née Ramsden), a painter, and Francis "Frank" St. John Christie. Her father ran the tea plantation where she was raised. She has a younger brother, Clive, and a (now deceased) older half-sister, June, from her father's relationship with an Indian woman, who worked as a tea picker on his plantation. Frank and Rosemary Christie separated when Julie was a child. She was baptised in the Anglican church and studied as a boarder at the independent Convent of Our Lady school in St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, after being expelled from another convent school for telling a risque joke which reached a wider audience than originally anticipated. After being asked to leave the Convent of Our Lady as well, she later attended Wycombe Court School, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, during which time she lived with a foster mother from the age of six. After her parents' divorce, Christie spent time with her mother in rural Wales. As a teenager at the all-girls' Wycombe Court School, she played "the Dauphin" in a production of Shaw's Saint Joan. She later studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama.