View allAll Photos Tagged farfromthemaddingcrowd
This farm at Starzelalpe in Austria is situated "far from the madding crowd": it is high up (1678m) at the end of the Duratal, where there are no roads - just trails - to cross the mountains.
We reached the farm on a hike from the Schwarzwassertal, over the ridge and then steeply down to this farm. I'll be posting more photos of this walk later on.
The Starzelalpe farm is really secluded, more than an hour's walk from the nearest village, Baad, at the end of the Kleinwalsertal. The triangular wall at the end of the farm that faces the steep slope behind it is a local way of protecting farms from the threat of avalanches. [Explored on 23/02/2022, #94]
The title is taken from the wonderful Thomas Hardy [1840-1928] novel which was set in Dorset, where Hardy came from. It was made into a very successful film but my favourite was the 1967 version with Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Is it any wonder that Hardy was inspired to write such amazing classics, being surrounded by the stunning Dorset countryside.
Here is a link to some information about him which is very interesting.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Christie
"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs" [Thomas Hardy.]
[Obviously written long before "Mills and Boon!"]
Heres a version of the complete film which is fairly good.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dEOtotMB-M#t=28.99517
I do hope you like the photo which was taken from the slopes of Golden Cap..
P@t.
This shot was reworked from the original scan. The original shot I posted to flickr had been heavily cropped. I like this version better. Originally shot on Velvia film with a Nikon F-100 using a circular polarizer and an 812 warming filter. You know, there is just something about film that still pushes my buttons. Thanks for the look and have a great weekend everybody.
House among Roses - Claude Monet 1840-1926
Albertina - Museum -Vienna
* A retreat for the soul Far from the Madding Crowd & our Troubled World ...
* and,Rose Petals for the victims in my second home ...
Peace to you my Flickr friends & Worldwide ...
I've joined a Facebook group devoted to posting photos and locations of Snowy Owls. What I've learned on the site is that often Snowy Owls are besieged by photographers who seem to care more about getting the shot than they care about the welfare of the bird. The owls are flushed unintentionally by photographers wanting to get closeups and they are flushed deliberately by photographers who want to get a flight shot. I read that in order to get more shots, one person drove across a field, in pursuit, after an owl took flight. So, this afternoon when I found this beautiful female Snowy Owl sitting on the ground far across a field, I kept my distance, shot from the window of my car, and didn't stay long. I wanted her to be free to concentrate on finding lunch instead of keeping track of me. I left feeling happy for this owl that had found a peaceful spot "far from the madding crowd."
"How Green Was My Valley" (1939) by Richard Llewellyn was the first novel that came to mind with this scene in the Pyengana Valley. But in the end I decided on the title on another classic that summed up my mood. Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd" (1874) dates almost exactly to the time Pyengana was settled by George and Margaret Cotton in 1875!
Hardy's phrase sums up the desire to get as far away from crowded cities as possible, and just 125 people live in this valley. But as I've said before, cities are where the madness of modernity lies. www.flickr.com/photos/luminosity7/51203329186/in/album-72...
At the end of a day in the paddocks grazing, these cows have come in for their milking. The pattern of life is regular as clockwork, but deeply in tune with the natural order of things.
I found this old framed photo in a junk shop in the Brecon Beacons. I had no clue as to where or when it was taken, but John Wilson soon solved the mystery! On the back it says it was framed by Fred Loversidge, at the Werneth Art Repository, Oldham. About 100 years old, I think. Wish I'd taken this shot.
Can't beat it, love it up here, wild and free, nature in abundance. Of course in sunshine is one thing, in a blizzard a little scary, dangerous even, unless you are fit and can use a compass. To the top left on the picture, the cairn in remembrance of the Lost Lad, a shepherd boy who died in a bad winter storm.
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Could Bathsheba and Gabriel have met in a more dramatic landscape? Instead of Wessex I would have set the scene in Dinorwic
Old olive grove - and a path still in use. Almost at a watering hole - we were gasping for a drink here.
With apologies to Thomas Hardy. Sand Dunes along the Atlantic Coast at Land's End on the Bogue Banks of North Carolina. Thanks for visiting and have a grand weekend.
Even after you have endured the B8007 to Kilchoan in "The Real Wild West" and then taken the turn to Achnaha and Sanna at the end of the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, the road becomes narrower and rougher, but on a scruffy corner next to an isolated single tender firestation the road splits again into an even narrower single tracked road, so minor that they seem to have given up on numbering it. It winds up and down amongst a brown, volcanic landscape where jumbled boulders and jagged rocks litter all parts of the landscape as if spat up in the air from Hell's Mouth. Wild hill sheep dot the hillsides and bogs between them. And if you manage to stay on the road as it wends its way amongst the imposing and enclosing blackened hills and mounds, you feel the emptiness, loneliness and remoteness of all that harsh landscape around you.
I stopped at a very small quarry and headed on foot out over the hills, down a rough track looking for a deserted settlement. It's hard going and the route is best driven in an eight wheeled Argocat, up and over towards the isolated and abandoned little settlement called Glendrian, a small crofting township surrounded by a circle of low hills in what is called "The back O' Beyond". The hills are the ring dykes of the Ardnamurchan Tertiary Volcanic Complex and are of interest in their own right. Glendrian is a scheduled monument consisting of over 17 unroofed buildings, scattered over the low lying ground. The ruined buildings consist of dwelling houses of a mostly but-and-ben design, with byres, barns, shieling huts and other associated buildings. There are also some enclosures, a kail yard and the remains of a plot and field agri-system. A more modern, two storey dwelling house stands, derelict, towards the centre of the settlement. First written reference to the settlement is found in 1619, and the last of the inhabitants departed in the mid 20th century.
Inhabitants here would have had miles to walk over the roughest ground to reach their nearest neighbour, perhaps in the total darkness of night, or a full-on winter's blizzard in an emergency. There is no help around there. You are on your own with the handful of people living the simple life. Entitled to graze perhaps two or three cows each on the land and a dozen sheep to roam the hills. There were a few small fields they cultivated, digging with spades, to grow hardy crops that would tolerate the acidic, saturated soils. The running water was in the burn. There was no electricity. No transport links.
In fact the reason the population declined here and eventually completely deserted the place has little to do with the Highland Clearances where communities were turfed out of their houses, often by force, and made to find new homes or emigrate to the New World. It is suggested they left because life was just too damned hard there, and that by moving away they could enjoy an easier life with access to transport, electricity, local services and shops. Ironically it was the creation of that tiny road to Sanna that made them realise what they were missing out on.
This will be an amazing place to visit in the summer, in the centre of the volcano crater, so far off the beaten track. I had two golden eagles soaring above me at one time, the sense of isolation so extreme. There's a similar abandoned settlement at Plocaig for me to discover yet a few more miles over the hills and bogs
Pendower is a south facing sandy beach about a mile long with excellent views along the coastline. Owned by the National Trust the beach joins with Carne beach at low tide.
This serene panoramic view was taken at Lake Pukaki, with Mount Cook in the remote background, during a visit to the beautiful South Island, New Zealand
It's a miserable and rainy day and we've got Typhoon Signal No. 3 with us today. Hope you all have a happy week ahead!
'Fly away from here...'
My mother, Mary, was laid to rest on Tuesday 3rd October, after a touching service with her family, relatives, and friends all
in attendance.
During the week before her funeral I spent a few days away from the emotional stress of losing her, and relaxed in a converted barn in Cornwall, UK.
My three siblings insisted I took some much needed rest to recoup before her final farewell, and during the calm, late September misty mornings looking across the fields from the cottage, I managed to capture one rather special moment.
It seemed a fitting image to remind me of her passing, and to share here with you all.
It's good to be back on flickr dear friends, but I may be slow in revving up into full gear, and commenting on all your recent posts.
A little history of the church: lanliverychurch.moonfruit.com/history/4563326620
And the West Coast of Scotland is as far away from crowds as one could possibly wish for and for someone like me who hates crowds, ESPECIALLY when people wander into my frame when I am taking photos, the Highlands are a perfect holiday spot.
Blink and one could miss the village of Ardmair.
But, on a sunny, sunny day, one cannot help be dazzled by this little bay under the shadow of a very large mountain.
I just loved how the beach curved with its lines of golden brown seaweed and the deep blue and green of the sea.
Makes one appreciate being alive!
It is cold and windy and misty. The almost black and white shades of the coastal scenery impart a certain untamed and mysterious touch to this image.
This was taken during the cruise to Hubbard Glacier, Alaska from Vancouver, Canada.
Bloxworth Manor House - (Elizabethan E-Plan)
Grade I listed house built in 1608 and claims to be the first brick property in the county of Dorset.
Built in 1608 by George Savage Savage, part of the possessions of the Cerne Abbey, at the dissolution. Not a large estate, but the family seem to have been mildly prosperous at the beginning of the 17th century and the house was rebuilt.
Due to a poor financial position, George Savage (great-great grandson & MP for Wareham) was forced In 1689 to convey the house to Henry Trenchard – whose family also owned Poxwell Manor – and it remained in the Trenchard family until 1964.
Over the last 100 years the house fell into ruins, was vandalized and then restored.
The house was used as Bathsheba Everdene's house (Upper Weatherbury Farm) in the 1967 film adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd. It was considerably and sympathetically restored in the 1970s.
The horticulturalist Martin Lane Fox, acquired the house in 1997 and remodelled the garden. The house was on the market in 2014 for £4 million
IMG_8691 SOOC
For maximum effect, click the image, to go into the Lightbox, to view at the largest size; or, perhaps, by clicking the expansion arrows at top right of the page for a Full Screen view.
Don't use or reproduce this image on Websites/Blog or any other media without my explicit permission.
© All Rights Reserved - Jim Goodyear 2019.
( BEST SEEN LARGE !)
LIfe is a reflection of our mind's memory. Reflections of Life as others see it is what greatness is.
When we go back home, is this what we dream of ?
This is a bracketed sequence of the Pristine Island, shot on the same day as the two earlier pictures. No cropping done to preserve the vanishing point dead centre.
Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin, no. 586. Julie Christie in Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967). Collection: Alina Deaconu.
Smart and sexy Julie Christie (1941) is an icon of the new British cinema. During the Swinging Sixties, she became a superstar with such roles as Lara in the worldwide smash hit Doctor Zhivago (1965). Since then she has won the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Julie Frances Christie was born in 1941 in Chukua, India, then part of the British Empire. She was the daughter of Frank St. John Christie, a tea planter, and his Welsh wife Rosemary (née Ramsden), who was a painter. Her younger brother, Clive Christie, would become a professor of Southeast Asian studies at Hull University. They grew up on their father's tea plantation in Assam. At 7, Julie was sent to England for her education. As a teenager at Wycombe Court School, she played the role of the Dauphin in a school production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. A fascination with the artist's lifestyle led to her enrolling in London's Central School of Speech and Drama training. Christie made her stage debut as a member of the Frinton Repertory of Essex in 1957. One of her first roles was playing Anne Frank in a London theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Christie was not fond of the stage, even though it allowed her to travel, including a professional gig in the United States. She made her TV debut as an artificial girl created from the DNA of a deceased science lab assistant in the BBC Sci-fi series A for Andromeda (Michael Hayes, 1961). Her first film appearance was a bit part in the amusing comedy Crooks Anonymous (Ken Annakin, 1962), which was followed up by a larger ingénue role in the romantic comedy The Fast Lady (Ken Annakin, 1963) with Stanley Baker. Christie first worked with the man who would kick her career into high gear, director John Schlesinger, when he choose her as a replacement for the actress (Topsy Jane) originally cast in Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963). Christie's turn in the film as the free-wheeling Liz, the supremely confident friend and love interest to Tom Courtenay's full-time dreamer Billy, was a stunner, and she had her first taste of becoming an icon of the new British cinema. Her screen presence was such that the great John Ford cast her as the young prostitute Daisy Battles in Young Cassidy (Jack Cardiff, John Ford, 1965), a biopic about Irish playwright Sean O'Casey. She made her breakthrough to super-stardom in Schlesinger's seminal Swinging Sixties film Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965). Schlesinger called on Christie to play the role of the manipulative young actress and jet setter Diana Scott when the casting of Shirley MacLaine fell through. As played by Christie, Diana is an amoral social butterfly who undergoes a metamorphosis from an immature sex kitten to a jaded socialite. For her complex performance, Christie won raves, including the Best Actress Oscar and the Best Actress BAFTA. Her image as the It Girl of the Swinging Sixties was further cemented by her appearance in the documentary Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (1967), which covered the hipster scene in England.
Julie Christie followed up Darling (1965) with the role of the tragic Lara Antipova in the two-time Academy Award-winning Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965). Lean’s epic adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel became one of the all-time box-office champs. Christie was now a superstar who commanded a price of $400,000 per picture. More interested in film as an art form than in consolidating her movie stardom, Christie followed up Doctor Zhivago (1965) with a dual role in Fahrenheit 451 (1966) for Francois Truffaut, a Nouvelle Vague director she admired. The film was, according to Jon C. Hopwood at IMDb, "hurt by the director's lack of English and by friction between Truffaut and Christie's male co-star Oskar Werner, who had replaced the more-appropriate-for-the-role Terence Stamp". Stamp and Christie had been lovers before she had become famous, and he was unsure he could act with her, due to his own ego problems. On his part, Werner resented the attention the smitten Truffaut gave Christie. Stamp overcame those ego problems to sign on as her co-star in John Schlesinger's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967), which also starred Peter Finch and Alan Bates. Jon C. Hopwood at IMDb: “It is a film that is far better remembered now than when it was received in 1967. The film and her performance as the Hardy heroine Bathsheba Everdene was lambasted by film critics, many of whom faulted Christie for being too ‘mod’ and thus untrue to one of Hardy's classic tales of fate.” She then met the man who transformed her life, undermining her pretensions to a career as a film star in their seven-year-long love affair, the American actor Warren Beatty. Living his life was always far more important than being a star for Beatty, who viewed the movie star profession as a 'treadmill leading to more treadmills' and who was wealthy enough after Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) to not have to ever work again. Christie and Beatty had visited a working farm during the production of Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and had been appalled by the industrial exploitation of the animals. Thereafter, animal rights became a very important subject to Christie. They were kindred souls who remain friends, four decades after their affair ended in 1974. Christie's last box-office hit in which she was the top-liner was Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968), a romantic drama about the romance between a staid doctor (George C. Scott) and a flighty but vulnerable socialite (Christie). According to Jon C. Hopwood, it is “a film that featured one of co-star George C. Scott's greatest performances, perfectly counter-balanced by Christie's portrayal of an ‘arch-kook’ who was emblematic of the 1960s. It is one of the major films of the decade, an underrated masterpiece." Despite the presence of Scott and Shirley Knight, Hopwood claims that the film would not work without Julie Christie. "There is frankly no other actress who could have filled the role, bringing that unique presence and the threat of danger that crackled around Christie's electric aura. At this point of her career, she was poised for greatness as a star, greatness as an actress.”
After meeting Beatty, Julie Christie essentially surrendered any aspirations to screen stardom, or to maintaining herself as a top-drawer working actress. She turned down the lead in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969) and Anne of the Thousand Days (Charles Jarrott, 1969), two parts that garnered Oscar nominations for the second choices, Jane Fonda and Geneviève Bujold. After shooting In Search of Gregory (Peter Wood, 1969), a critical and box office flop, to fulfil her contractual obligations, she spent her time with Beatty in California, renting a beach house in Malibu. She did return to form as the bored upper-class woman who ruins a boy's life by involving him in her sexual duplicities, in The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1970), written by playwright Harold Pinter. She won her second Oscar nomination for her role as a brothel 'madam' in Robert Altman's Western drama McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) that she made with her lover Beatty. Christie also turned down the role of the Russian Empress in Nicholas and Alexandra (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1971), another film that won the second-choice (Janet Suzman) Best Actress Oscar nomination. Two years later, she appeared in the dazzling mystery-horror film Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), with its famously erotic love scenes between Christie and Donald Sutherland. Director Nicolas Roeg had been her cinematographer on Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and Petulia (1968). In the mid-1970s, her affair with Beatty came to an end, but the two remained close friends and worked together in Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975) and the comedy Heaven Can Wait (Buck Henry, Warren Beatty, 1978). Christie turned down the part of Louise Bryant in Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981), a part written by Beatty with her in mind, as Christie felt an American should play the role. Beatty's then lover, Diane Keaton, played the part and won a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Other interesting roles she turned down were parts in Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976), and American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980).
Julie Christie moved back to the UK and became 'the British answer to Jane Fonda', campaigning for various social and political causes, including animal rights and nuclear disarmament. She was greatly in demand but became even more choosy about her roles as her own political awareness increased. Her sporadic film commitments reflected her political consciousness such as the animal rights documentary The Animals Film (Victor Schonfeld, 1981), and the feature The Gold Diggers (Sally Potter, 1983), a feminist reinterpretation of film history. Roles in The Return of the Soldier (Alan Bridges, 1982) with Alan Bates and Glenda Jackson, and Merchant-Ivory's Heat and Dust (James Ivory, 1983) seemed to herald a return to form, but then she essentially retired. A career renaissance came in the mid-1990s with her turn as Queen Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996). More rave notices brought her turn as the faded movie star married to handyman Nick Nolte and romanced by a younger man (Jonny Lee Miller) in Afterglow (Alan Rudolph, 1997). She received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance and showed up at the awards as radiant and uniquely beautiful as ever. Christie lived with left-wing investigative journalist and writer Duncan Campbell since 1979, before marrying in 2008. In addition to her film work, she has narrated many books on tape. In 1995, she made a triumphant return to the stage in a London revival of Harold Pinter's Old Times, which garnered her superb reviews. In the decade since Afterglow (1997), she has worked steadily on film in supporting roles. She worked three times with director-screenwriter and actress Sarah Polley: co-starring with Polley in No Such Thing (Hal Hartley, 2001) and the Goya Award-winning La Vida secreta de las palabras/The Secret Life of Words (Isabel Coixet, 2005), and taking the lead in Polley's first feature film as a director, Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006). Christie made a brief appearance in the third Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004), playing Madam Rosmerta, the landlady of the Three Broomsticks pub. That same year, she also appeared in two other high-profile films: Wolfgang Petersen's historical epic Troy (2004) and Marc Forster's Finding Neverland (2004), playing Kate Winslet's mother. The latter performance earned Christie a BAFTA nomination as a supporting actress in the film. In 2008, Christie narrated Uncontacted Tribes, a short film for the British-based charity Survival International, featuring previously unseen footage of remote and endangered peoples. She has been a long-standing supporter of the charity, and in February 2008, was named as its first 'Ambassador'. She appeared in a segment of the anthology film New York, I Love You (2008), written by Anthony Minghella, directed by Shekhar Kapur and co-starring Shia LaBeouf. She also played in Glorious 39 (Stephen Poliakoff, 2008), about a British family at the start of World War II. In 2011, Christie played a 'sexy, bohemian' version of the grandmother role in a gothic retelling of Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke, 2011) with Amanda Seyfried in the title role. Her most recent role was in the political thriller The Company You Keep (Robert Redford, 2012), where she co-starred with Robert Redford. And we conclude this bio with an observation of Brian McFarlane in The Encyclopedia of British Cinema: “Arguably the most genuinely glamorous, and one of the most intelligent, of all British stars, Julie Christie brought a gust of new, sensual life into British cinema.”
Sources: Jon C. Hopwood (IMDb), Brian McFarlane (Encyclopedia of British Cinema), TCM, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQiVAUqI66w
There is no regular path for getting out of love.....
As there is for getting in.
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
© All rights reserved Anna Kwa. Please do not use this image on websites, blogs or any other media without my explicit written permission
This green and pleasant land.
* Springtime shot in Southport's Hesketh Park : April 2016.
I've had this archway shot in my mind's eye since we moved to Southport, about six years ago. However, I've never before been in the right spot at the right time ; light-wise & lushness-wise. *
Maiden Castle - Dorchester Dorset - one of the most impressive iron age multivallate hill forts in Dorset and Europe.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxGE65pn2vg
It's very difficult to look at the World and into your heart at the same time ....
In between, a life has passed.
Jim Harrison
© All rights reserved Anna Kwa. Please do not use this image on websites, blogs or any other media without my explicit written permission
Linlithgow's independent bookshop, the lovely Far From the Madding Crowd (of course I went in to look around and chat with them while I was there)
Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin, no. 587. Julie Christie in Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967). Collection: Alina Deaconu. The hotel in the back is the Royal Hotel in Weymouth, Dorset, UK.
Smart and sexy Julie Christie (1941) is an icon of the new British cinema. During the Swinging Sixties, she became a superstar with such roles as Lara in the worldwide smash hit Doctor Zhivago (1965). Since then she has won the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Julie Frances Christie was born in 1941 in Chukua, India, then part of the British Empire. She was the daughter of Frank St. John Christie, a tea planter, and his Welsh wife Rosemary (née Ramsden), who was a painter. Her younger brother, Clive Christie, would become a professor of Southeast Asian studies at Hull University. They grew up on their father's tea plantation in Assam. At 7, Julie was sent to England for her education. As a teenager at Wycombe Court School, she played the role of the Dauphin in a school production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. A fascination with the artist's lifestyle led to her enrolling in London's Central School of Speech and Drama training. Christie made her stage debut as a member of the Frinton Repertory of Essex in 1957. One of her first roles was playing Anne Frank in a London theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Christie was not fond of the stage, even though it allowed her to travel, including a professional gig in the United States. She made her TV debut as an artificial girl created from the DNA of a deceased science lab assistant in the BBC Sci-fi series A for Andromeda (Michael Hayes, 1961). Her first film appearance was a bit part in the amusing comedy Crooks Anonymous (Ken Annakin, 1962), which was followed up by a larger ingénue role in the romantic comedy The Fast Lady (Ken Annakin, 1963) with Stanley Baker. Christie first worked with the man who would kick her career into high gear, director John Schlesinger, when he choose her as a replacement for the actress (Topsy Jane) originally cast in Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963). Christie's turn in the film as the free-wheeling Liz, the supremely confident friend and love interest to Tom Courtenay's full-time dreamer Billy, was a stunner, and she had her first taste of becoming an icon of the new British cinema. Her screen presence was such that the great John Ford cast her as the young prostitute Daisy Battles in Young Cassidy (Jack Cardiff, John Ford, 1965), a biopic about Irish playwright Sean O'Casey. She made her breakthrough to super-stardom in Schlesinger's seminal Swinging Sixties film Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965). Schlesinger called on Christie to play the role of the manipulative young actress and jet setter Diana Scott when the casting of Shirley MacLaine fell through. As played by Christie, Diana is an amoral social butterfly who undergoes a metamorphosis from an immature sex kitten to a jaded socialite. For her complex performance, Christie won raves, including the Best Actress Oscar and the Best Actress BAFTA. Her image as the It Girl of the Swinging Sixties was further cemented by her appearance in the documentary Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (1967), which covered the hipster scene in England.
Julie Christie followed up Darling (1965) with the role of the tragic Lara Antipova in the two-time Academy Award-winning Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965). Lean’s epic adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel became one of the all-time box-office champs. Christie was now a superstar who commanded a price of $400,000 per picture. More interested in film as an art form than in consolidating her movie stardom, Christie followed up Doctor Zhivago (1965) with a dual role in Fahrenheit 451 (1966) for Francois Truffaut, a Nouvelle Vague director she admired. The film was, according to Jon C. Hopwood at IMDb, "hurt by the director's lack of English and by friction between Truffaut and Christie's male co-star Oskar Werner, who had replaced the more-appropriate-for-the-role Terence Stamp". Stamp and Christie had been lovers before she had become famous, and he was unsure he could act with her, due to his own ego problems. On his part, Werner resented the attention the smitten Truffaut gave Christie. Stamp overcame those ego problems to sign on as her co-star in John Schlesinger's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967), which also starred Peter Finch and Alan Bates. Jon C. Hopwood at IMDb: “It is a film that is far better remembered now than when it was received in 1967. The film and her performance as the Hardy heroine Bathsheba Everdene was lambasted by film critics, many of whom faulted Christie for being too ‘mod’ and thus untrue to one of Hardy's classic tales of fate.” She then met the man who transformed her life, undermining her pretensions to a career as a film star in their seven-year-long love affair, the American actor Warren Beatty. Living his life was always far more important than being a star for Beatty, who viewed the movie star profession as a 'treadmill leading to more treadmills' and who was wealthy enough after Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) to not have to ever work again. Christie and Beatty had visited a working farm during the production of Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and had been appalled by the industrial exploitation of the animals. Thereafter, animal rights became a very important subject to Christie. They were kindred souls who remain friends, four decades after their affair ended in 1974. Christie's last box-office hit in which she was the top-liner was Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968), a romantic drama about the romance between a staid doctor (George C. Scott) and a flighty but vulnerable socialite (Christie). According to Jon C. Hopwood, it is “a film that featured one of co-star George C. Scott's greatest performances, perfectly counter-balanced by Christie's portrayal of an ‘arch-kook’ who was emblematic of the 1960s. It is one of the major films of the decade, an underrated masterpiece." Despite the presence of Scott and Shirley Knight, Hopwood claims that the film would not work without Julie Christie. "There is frankly no other actress who could have filled the role, bringing that unique presence and the threat of danger that crackled around Christie's electric aura. At this point of her career, she was poised for greatness as a star, greatness as an actress.”
After meeting Beatty, Julie Christie essentially surrendered any aspirations to screen stardom, or to maintaining herself as a top-drawer working actress. She turned down the lead in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969) and Anne of the Thousand Days (Charles Jarrott, 1969), two parts that garnered Oscar nominations for the second choices, Jane Fonda and Geneviève Bujold. After shooting In Search of Gregory (Peter Wood, 1969), a critical and box office flop, to fulfil her contractual obligations, she spent her time with Beatty in California, renting a beach house in Malibu. She did return to form as the bored upper-class woman who ruins a boy's life by involving him in her sexual duplicities, in The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1970), written by playwright Harold Pinter. She won her second Oscar nomination for her role as a brothel 'madam' in Robert Altman's Western drama McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) that she made with her lover Beatty. Christie also turned down the role of the Russian Empress in Nicholas and Alexandra (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1971), another film that won the second-choice (Janet Suzman) Best Actress Oscar nomination. Two years later, she appeared in the dazzling mystery-horror film Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), with its famously erotic love scenes between Christie and Donald Sutherland. Director Nicolas Roeg had been her cinematographer on Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and Petulia (1968). In the mid-1970s, her affair with Beatty came to an end, but the two remained close friends and worked together in Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975) and the comedy Heaven Can Wait (Buck Henry, Warren Beatty, 1978). Christie turned down the part of Louise Bryant in Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981), a part written by Beatty with her in mind, as Christie felt an American should play the role. Beatty's then lover, Diane Keaton, played the part and won a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Other interesting roles she turned down were parts in Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976), and American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980).
Julie Christie moved back to the UK and became 'the British answer to Jane Fonda', campaigning for various social and political causes, including animal rights and nuclear disarmament. She was greatly in demand but became even more choosy about her roles as her own political awareness increased. Her sporadic film commitments reflected her political consciousness such as the animal rights documentary The Animals Film (Victor Schonfeld, 1981), and the feature The Gold Diggers (Sally Potter, 1983), a feminist reinterpretation of film history. Roles in The Return of the Soldier (Alan Bridges, 1982) with Alan Bates and Glenda Jackson, and Merchant-Ivory's Heat and Dust (James Ivory, 1983) seemed to herald a return to form, but then she essentially retired. A career renaissance came in the mid-1990s with her turn as Queen Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996). More rave notices brought her turn as the faded movie star married to handyman Nick Nolte and romanced by a younger man (Jonny Lee Miller) in Afterglow (Alan Rudolph, 1997). She received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance and showed up at the awards as radiant and uniquely beautiful as ever. Christie lived with left-wing investigative journalist and writer Duncan Campbell since 1979, before marrying in 2008. In addition to her film work, she has narrated many books on tape. In 1995, she made a triumphant return to the stage in a London revival of Harold Pinter's Old Times, which garnered her superb reviews. In the decade since Afterglow (1997), she has worked steadily on film in supporting roles. She worked three times with director-screenwriter and actress Sarah Polley: co-starring with Polley in No Such Thing (Hal Hartley, 2001) and the Goya Award-winning La Vida secreta de las palabras/The Secret Life of Words (Isabel Coixet, 2005), and taking the lead in Polley's first feature film as a director, Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006). Christie made a brief appearance in the third Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004), playing Madam Rosmerta, the landlady of the Three Broomsticks pub. That same year, she also appeared in two other high-profile films: Wolfgang Petersen's historical epic Troy (2004) and Marc Forster's Finding Neverland (2004), playing Kate Winslet's mother. The latter performance earned Christie a BAFTA nomination as a supporting actress in the film. In 2008, Christie narrated Uncontacted Tribes, a short film for the British-based charity Survival International, featuring previously unseen footage of remote and endangered peoples. She has been a long-standing supporter of the charity, and in February 2008, was named as its first 'Ambassador'. She appeared in a segment of the anthology film New York, I Love You (2008), written by Anthony Minghella, directed by Shekhar Kapur and co-starring Shia LaBeouf. She also played in Glorious 39 (Stephen Poliakoff, 2008), about a British family at the start of World War II. In 2011, Christie played a 'sexy, bohemian' version of the grandmother role in a gothic retelling of Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke, 2011) with Amanda Seyfried in the title role. Her most recent role was in the political thriller The Company You Keep (Robert Redford, 2012), where she co-starred with Robert Redford. And we conclude this bio with an observation of Brian McFarlane in The Encyclopedia of British Cinema: “Arguably the most genuinely glamorous, and one of the most intelligent, of all British stars, Julie Christie brought a gust of new, sensual life into British cinema.”
Sources: Jon C. Hopwood (IMDb), Brian McFarlane (Encyclopedia of British Cinema), TCM, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Romanian calender card by Casa Filmului Acin. Julie Christie in Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967). Collection: Alina Deaconu.
Smart and sexy Julie Christie (1941) is an icon of the new British cinema. During the Swinging Sixties, she became a superstar with such roles as Lara in the worldwide smash hit Doctor Zhivago (1965). Since then she has won the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Julie Frances Christie was born in 1941 in Chukua, India, then part of the British Empire. She was the daughter of Frank St. John Christie, a tea planter, and his Welsh wife Rosemary (née Ramsden), who was a painter. Her younger brother, Clive Christie, would become a professor of Southeast Asian studies at Hull University. They grew up on their father's tea plantation in Assam. At 7, Julie was sent to England for her education. As a teenager at Wycombe Court School, she played the role of the Dauphin in a school production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. A fascination with the artist's lifestyle led to her enrolling in London's Central School of Speech and Drama training. Christie made her stage debut as a member of the Frinton Repertory of Essex in 1957. One of her first roles was playing Anne Frank in a London theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Christie was not fond of the stage, even though it allowed her to travel, including a professional gig in the United States. She made her TV debut as an artificial girl created from the DNA of a deceased science lab assistant in the BBC Sci-fi series A for Andromeda (Michael Hayes, 1961). Her first film appearance was a bit part in the amusing comedy Crooks Anonymous (Ken Annakin, 1962), which was followed up by a larger ingénue role in the romantic comedy The Fast Lady (Ken Annakin, 1963) with Stanley Baker. Christie first worked with the man who would kick her career into high gear, director John Schlesinger, when he choose her as a replacement for the actress (Topsy Jane) originally cast in Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963). Christie's turn in the film as the free-wheeling Liz, the supremely confident friend and love interest to Tom Courtenay's full-time dreamer Billy, was a stunner, and she had her first taste of becoming an icon of the new British cinema. Her screen presence was such that the great John Ford cast her as the young prostitute Daisy Battles in Young Cassidy (Jack Cardiff, John Ford, 1965), a biopic about Irish playwright Sean O'Casey. She made her breakthrough to super-stardom in Schlesinger's seminal Swinging Sixties film Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965). Schlesinger called on Christie to play the role of the manipulative young actress and jet setter Diana Scott when the casting of Shirley MacLaine fell through. As played by Christie, Diana is an amoral social butterfly who undergoes a metamorphosis from an immature sex kitten to a jaded socialite. For her complex performance, Christie won raves, including the Best Actress Oscar and the Best Actress BAFTA. Her image as the It Girl of the Swinging Sixties was further cemented by her appearance in the documentary Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (1967), which covered the hipster scene in England.
Julie Christie followed up Darling (1965) with the role of the tragic Lara Antipova in the two-time Academy Award-winning Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965). Lean’s epic adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel became one of the all-time box-office champs. Christie was now a superstar who commanded a price of $400,000 per picture. More interested in film as an art form than in consolidating her movie stardom, Christie followed up Doctor Zhivago (1965) with a dual role in Fahrenheit 451 (1966) for Francois Truffaut, a Nouvelle Vague director she admired. The film was, according to Jon C. Hopwood at IMDb, "hurt by the director's lack of English and by friction between Truffaut and Christie's male co-star Oskar Werner, who had replaced the more-appropriate-for-the-role Terence Stamp". Stamp and Christie had been lovers before she had become famous, and he was unsure he could act with her, due to his own ego problems. On his part, Werner resented the attention the smitten Truffaut gave Christie. Stamp overcame those ego problems to sign on as her co-star in John Schlesinger's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967), which also starred Peter Finch and Alan Bates. Jon C. Hopwood at IMDb: “It is a film that is far better remembered now than when it was received in 1967. The film and her performance as the Hardy heroine Bathsheba Everdene was lambasted by film critics, many of whom faulted Christie for being too ‘mod’ and thus untrue to one of Hardy's classic tales of fate.” She then met the man who transformed her life, undermining her pretensions to a career as a film star in their seven-year-long love affair, the American actor Warren Beatty. Living his life was always far more important than being a star for Beatty, who viewed the movie star profession as a 'treadmill leading to more treadmills' and who was wealthy enough after Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) to not have to ever work again. Christie and Beatty had visited a working farm during the production of Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and had been appalled by the industrial exploitation of the animals. Thereafter, animal rights became a very important subject to Christie. They were kindred souls who remain friends, four decades after their affair ended in 1974. Christie's last box-office hit in which she was the top-liner was Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968), a romantic drama about the romance between a staid doctor (George C. Scott) and a flighty but vulnerable socialite (Christie). According to Jon C. Hopwood, it is “a film that featured one of co-star George C. Scott's greatest performances, perfectly counter-balanced by Christie's portrayal of an ‘arch-kook’ who was emblematic of the 1960s. It is one of the major films of the decade, an underrated masterpiece." Despite the presence of Scott and Shirley Knight, Hopwood claims that the film would not work without Julie Christie. "There is frankly no other actress who could have filled the role, bringing that unique presence and the threat of danger that crackled around Christie's electric aura. At this point of her career, she was poised for greatness as a star, greatness as an actress.”
After meeting Beatty, Julie Christie essentially surrendered any aspirations to screen stardom, or to maintaining herself as a top-drawer working actress. She turned down the lead in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969) and Anne of the Thousand Days (Charles Jarrott, 1969), two parts that garnered Oscar nominations for the second choices, Jane Fonda and Geneviève Bujold. After shooting In Search of Gregory (Peter Wood, 1969), a critical and box office flop, to fulfil her contractual obligations, she spent her time with Beatty in California, renting a beach house in Malibu. She did return to form as the bored upper-class woman who ruins a boy's life by involving him in her sexual duplicities, in The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1970), written by playwright Harold Pinter. She won her second Oscar nomination for her role as a brothel 'madam' in Robert Altman's Western drama McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) that she made with her lover Beatty. Christie also turned down the role of the Russian Empress in Nicholas and Alexandra (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1971), another film that won the second-choice (Janet Suzman) Best Actress Oscar nomination. Two years later, she appeared in the dazzling mystery-horror film Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), with its famously erotic love scenes between Christie and Donald Sutherland. Director Nicolas Roeg had been her cinematographer on Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and Petulia (1968). In the mid-1970s, her affair with Beatty came to an end, but the two remained close friends and worked together in Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975) and the comedy Heaven Can Wait (Buck Henry, Warren Beatty, 1978). Christie turned down the part of Louise Bryant in Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981), a part written by Beatty with her in mind, as Christie felt an American should play the role. Beatty's then lover, Diane Keaton, played the part and won a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Other interesting roles she turned down were parts in Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976), and American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980).
Julie Christie moved back to the UK and became 'the British answer to Jane Fonda', campaigning for various social and political causes, including animal rights and nuclear disarmament. She was greatly in demand but became even more choosy about her roles as her own political awareness increased. Her sporadic film commitments reflected her political consciousness such as the animal rights documentary The Animals Film (Victor Schonfeld, 1981), and the feature The Gold Diggers (Sally Potter, 1983), a feminist reinterpretation of film history. Roles in The Return of the Soldier (Alan Bridges, 1982) with Alan Bates and Glenda Jackson, and Merchant-Ivory's Heat and Dust (James Ivory, 1983) seemed to herald a return to form, but then she essentially retired. A career renaissance came in the mid-1990s with her turn as Queen Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996). More rave notices brought her turn as the faded movie star married to handyman Nick Nolte and romanced by a younger man (Jonny Lee Miller) in Afterglow (Alan Rudolph, 1997). She received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance and showed up at the awards as radiant and uniquely beautiful as ever. Christie lived with left-wing investigative journalist and writer Duncan Campbell since 1979, before marrying in 2008. In addition to her film work, she has narrated many books on tape. In 1995, she made a triumphant return to the stage in a London revival of Harold Pinter's Old Times, which garnered her superb reviews. In the decade since Afterglow (1997), she has worked steadily on film in supporting roles. She worked three times with director-screenwriter and actress Sarah Polley: co-starring with Polley in No Such Thing (Hal Hartley, 2001) and the Goya Award-winning La Vida secreta de las palabras/The Secret Life of Words (Isabel Coixet, 2005), and taking the lead in Polley's first feature film as a director, Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006). Christie made a brief appearance in the third Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004), playing Madam Rosmerta, the landlady of the Three Broomsticks pub. That same year, she also appeared in two other high-profile films: Wolfgang Petersen's historical epic Troy (2004) and Marc Forster's Finding Neverland (2004), playing Kate Winslet's mother. The latter performance earned Christie a BAFTA nomination as a supporting actress in the film. In 2008, Christie narrated Uncontacted Tribes, a short film for the British-based charity Survival International, featuring previously unseen footage of remote and endangered peoples. She has been a long-standing supporter of the charity, and in February 2008, was named as its first 'Ambassador'. She appeared in a segment of the anthology film New York, I Love You (2008), written by Anthony Minghella, directed by Shekhar Kapur and co-starring Shia LaBeouf. She also played in Glorious 39 (Stephen Poliakoff, 2008), about a British family at the start of World War II. In 2011, Christie played a 'sexy, bohemian' version of the grandmother role in a gothic retelling of Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke, 2011) with Amanda Seyfried in the title role. Her most recent role was in the political thriller The Company You Keep (Robert Redford, 2012), where she co-starred with Robert Redford. And we conclude this bio with an observation of Brian McFarlane in The Encyclopedia of British Cinema: “Arguably the most genuinely glamorous, and one of the most intelligent, of all British stars, Julie Christie brought a gust of new, sensual life into British cinema.”
Sources: Jon C. Hopwood (IMDb), Brian McFarlane (Encyclopedia of British Cinema), TCM, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Soutern Vectis 1952 (PL51 LDN) a Volvo B7TL Plaxton President, is seen at Bembridge, Isle of Wight. 27th May 2015.
Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin, no. 86. Julie Christie and Terence Stamp in Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967).
Smart and sexy Julie Christie (1941) is an icon of the new British cinema. During the Swinging Sixties, she became a superstar with such roles as Lara in the worldwide smash hit Doctor Zhivago (1965). Since then she has won the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Julie Frances Christie was born in 1941 in Chukua, India, then part of the British Empire. She was the daughter of Frank St. John Christie, a tea planter, and his Welsh wife Rosemary (née Ramsden), who was a painter. Her younger brother, Clive Christie, would become a professor of Southeast Asian studies at Hull University. They grew up on their father's tea plantation in Assam. At 7, Julie was sent to England for her education. As a teenager at Wycombe Court School, she played the role of the Dauphin in a school production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. A fascination with the artist's lifestyle led to her enrolling in London's Central School of Speech and Drama training. Christie made her stage debut as a member of the Frinton Repertory of Essex in 1957. One of her first roles was playing Anne Frank in a London theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Christie was not fond of the stage, even though it allowed her to travel, including a professional gig in the United States. She made her TV debut as an artificial girl created from the DNA of a deceased science lab assistant in the BBC Sci-Fi series A for Andromeda (Michael Hayes, 1961). Her first film appearance was a bit part in the amusing comedy Crooks Anonymous (Ken Annakin, 1962), which was followed up by a larger ingénue role in the romantic comedy The Fast Lady (Ken Annakin, 1963) with Stanley Baker. Christie first worked with the man who would kick her career into high gear, director John Schlesinger, when he choose her as a replacement for the actress (Topsy Jane) originally cast in Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963). Christie's turn in the film as the free-wheeling Liz, the supremely confident friend and love interest to Tom Courtenay's full-time dreamer Billy, was a stunner, and she had her first taste of becoming an icon of the new British cinema. Her screen presence was such that the great John Ford cast her as the young prostitute Daisy Battles in Young Cassidy (Jack Cardiff, John Ford, 1965), a biopic about Irish playwright Sean O'Casey. She made her breakthrough to super-stardom in Schlesinger's seminal Swinging Sixties film Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965). Schlesinger called on Christie to play the role of the manipulative young actress and jet setter Diana Scott when the casting of Shirley MacLaine fell through. As played by Christie, Diana is an amoral social butterfly who undergoes a metamorphosis from an immature sex kitten to a jaded socialite. For her complex performance, Christie won raves, including the Best Actress Oscar and the Best Actress BAFTA. Her image as the It Girl of the Swinging Sixties was further cemented by her appearance in the documentary Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (1967), which covered the hipster scene in England.
Julie Christie followed up Darling (1965) with the role of the tragic Lara Antipova in the two-time Academy Award-winning Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965). Lean’s epic adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel became one of the all-time box-office champs. Christie was now a superstar who commanded a price of $400,000 per picture. More interested in film as an art form than in consolidating her movie stardom, Christie followed up Doctor Zhivago (1965) with a dual role in Fahrenheit 451 (1966) for Francois Truffaut, a Nouvelle Vague director she admired. The film was, according to Jon C. Hopwood at IMDb, "hurt by the director's lack of English and by friction between Truffaut and Christie's male co-star Oskar Werner, who had replaced the more-appropriate-for-the-role Terence Stamp". Stamp and Christie had been lovers before she had become famous, and he was unsure he could act with her, due to his own ego problems. On his part, Werner resented the attention the smitten Truffaut gave Christie. Stamp overcame those ego problems to sign on as her co-star in John Schlesinger's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967), which also starred Peter Finch and Alan Bates. Jon C. Hopwood at IMDb: “It is a film that is far better remembered now than when it was received in 1967. The film and her performance as the Hardy heroine Bathsheba Everdene was lambasted by film critics, many of whom faulted Christie for being too ‘mod’ and thus untrue to one of Hardy's classic tales of fate.” She then met the man who transformed her life, undermining her pretensions to a career as a film star in their seven-year-long love affair, the American actor Warren Beatty. Living his life was always far more important than being a star for Beatty, who viewed the movie star profession as a 'treadmill leading to more treadmills' and who was wealthy enough after Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) to not have to ever work again. Christie and Beatty had visited a working farm during the production of Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and had been appalled by the industrial exploitation of the animals. Thereafter, animal rights became a very important subject to Christie. They were kindred souls who remain friends, four decades after their affair ended in 1974. Christie's last box-office hit in which she was the top-liner was Petulia (Richard Lester, 1968), a romantic drama about the romance between a staid doctor (George C. Scott) and a flighty but vulnerable socialite (Christie). According to Jon C. Hopwood, it is “a film that featured one of co-star George C. Scott's greatest performances, perfectly counter-balanced by Christie's portrayal of an ‘arch-kook’ who was emblematic of the 1960s. It is one of the major films of the decade, an underrated masterpiece." Despite the presence of Scott and Shirley Knight, Hopwood claims that the film would not work without Julie Christie. "There is frankly no other actress who could have filled the role, bringing that unique presence and the threat of danger that crackled around Christie's electric aura. At this point of her career, she was poised for greatness as a star, greatness as an actress.”
After meeting Beatty, Julie Christie essentially surrendered any aspirations to screen stardom, or to maintaining herself as a top-drawer working actress. She turned down the lead in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969) and Anne of the Thousand Days (Charles Jarrott, 1969), two parts that garnered Oscar nominations for the second choices, Jane Fonda and Geneviève Bujold. After shooting In Search of Gregory (Peter Wood, 1969), a critical and box office flop, to fulfil her contractual obligations, she spent her time with Beatty in California, renting a beach house in Malibu. She did return to form as the bored upper-class woman who ruins a boy's life by involving him in her sexual duplicities, in The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1970), written by playwright Harold Pinter. She won her second Oscar nomination for her role as a brothel 'madam' in Robert Altman's Western drama McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) that she made with her lover Beatty. Christie also turned down the role of the Russian Empress in Nicholas and Alexandra (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1971), another film that won the second-choice (Janet Suzman) Best Actress Oscar nomination. Two years later, she appeared in the dazzling mystery-horror film Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), with its famously erotic love scenes between Christie and Donald Sutherland. Director Nicolas Roeg had been her cinematographer on Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and Petulia (1968). In the mid-1970s, her affair with Beatty came to an end, but the two remained close friends and worked together in Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975) and the comedy Heaven Can Wait (Buck Henry, Warren Beatty, 1978). Christie turned down the part of Louise Bryant in Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981), a part written by Beatty with her in mind, as Christie felt an American should play the role. Beatty's then lover, Diane Keaton, played the part and won a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Other interesting roles she turned down were parts in Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976), and American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980).
Julie Christie moved back to the UK and became 'the British answer to Jane Fonda', campaigning for various social and political causes, including animal rights and nuclear disarmament. She was greatly in demand but became even more choosy about her roles as her own political awareness increased. Her sporadic film commitments reflected her political consciousness such as the animal rights documentary The Animals Film (Victor Schonfeld, 1981), and the feature The Gold Diggers (Sally Potter, 1983), a feminist reinterpretation of film history. Roles in The Return of the Soldier (Alan Bridges, 1982) with Alan Bates and Glenda Jackson, and Merchant-Ivory's Heat and Dust (James Ivory, 1983) seemed to herald a return to form, but then she essentially retired. A career renaissance came in the mid-1990s with her turn as Queen Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996). More rave notices brought her turn as the faded movie star married to handyman Nick Nolte and romanced by a younger man (Jonny Lee Miller) in Afterglow (Alan Rudolph, 1997). She received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance and showed up at the awards as radiant and uniquely beautiful as ever. Christie lived with left-wing investigative journalist and writer Duncan Campbell since 1979, before marrying in 2008. In addition to her film work, she has narrated many books on tape. In 1995, she made a triumphant return to the stage in a London revival of Harold Pinter's Old Times, which garnered her superb reviews. In the decade since Afterglow (1997), she has worked steadily on film in supporting roles. She worked three times with director-screenwriter and actress Sarah Polley: co-starring with Polley in No Such Thing (Hal Hartley, 2001) and the Goya Award-winning La Vida secreta de las palabras/The Secret Life of Words (Isabel Coixet, 2005), and taking the lead in Polley's first feature film as a director, Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006). Christie made a brief appearance in the third Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004), playing Madam Rosmerta, the landlady of the Three Broomsticks pub. That same year, she also appeared in two other high-profile films: Wolfgang Petersen's historical epic Troy (2004) and Marc Forster's Finding Neverland (2004), playing Kate Winslet's mother. The latter performance earned Christie a BAFTA nomination as a supporting actress in the film. In 2008, Christie narrated Uncontacted Tribes, a short film for the British-based charity Survival International, featuring previously unseen footage of remote and endangered peoples. She has been a long-standing supporter of the charity, and in February 2008, was named as its first 'Ambassador'. She appeared in a segment of the anthology film New York, I Love You (2008), written by Anthony Minghella, directed by Shekhar Kapur and co-starring Shia LaBeouf. She also played in Glorious 39 (Stephen Poliakoff, 2008), about a British family at the start of World War II. In 2011, Christie played a 'sexy, bohemian' version of the grandmother role in a gothic retelling of Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke, 2011) with Amanda Seyfried in the title role. Her most recent role was in the political thriller The Company You Keep (Robert Redford, 2012), where she co-starred with Robert Redford. And we conclude this bio with an observation of Brian McFarlane in The Encyclopedia of British Cinema: “Arguably the most genuinely glamorous, and one of the most intelligent, of all British stars, Julie Christie brought a gust of new, sensual life into British cinema.”
Sources: Jon C. Hopwood (IMDb), Brian McFarlane (Encyclopedia of British Cinema), TCM, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Lulwind Cove : The almost always beautiful Lulworth Cove, smugglers haunt, iconic tourist spot, popular geology school visit and according to ringleader of the Portland Spy Ring, Harry Houghton was where he aided Soviet spies coming ashore in the 1950's just weeks before British Intelligence services arrested them all.
#lulworth #lulworthcove #jurassiccoast #weldestate #lulwindcove #thomashardy #johnkeats #brightstar #farfromthemaddingcrowd
In Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel 'Far from the Madding Crowd', this is where one of Bathsheba’s suitors, the favoured Sergeant Troy takes a dramatic swim in the waters: “Troy came to a small basin of sea enclosed by the cliffs […] He undressed and plunged in. Inside the cove the water was uninteresting to a swimmer, being smooth as a pond, and to get a little of the ocean swell, Troy presently swam between the two projecting spurs of rock which formed the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean,” whereupon he was swept out to sea and presumed drowned, only to make a dramatic reappearance.
This was where the poet John Keats spent his last ever (supposedly) day in England bound for Italy carrying with him one of the last poems that he wrote, the sonnet ‘Bright Star'.
Thomas Hardy's poem about this visit:
*At Lulworth Cove, a century back*
Had I but lived a hundred years ago
I might have gone, as I have gone this year,
By Warmwell Cross on to a Cove I know,
And Time have placed his finger on me there:
"You see that man?" — I might have looked, and said,
"O yes: I see him. One that boat has brought
Which dropped down Channel round Saint Alban's Head.
So commonplace a youth calls not my thought."
"You see that man?" — "Why yes; I told you; yes:
Of an idling town-sort; thin; hair brown in hue;
And as the evening light scants less and less
He looks up at a star, as many do."
"You see that man?" — "Nay, leave me!" then I plead,
"I have fifteen miles to vamp across the lea,
And it grows dark, and I am weary-kneed:
I have said the third time; yes, that man I see!"
"Good. That man goes to Rome — to death, despair;
And no one notes him now but you and I:
A hundred years, and the world will follow him there,
And bend with reverence where his ashes lie."
Colonel Bullen Reymes inherited the manor of Waddon through his wife in 1651 and started the process of gentrifying its principal house. Henry Chafin finished the job, elegantly encapsulating Waddon House with Portland stone, in about 1700. For a couple of years it was even grander, before losing a west wing to fire in 1704. It was still impressive enough in 1966 to be chosen by film-maker John Schlesinger for Squire Boldwood’s home in the cinema version of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. A branch of the Chafin family, represented by Mr Charles Chaffyn-Grove, is still in residence.