Julie Christie 9781844574483, 9781844574476, 9781838711481, 9781349931705

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FILM STARS

Stars are an integral part of every major film industry in the world. In this pivotal new series, each book is devoted to an international movie star, looking at the development of their identity, their acting and performance methods, the cultural significance of their work, and their influence and legacy. Taking a wide range of different stars, including George Clooney, Brigitte Bardot and Dirk Bogarde among others, this series encompasses the sphere of silent and sound acting, Hollywood and non-Hollywood areas of cinema, and child and adult forms of stardom. With its broad range, but a focus throughout on the national and historical dimensions to film, the series offers students and researchers a new approach to studying film. SERIES EDITORS Martin Shingler and Susan Smith

Julie CHRISTIE MELANIE BELL

A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan

© Melanie Bell 2016 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2016 by PALGRAVE on behalf of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you. PALGRAVE in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is a global imprint of the above companies and is represented throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Designed by couch Cover images: (front) The Gold Diggers (Sally Potter, 1983), © Sally Potter/Rose English/ Lindsay Cooper; (back) Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978–1–84457–447–6 eISBN 978–1–83871–658–5 ePDF 978–1–34993–170–5

(previous page) Ironic performance as proto-feminism: Julie Christie as Marian in The Go-Between (1970)

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VI INTRODUCTION 1 1 PERSONA: BECOMING ‘JULIE CHRISTIE’ 8 2 PERFORMANCE: THE POETIC AND THE IRONIC 43 3 POLITICS: FEMINIST PRAXIS IN CULTURAL PRODUCTION 82 CODA: AFTERGLOW AND AWAY FROM HER 121 NOTES 130 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 152 FILMOGRAPHY 157 INDEX 160

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to take this opportunity to thank those who have helped with the production of this book. Martin Shingler was a supportive editor whose feedback on the manuscript was invaluable. Sophia Contento and Jenna Steventon at BFI Publishing/Palgrave provided welcome support, as did staff at the BFI National Library. Colleagues and students at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics helped shape ideas, in particular Ruth Connolly, who was extremely generous with her time. Conversations with Tom Bryan, Rona Murray and Eris Williams Reed helped clarify my thinking, with thanks also due to Rosie White and James Leggott, who identified resources on Demon Seed and Memoirs of a Survivor. I was grateful for the opportunity to present work in progress at the ‘British Stars and Stardom’ conference at Queen Mary, London (2013) and the ‘Gender, Work and Organisation’ conference at Keele (2014). Finally I want to express my gratitude to my husband Chris Curtis for his unstinting support; in Julie’s words ‘thank you, my love’.

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INTRODUCTION

Julie Christie’s prickly relationship with stardom is legendary. An Oscar winner by the age of twenty-five for Darling (1965) she spent much of her subsequent career pushing against the very star system that had made her famous. By the 1980s she was virtually unrecognisable in low-budget niche British productions such as Memoirs of a Survivor (1981), and her political outspokenness on topics such as Western foreign policy and animal vivisection alienated the actress from many of her American and British fans. By 1985 the film critic Alexander Walker – a worshipper of Christie in the 1960s and 70s – was bemoaning the actress’s ‘fetishistic disowning of her own fame’.1 And yet despite all her efforts Christie remains a star. Her subsequent Oscar nominations (for McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1971; Afterglow, 1997; Away from Her, 2006), photoshoots for Vogue and Vanity Fair, press interest in her love affairs and numerous ‘comebacks’ are testament to the actress’s longevity. In part her staying power is due to her emblematic status. She is the female star who epitomises the popular idea of the sixties, a decade that has itself assumed legendary historical status. With her trademark long blonde hair, wide mouth, sensuous lips, brilliant blue eyes, strong jaw and lissom, small-breasted body, Christie exuded sexual energy. Feted in the US, Britain and Europe Christie represented a new version of womanhood: modern, youthful and

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independent, an icon of social and sexual liberation. The critical and commercial success of first Darling and then Doctor Zhivago (1965) was matched by intense scrutiny of her clothes, particularly miniskirts, and her itinerant lifestyle, all of which attracted the attention of the press and social commentators of the day. For journalists she had ‘revolutionized the concept of the sex symbol’ and represented ‘the idea of freedom …. [a]n idea whose time had come’.2 But her career goes beyond the moment of the mid-1960s. As the sexual liberation of that decade gave way to women’s liberation in the seventies, Christie’s career kept pace with the changing social landscape. Her 1970s films (from McCabe & Mrs. Miller to Shampoo, 1975) portray women impatient with the men around them, reflecting a growing sense of frustration with the social opportunities available to women in the decade. In McCabe & Mrs. Miller for example her character is intellectually superior to a male protagonist blinded by pride and greed but who refuses her counsel. Off screen Christie’s actions suggested a similar dissatisfaction with women’s life choices, a restlessness manifest in her refusal to marry Warren Beatty in 1971, considered a highly eligible bachelor at the time. By the 1980s feminism entered the mainstream and its concerns about social, sexual and economic equality shaped women’s everyday lives. Once more Christie was at the vanguard of social change, outspokenly feminist in word and deed, chiding male directors for their screen representations of women as passive, and actively supporting projects such as The Gold Diggers (1983), which critiqued gender politics in a thought-provoking manner. From the 1990s onwards she has chosen projects that engage with topical issues such as ageing and Alzheimer’s disease (Afterglow and Away from Her), ensuring her film work remains socially relevant. It is Christie’s ability to adapt, to respond intelligently and creatively to social context and her professional environment, which accounts for her success and lasting appeal. She succeeds in continually surprising and challenging her audience.

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process: an actor’s work was of less importance than questions of representation. Gender has compounded this tradition, with the

Julie Christie on the production shoot of Darling (1965) with Dirk Bogarde and John Schlesinger

work of female stars particularly vulnerable to being rendered invisible through dominant

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Aims and methodology This book has two broad aims. The first is to provide a comprehensive account of Christie’s career, to map its trajectory and pathways, to describe her star persona and to introduce readers to a range of written material both about and by Christie. The work has a chronological arc that follows Christie’s career from her emergence in the 1960s through to the present day. In a career spanning fifty years across film, television and theatre, selections must be made and I focus on the actress’s film work as this is the medium in which she has made her most significant contributions to culture and society. Within this oeuvre I prioritise key periods of activity or moments of work during which the actress produced a small cycle of landmark films. The rationale for this comes from Christie herself, who claimed ‘I think I work, actually work, every ten years’ and I use these moments to bring into view fundamental aspects of the actress’s persona, her work as a craft specialist and her agency as an artist.3 The second aim is to position Christie decisively in film history. Despite starring in films that would be considered landmarks in any film history (Doctor Zhivago, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Gold Diggers) and collaborating with a number of well-known auteurs including David Lean, Sally Potter, Robert Altman and François Truffaut, there is surprisingly little scholarship on the actress, only three biographies of variable quality and two short academic pieces, the first published in 1978, the second in 2010, both of which focus on her 1970s films.4 This absence can in part be explained by the contours of her career, which ranges across very different national contexts, genres, production modes and forms of creative expression. It is this diversity that makes her a particularly challenging and rewarding subject for study.5 And traditions in film studies have also played a part. Historically star studies prioritised star image and persona above analysis of an actor’s intervention in the production

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process: an actor’s work was of less importance than questions of representation. Gender has compounded this tradition, with the work of female stars particularly vulnerable to being rendered invisible through dominant discourses that portrayed women as ‘Galatea figures’ under the control of male directors or producers, or that cast women as muses to a male authorship.6 Both approaches function in culture as explanatory paradigms that limit the narrative of women as agents in their own careers. More recently scholarship across star, performance and organisational studies has started to reposition stardom within an industrial context that understands acting as work. Danae Clark, for example, theorises ‘the actor as a social subject’ who performs a job within a labour system.7 Performance theorists such as Cynthia Baron have focused on rehearsal processes and regimes in classic Hollywood and beyond, while developments by Deborah Dean and Campbell Jones in the field of work and organisational theory have drawn attention to ‘the gendered experiences of working as an actor’ and the processes through which ‘the work of women actors as work has been silenced’.8 Collectively these approaches bring together questions about stars’ subjectivity and agency with attention to the political economy of film production. This study draws on these methodologies and connects them with recent developments in feminist film scholarship concerning women’s participation in the history of cinema. Across an international field, feminist scholars are investigating women’s work both in and around cinema, as actors, directors, publicists, producers, writers and more, drawing on non-conventional sources of evidence such as gossip and journalistic sources, and working with models of co-creation and collaboration to bring women’s work into view.9 This book is a star study that approaches acting as work and puts the relationship between women and cultural production centre-stage. It is a work of film history that combines textual analysis of performance, costume, space, characterisation and

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narrative with archival research, drawing on scripts, personal letters, production files, interview material, press packs and other ephemera to establish the range and extent of Christie’s interventions in, and control of, her career and image. And it is also a feminist historiography that in writing Christie into film history asks questions about the dominant explanatory paradigms of film history that have marginalised her work.

Structure The book is divided into the three principal areas of persona, performance and politics, although these should be understood as categories that are complementary and interrelated rather than discrete. Chapter 1 focuses on the 1960s, Christie’s emergence as a star, and how her brand of independent and caring femininity enjoyed significant critical and commercial success. It brings into view neglected texts such as A for Andromeda (1961) alongside canonical films (Darling, Doctor Zhivago), examines the actress’s many appearances in American Vogue and analyses the contractual arrangements through which her labour was regulated. Chapter 2 explores director–star collaborations in the freelance economy of the 1970s, drawing attention to Christie’s rehearsal methods and her working relationship with not only male directors but also uncredited female assistants. I argue that Christie developed two distinct performance styles in her work at this time – the poetic and the ironic – and discuss her range in films such as Petulia (1968) and Don’t Look Now (1973). The actress’s political activity is the focus of Chapter 3. Here I propose that Christie traded her commercial worth for prestige stardom, using it to leverage projects that she deemed socially acceptable in terms of her commitment to feminism and environmentalism. I examine how Christie functioned as a role model within the context of a popularised feminism in the 1980s,

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and read her film choices (including Demon Seed, 1977 and Heat and Dust, 1983) as examples of feminist praxis. The work concludes with a brief assessment of Christie’s work from the 1990s, specifically Afterglow and Away from Her, which, in their scrutiny of ageing and the female star, bring the debates about gender and stardom full circle. *** My initial interest in Christie grew out of an awareness of her work with auteur directors in films such as Darling, Don’t Look Now and The Gold Diggers. As a feminist scholar I was motivated by a commitment to reposition Christie in film history and in doing so to challenge the dominant frameworks of those histories; this was an actress whose work had been overshadowed by extensive critical attention to her male directors. As the project developed I became deeply impressed by Christie’s personal and professional choices: the manner in which she stands outside the conventional life story for women (eschewing marriage and children); her bravery and integrity in choosing, and rejecting, film roles; the breathtaking honesty and self-reflexiveness she demonstrates in interviews. Her work and the idea of Christie have ultimately been a source of inspiration that has nourished this project in innumerable ways.

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1 PERSONA: BECOMING ‘JULIE CHRISTIE’

Introduction The first phase of Christie’s career spans the 1960s, with the decade bookended by the feature films Billy Liar (1963) and In Search of Gregory (1969). Pre-stardom Christie gained a professional grounding in film, television and repertory theatre. In 1961 she graduated from Britain’s Central School of Speech and Drama where she had received what was, in the British context, a conventional training that prepared students for employment in theatre rather than film or television.1 The next three years were spent trying to establish herself as an actress, making modestly budgeted comedies in British film studios, picking up television work and appearing in a couple of seasons at Birmingham Repertory and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she made little impression. Her experience was typical of actors in Britain where the production base of the featurefilm market was unpredictable: actors were rarely placed on long-term contracts and working in theatre was common practice. Her breakthrough came in 1963 when director John Schlesinger reluctantly cast her as Liz in his high-profile adaptation of Keith Waterhouse’s novel Billy Liar. This was rapidly followed by Darling, Young Cassidy and Doctor Zhivago (all 1965), and by April 1966 Christie had won an Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Darling. This meteoric rise was followed by a series of relative flops,

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commercially speaking (Fahrenheit 451, 1966, Far from the Madding Crowd, 1967, Petulia and In Search of Gregory), and by the end of the decade Christie had fallen out of favour, her public profile as much the result of her romance with Warren Beatty as her film work. But this picture of apparently shortlived success does not do justice to the social significance of Christie. The sixties as a decade selfconsciously positioned themselves as representing a radical new chapter in British history, one that swept away the social constraints of the previous generation and ushered in a time of liberation and freedom. Christie’s achievement within that decade was to popularise a new model of femininity, one marked as independent and sexually autonomous, and that is still recognisable in 2015. This portrait of highs and lows encompasses a diverse range of professional experiences, which exposed the actress to, and tutored her in, a wide array of directorial styles, industry production contexts and publicity regimes. By the end of the decade Christie had worked with British and European ‘New Wave’ directors (John Schlesinger, Franc¸ois Truffaut, Richard Lester), directors of classic Hollywood (David Lean, John Ford), and actors whose experience spanned British, American and European film, television and stage (Rod Steiger, Oskar Werner, Omar Sharif, Dirk Bogarde, James Robertson Justice, Tom Courtenay, Peter Finch, Michael Sarrazin and George C. Scott).2 This gave her a training that was international in texture and tone. She had been photographed by David Bailey and Richard Avedon and modelled regularly for American Vogue. Her status as a fashion icon was so well established that by 1967 Time magazine confidently declared that ‘what Julie Christie wears has more real impact on fashion than all the clothes of the 10 Best-Dressed women combined’.3 By any yardstick the decade was a baptism of fire. It was also typical of a type of eclectic training that was to become the norm in Hollywood as the studio system increasingly unravelled in the sixties and the contours of post-studio stardom (freelance working, director–star collaborations) began to take shape.

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These experiences shaped Julie Christie in very profound ways. In later interviews she confessed to spending much of her time in the sixties being ‘terrified’ during filming, with little understanding of the production process and what was expected of her, the consciousness of which she claimed damaged her confidence as an actress for a while.4 While this was undoubtedly uncomfortable, the process was not without its benefits, as it enabled her to identify the types of films and production contexts she preferred, and which she was to prioritise for the rest of her career. It also gave rise to a type of ‘edgy’ performance style – which the director Richard Lester described as ‘unfettling nervousness’ – compatible with the energy and restlessness of much sixties cinema.5 In this chapter I explore how Julie Christie became a star and how new forms of cinema, performance styles and fashion were key to her success. I place this success in the context of an audience appetite for a modern form of femininity, which would reflect the decade’s transformed attitudes to social and sexual permissiveness. And I also situate her work within the wider cultural context of an American interest in ‘Britishness’ that is historically specific to the mid-1960s. In this chapter I interpret the development of Christie’s star persona as expressive of the commodification of a certain kind of Britishness in America, and of a domestication of a liberated sixties femininity into something simultaneously edgy but accessible. This chapter also considers Christie’s professional relationship with the director–producer team of John Schlesinger and Joe Janni with whom she made several films while under contract to Janni between 1963 and 1968. I argue that a narrative of male control was written around the actress as the men were credited with ‘creating’ Christie and, in the words of one journalist, ‘turn[ing] a starlet into a world star’.6 I examine how Christie pushed back against this in a bid to move from mainstream to independent cinema and, while not wholly successful, her actions did have the effect of underpinning the rebellious/independent strand of her star persona and setting the

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scene for her later career as a prestige star. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Christie’s well-managed transition in the 1970s where in stepping back from mainstream stardom she was able to transcend the moment of ‘the sixties’ to become a star with staying power.

Getting started: the building blocks Julie Frances Christie was born on 14 April 1940 in the Assam region of India. Her father managed a tea plantation for the Jokai (Assam) Tea Company and the family was part of the expatriate British community in India. Christie’s childhood was itinerant. Sent to the south of England in 1947 to be educated, she attended a number of day and boarding schools, entailing long periods of separation from her parents (who later divorced); circumstances that she later claimed increased her independence but left her feeling lonely.7 Aged sixteen she spent some time in France, living with a family to improve her French, a sojourn that introduced her to art and French literature, widening her horizons beyond the relatively narrow confines of her solidly middle-class upbringing. In 1959, aged eighteen, she enrolled on an acting course at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, an experience she later credited as a turning point in her early life, introducing her to people from different class backgrounds.8 With minimal funds to support herself she eked out a frugal existence, sleeping on friends’ sofas and, like others of her generation, enthusiastically consuming the European ‘New Wave’ films being shown at the London cinemas. This shaped her film consciousness in very particular ways and she retrospectively described herself as ‘crazy on French film’ at this time, with aspirations to appear in ‘a Nouvelle Vague film’.9 With the success of Billy Liar elements of this biography were repeated in early press commentary about Christie in ways that crafted a narrative of

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independence and adventure around the actress. Alongside the press tales of pythons, Indian ayahs and boarding-school expulsions were early descriptions of Christie’s air of ‘determined vagrancy’, and critics such as Alexander Walker would later describe her as a ‘deracinated’ child of British colonialism.10 It was this sense of ‘uprootedness’ that perfectly chimed with the decade’s appetite for social and sexual liberation and played a major part in Christie’s breakthrough as a star.

British cinema and society in the 1960s Before we come to Billy Liar, however, it is worth reflecting on the professional conditions under which Christie was operating. The early 1960s were a particularly inauspicious time for an actress to enter the job market. The British film industry, as with many other European countries, lacked Hollywood’s mature studio system and, as such, could offer only intermittent employment opportunities for ambitious actors. This situation was compounded in the early 1960s by a downturn in film production levels.11 These unpromising circumstances were further limited by a decline in traditional femalecentred genres as a new group of male directors moved into British film production. These directors responded to changes in censorship regulations (themselves part of a broader liberalisation agenda in British society and culture) but, as Sue Harper has argued, ‘the new freedoms temporarily blinded some film-makers to anything but sexual action’, a move that required actresses to function primarily as sex kittens.12 The challenges of access and sexual exploitation faced by all actresses were particularly acute in the early 1960s. But other factors worked in Christie’s favour. Britain in the sixties was a time of social transformation, with a buoyant economy, increased consumerism and a vibrant youth culture, with fashion, film and music at the vanguard of social change. One of the most

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significant developments of the decade was the ready availability of contraception, specifically the pill, for married and, increasingly, single women. A number of high-profile events – the Profumo affair, the British publication of Sex and the Single Girl in 1963 – triggered a debate about young women’s sexuality. If sex was separated from procreation, what were the responsibilities and aspirations of young women in relation to marriage, love and monogamy? Historians have seen this as a time when opposing versions of modern female selfhood were in circulation. On the one hand, education promised young women social progression while youth culture advocated self-assertion in the face of traditional authorities. But traditional discourses of womanhood – marriage, motherhood and the sexual double-standard – retained their currency.13 This conflict was to preoccupy Christie’s generation, women born in the post-war years and who came of age in the sixties. British film culture responded to these concerns in certain ways. It did, as discussed, cast actresses such as Barbara Windsor in sex kitten roles (typically working class and ‘feisty’) but it also looked for, as Harper has shown, ‘actresses who could … indicate some of the complexities of sexual freedom’; they had to show a serious side.14 To communicate ‘complexity’ film-makers sought actresses who were middle class and educated and it is within this context that we need to understand the careers of not only Julie Christie but her nearest contemporaries Sarah Miles and Susannah York, although certain factors singled out Christie alone for international fame. This coterie of actresses played characters involved in situations where sex took place on their terms and could function as a form of empowerment for women. As a social type they recall Richard Dyer’s categories of ‘The Rebel’ and the ‘Independent Woman’ – types associated with oppositional values – and indeed a narrative of rebellion and independence accrued to all three actresses.15 But what was particular to the British actresses of the sixties was that independence was inflected through discourses of ‘seriousness’.

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Miles was typed as a ‘rebel girl’, York was described as a ‘maverick … who also worries about her identity’, while Christie was ‘audacious’ and ‘volatile’ but also sensitive and shy.16 As Britain and America negotiated the social and sexual transformations of the age, it was the new female type of the independent yet sensitive rebel girl that quickly gained currency. This was because, in showing a serious side, their personas could suggest that sex had not become wholly frivolous; it retained a moral dimension.

The early films: emergent and residual formats Two productions in the 1961–3 period illustrate how well suited the actress was to performing this new female type. In 1961 she starred in the BBC’s new flagship science-fiction drama A for Andromeda, which successfully captured the sense of social change in Britain. In 1962–3 the actress then made two comedy films for the Rank Organisation, a long-established studio in the British film industry that was struggling to adapt to changing audience tastes. The structure of feeling in the Rank films was residual and out of step with Christie’s looks and performance style. It is worth examining in more detail the relative success and failure of these texts to understand how this female type functioned. A for Andromeda was widely reviewed by all the British press and publicised to audiences through television trailers and magazine articles, bringing Christie widespread coverage early in her career. Set in the near future (1970) the series featured female characters in scientific roles, a reflection of its creators’ belief that women would soon hold positions of responsibility, and associating Christie with progressive agendas from the outset. Christie plays two characters: a dark-haired research assistant Christine, hard-working and professional, and the blonde-haired and sexually attractive Andromeda who causes chaos.

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The script notes describe the Christine character as ‘a young post-graduate student, serious, and pretty in a rather striking Baltic way’, while the Andromeda character was to be sexually appealing, along the lines of Brigitte Bardot.17 This typing – serious and sexy – is an early prototype of the middle-class rebel girl. As Christine, Christie is dressed in a knee-length skirt and white blouse – the working outfit of an educated young woman of her class and generation – and her portrayal is convincing; as she moves across the laboratory handling technical equipment she looks every inch the coolly competent post-graduate student. Conversely as Andromeda, Christie is presented with shoulder-length blonde hair worn down, minimal make-up, wearing loose, light-coloured dresses. As the narrative unfolds her clothing becomes torn and her appearance increasingly dishevelled, an ungroomed aesthetic intended to look ‘natural’, but one that is also highly sexually evocative. Indeed this look has much in common with the ‘scruffy’ yet sexy look popularised by Jean Shrimpton in the early sixties, a point I will develop more fully later in this chapter. Christie carries the look effortlessly; this is no virginal ingénue but a young woman whose desires are her own. Christie’s performance was singled out for praise by the popular press; ‘Andromeda is a master-stroke: attractive, sexy (the actress is Julie Christie) but more than that, a catalyst to make the plot fizz at last.’18 Although Christie was far from a star at this point, the success of the series and her triumph in a role requiring her to be sexy and ‘more than that’, suggest both how British visual culture was experimenting with new female types and how Christie was ideal for these roles. The conclusion implied by the Andromeda role in the series is that in the future it will be possible to reconcile elements (sexy and serious) that have typically been designated ‘contradictory’ in cultural representation. By contrast, the actress’s next performances in genre comedy were a departure from these new developments. Christie’s two films for the struggling Rank Organisation – Crooks Anonymous (1962) and

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Conventional ‘glamour’, Julie Christie in Crooks Anonymous (1962)

The Fast Lady (1963) – were light comedies with ensemble casts in which she fulfilled stereotypical roles. In Crooks Anonymous she is a pin-up type (a stripper) while in The Fast Lady she plays the conventional love interest, typed as the girl-next-door. What is noteworthy about these films is how out of place she looks. Although Christie was cast because she was pretty and inexpensive, the director of both films, Ken Annakin, recognised in her something different; she was ‘not the traditional English Rose … [she] had a special magnetism’.19 But neither film capitalised on this potential. Christie wears tight pedal-pusher jeans and polo-necked sweaters – a style that does not suit her – while the heavy make-up and backcombed hair make her look older than her twenty-one years. Publicity shots for the films show Christie looking stiff and awkward in a number of conventional ‘glamour’ poses. Despite this

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unpromising context, elements of Christie’s performance run counter to conventional sexual objectification and presage the new modes of youthful independence that were to characterise her sixties work. Her costuming in Crooks Anonymous is heavily sexualised but her serious expression and contemporary mannerisms and poses (perching on a chair arm with her hands held casually between her legs) work against objectification. In The Fast Lady, modernity is signalled, not by self-conscious lines such as ‘Get with it Daddy’, but by Christie’s barefoot sprint across a lawn where an ‘impromptu’ swerve around an awkwardly placed gardener implies reserves of energy. But these are small examples in an otherwise residual format and Rank’s inability to use Christie effectively is an index of how far removed the organisation was from the new cultural landscape. Christie’s popular success was to be found in an altogether different style of film-making influenced by the British ‘New Wave’.

British New Wave: Billy Liar and the ‘chic’ young woman Christie’s next two films – Billy Liar and Darling – provided the foundation on which her star persona was built. Both were made by the director/producer team of John Schlesinger and Joe Janni, who were to become key figures in Christie’s sixties career. Billy Liar bears many of the hallmarks of a British New Wave film (northern location shooting, working-class, provincial lives) while the setting for Darling is London (the ‘swinging city’) and the world of fashion photography and fast living. While Schlesinger and Janni were reluctant to cast Christie in Billy Liar, the role in Darling was written for her, a starmaking vehicle that won her an Oscar. While both films have been the subject of critical debate what is significant for my discussion of Christie’s star persona is casting, performance and reception, and I will look at each film in turn in the light of these categories.

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Casting the role: a star-making entrance and fashion photography Schlesinger and Janni had first auditioned Christie in 1962 for an earlier New Wave film (A Kind of Loving) but rejected her on the grounds that she was ‘too exciting’ for the role of a suburban secretary. They interviewed her twice more in 1963 for the character Liz in their next film Billy Liar, who Schlesinger envisaged as ‘a sort of earthy mother figure, a heavily breasted, all enveloping creature’.20 Once again they rejected Christie, this time on the grounds that she was ‘too chic’, a judgment suggesting that the impact of Christie’s recent year in France was evident to the production team.21 Filming started with another actress but she was taken ill midway through the shoot and Schlesinger, operating with a small budget and tight production schedule, had little choice but to cast Christie. This decision entailed rewriting the character’s initial entrance, illustrating how Christie’s casting disrupted his intended presentation of the character of Liz. In the final shooting script Liz was to have entered the narrative when she meets Billy in the classical music department of a local record store, an introduction faithful to the original source novel. But Schlesinger radically revised his original plan, clearly considering such an entrance too mundane for Christie. Christie’s Liz was to be introduced via a one-minute sequence showing the character walking through an urban landscape to the accompaniment of an extradiegetic jazz score. The sequence is well known in film histories, identified as both a star-making entrance and as signalling a new direction for British cinema but it is worth reflecting on Christie’s performance and the aesthetics of the body because these laid the foundations of her star persona. Schlesinger frames Liz through a combination of crane, long and medium shots as she traverses an urban setting undergoing redevelopment. This performance frame prioritises the movement of the body. Liz crosses a bridge, mugs in a

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shop window, smokes a cigarette and absentmindedly skips over pavement cracks. Her clothing is unremarkable (a plain skirt and single-breasted coat) and her ungroomed appearance ‘natural’. She moves with confidence through the urban environment and her activities – skipping, pulling faces, singing/humming – suggest her freedom from the restrictive bodily codes of decorous femininity. As she passes through the city’s streets people stop in their tracks and turn to stare at her, nudging friends and exchanging comments. Schlesinger’s documentary background and his willingness to retain unscripted moments in his films imbue the reactions of passers-by with a sense of realism. Christie’s clothing and behaviours are ‘natural’ but in this environment she is extraordinary; a fantasy figure within the context of provincial life. Passers-by respond as though the figure were not an ordinary girl but already a star. But the sequence is not wholly documentary in its aesthetics; rather the style of the introduction has its roots in the new trends in British and American fashion photography. From the early 1960s pioneer photographers such as David Bailey were posing models like Jean Shrimpton in urban locations rather than in the conventional domestic or studio settings. Bailey’s fashion photography showed models often walking, running or appearing to step out of the frame and this popularised a ‘new mode of femininity’: fluid, active, modern.22 Schlesinger will have been familiar with the work of Bailey and his contemporaries and the casting of Christie – whose slim, small-breasted body is reminiscent of Shrimpton’s – gave the director the chance to foreground this new mode of femininity on screen in ways that would not have been possible with the original actress cast.23 The sequence also showcases what were to become two central components of the Christie persona: the broad smile and big eyes. In response to questions about where she has been and why, Christie’s Liz smiles broadly, closes her eyes and shrugs her shoulders, her arms gesturing palm upwards in an amused manner at the question.

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Restless yet caring: performing femininity in Billy Liar (1963)

The ‘shrug’ signifies insouciance while its status as a casual gesture suggests one liberated from rules and social expectations, someone who pleases herself and lives in the moment; a form of social rebellion. A wide smile and open arms (a passive, inviting pose) balance the shrug gesture, drawing the recipient into its orbit, signifying approachability and neutralising any hint of dismissiveness possibly evoked by the shrug. The smile extends to the eyes, which are wide-eyed and open, indicating a friendly demeanour. It is through the combination of the eyes and the smile that Christie

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communicates ‘empathy’, establishing a caring/sensitive dimension to her star persona. Christie’s Liz is not the ‘mother figure’ type initially envisaged by Schlesinger but she is caring and exhibits concern for Billy. It was this ability to empathise with other characters and convey that empathy to the audience that was to become a recurring feature of Christie’s subsequent performances. In the character of Liz, Christie’s performance offered audiences a new type of femininity: energetic and restless, while also sensitive and caring.

A scruffy starlet: critical reception British press commentary was quick to pick up on Christie’s performance and from it wove the fabric of her star image, mapping out a set of co-ordinates that were mobilised throughout Christie’s 1960s career. Although the film received mixed reviews and Christie’s screen time amounted to a bare eleven minutes, the actress was singled out for praise. Reviewers delighted in her ‘coolness and charm’ and her ‘easy, unforced, natural’ performance.24 Her face was described as ‘a kaleidoscope of changing expressions’, her appearance scruffy and ungroomed with hair that ‘looks as though it has been stuck on with glue’ and clothes that ‘appear to have been put through the wringer, dry’.25 These remarks helped establish the actress’s star persona as casual, ‘natural’ and, through an association with movement, youthful and energetic. Indeed part of Christie’s appeal was that she was beautiful in a way that was seen as new and different, relative to the standards of the day. John Schlesinger commented, ‘It’s not a traditional face. The jawline is masculine.’ Some found this unnerving, with members of the Darling crew purportedly describing Christie as ‘look[ing] just like a feller’ while other critics discerned in the actress a ‘butch quality’.26 It was this very

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difference that marked Christie out from the previous generation of stars – Audrey Hepburn, for example – who had popularised elfin features. And it was this difference that was to make her ideal for the pages of American Vogue, where the magazine’s new editor Diana Vreeland favoured models with ‘unconventional’ looks, relative to American norms of beauty.27 The scruffy aesthetic used to signal Christie’s sex appeal was very contemporary, associated with a particular set of Londonbased values and behaviours of the early 1960s that were broadly anti-establishment. Conventional modes of femininity and decorum were eschewed to suggest a female sexual appetite, albeit one constructed by and for men. Bailey’s photographs of Jean Shrimpton looking ‘dishevelled’ and ‘just-out-of-bed’ had popularised this look, introducing what Stephen Gundle describes as a new form of ‘excitement and sex appeal’ into fashion shoots.28 Press appraisals of Christie align her with these new styles and sets of values, further developing the air of casualness and sexual freedom that made up the Christie persona. The sense of Christie as something new in British visual culture, and its intoxicating potential, is evident in the film critic Alexander Walker’s assessment of Christie’s performance as Liz as someone who ‘remind[s] us less of an English girl than an Italian one. Here … is a provincial kid who takes her pleasures gladly in the Latin manner … the strangeness is exhilarating.’29 For other critics she had ‘revolutionized the concept of the sex symbol’ and encapsulated ‘the way-out allure of the sixties’.30 The discursive construction of Christie was as a new type of femininity, one that united social and sexual independence with a caring/sensitive nature, thereby offering audiences an idealised solution to the ideological ‘problem’ of the liberated woman of the sixties with access to contraception and education. This was an image that, as we will see, was very marketable abroad.

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The American market and cosmopolitan taste Christie’s success in the North American market was facilitated by two factors: she was part of a broader movement of ideas from British to US culture and her mini-skirted ‘look’ was about to become fashionable. I return to the topic of fashion in the next section on Darling and Vogue. What I want to highlight here are changing consumer taste patterns and the appetite of middle-class Americans for ‘cosmopolitanism’. As Cynthia Baron demonstrates, Americans from the late 1950s onwards had been appropriating new ideas and goods (principally from Europe) as an attractive way to ‘break from routine … [and] conformity’ while satisfying desires for ‘sophisticated consumer objects’.31 French and Italian films had benefited particularly well from these consumer taste patterns but from 1962 onwards and with the success of Dr No (1962), British films moved centre-stage, themselves part of a wider interest in London, which was accruing status as the cultural centre of the West. British success was further enhanced by greater relaxations in film censorship, relative to the American industry, which enabled Britain to produce films which were more explicit, dramatising new social, sexual and moral codes. In this respect Britain was able to, as Alexander Walker described it, ‘sell the sensations of its own social revolution to America’.32 While Billy Liar lacked the commercial clout of a Bond film, American reviewers operating in this cultural climate were quick to pick up on Christie and identify her to their readers as a new modern woman. Early coverage in America’s premier photojournalism magazine Look illustrates how the emerging star was appropriated by reviewers to mediate new British values to an American audience. Look allocated Christie a four-page spread in August 1964, which carefully balanced British youthful insouciance with aspects of the American cheerleader type to create a narrative of playful yet serious femininity for its American readers. The piece describes Christie as an

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‘independent girl’ who ‘just enjoys herself’, ‘has the 1964 tempo’, is ‘flitty’ and ‘unpredictable’, with an irreverent attitude. Readers are told she lives in a ‘relaxed’ part of London and has met The Beatles, situating her firmly within the high-profile trend for British film, fashion and music.33 This edgy femininity, however, has to be translated for an American readership into something more palatable and recognisably American, which it does through the beach setting and colour photography. Images show Christie sunbathing, buying hot-dogs and being driven in an open-topped convertible (bare feet on the dashboard), while the article’s central image – a colour closeup of Christie emphasising her sun-bleached blonde hair, tanned white skin, blue-grey eyes and pink lips – conforms to the dominant American aesthetic of white femininity. The direct gaze is offset by the dreamy expression and position of the hands, which suggest ‘introspection’, thus as an object of the gaze the figure is both sexy and serious. In a manner typical of star writing, the magazine’s coverage encompasses a number of contradictory elements (already seen in British coverage of the actress), informing its readers that Christie is scruffy yet sexy, independent but also ‘quite maternal in some ways’, unpredictable but believes in love; a strategy that domesticates liberated femininity into something edgy but accessible.34 By combining elements of an established type (the cheerleader) with a historically specific type (the young, modern British woman) a transatlantic quality is attained, which made Christie ideally placed to satisfy the cosmopolitan tastes of mainstream American audiences. All she needed now was a star vehicle and some shrewd publicity; enter Joe Janni and Darling.

Contractual arrangements: Joe Janni After Christie’s success in Billy Liar she signed a five-year contract with the film’s producer Joe Janni, the terms of which governed her

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employment during the next phase of her stardom (from Darling to In Search of Gregory). The producer paid Christie an annual salary, which guaranteed him access to her services as an actress in films he produced or any other films he chose. From these ‘external’ film projects Christie would pay Janni 50 per cent of the fee she earned.35 In many respects the terms of Christie’s employment were not dissimilar to those that had governed stars in the studio era; she was under contract, albeit it to a producer, rather than a studio, and with some degree of autonomy, but required to appear in projects not necessarily of her choosing, to undertake associated publicity work and to accept a smaller financial reward for her labour. This particular contractual arrangement was unusual in the context of British cinema, where stars typically worked on a freelance basis, and it was the shifting commercial/legal landscape of 1960s film-making that made this arrangement possible. Although initially resistant to Christie’s casting in Billy Liar, Janni was astute enough to recognise her potential in a rapidly evolving market and the importance of finding roles to exploit her ‘chic’ and ‘exciting’ qualities. A veteran of the British studio system, Janni had a keen instinct for popular taste and was able to adapt to the new format of independent producerled film-making in Britain in the 1960s.36 In terms of stardom, there were pros and cons to the Janni contract. On the one hand, he was a shrewd producer and was responsible for getting Christie into films such as Young Cassidy and Doctor Zhivago, which raised her profile in the American market. One of his first decisions was to loan Christie to MGM for a small part in Young Cassidy, directed by John Ford, opposite established star Rod Taylor. With the MGM machine behind the production, Christie looked every inch the star, with sumptuous lighting by Jack Cardiff, and positive notices in American publications such as Life magazine, which promised its readers that Christie was an ‘incandescent, beryleyed beauty … [who] seems destined for a notable career’.37 On the other hand, Janni, unlike MGM, did not have the resources of a

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studio publicity department at his disposal, which limited his capacity to fully exploit the market potential of his new star. And he had not banked on his star having particular ideas about her career which ran counter to his own. Christie’s aspirations to appear in a nouvelle vague film conflicted with Janni’s commercial ambitions for the actress.

Career pathways: mainstream and independent Between Darling and In Search of Gregory (the last film made under the Janni contract) Christie’s career was to run along two pathways. The dominant strand was that of mainstream film-making and conventional stardom, comprising roadshow productions such as Doctor Zhivago and Far from the Madding Crowd, high-profile appearances at events such as the Academy Awards (1966, 1967) and photo shoots for British and American Vogue. By 1968 Christie was an established box-office star with market currency, named as second only to John Wayne in a poll of ‘Most Popular’ stars conducted with British cinema exhibitors.38 The second strand of Christie’s career was that of independent, small-scale film-making with auteur directors such as Franc¸ois Truffaut and Richard Lester. Although less prominent in her sixties career, this pathway came to dominate in the 1970s when her work in auteur cinema took precedence over mainstream productions.39 While I do not want to position these as oppositional categories – indeed Truffaut’s auteur cinema gave American audiences a form of cultural capital that had a commercial value in the context of the cosmopolitan tastes identified by Baron – the production, distribution and exhibition contexts varied sufficiently to establish these as distinct if related pathways for a star. Within this parallel career of mainstream and independent film-making was a tussle over what ‘Julie Christie’ meant, who created her, who owned her and her use value as a cultural object.

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It is to this debate that I will now turn in my analysis of Darling and the reception of the film in Britain and America.

Darling and tensions in the star persona In Darling the narrative is centred around Diana Scott (played by Christie), an aspiring model, actress and girl about town, who amuses herself with numerous love affairs and dabbles ineffectually in everything from motherhood to learning Italian. The film takes place in London with scenes in Paris and Rome, and showcases a ‘desirable’ lifestyle of fast living, foreign travel and stylish costumes: Diana shoplifts in Harrods, eats escargots, sunbathes on Italian beaches and dresses in Quantish mini-skirts and glamorous ballgowns. She socialises with advertising executives and photographers and is shown to succeed in a society where surface appearances take precedence over other values. The script is highly judgmental about this contemporary society and therefore Diana Scott as its chief representative. She is portrayed as vain, intellectually vapid and emotionally shallow. Despite such an unpromising characterisation, the film was a commercial success in Britain and particularly in America. The British trade publication Kine Weekly reported that the film was doing ‘splendidly’ at upmarket theatres on its release in September 1965 and its American profile followed a similar pattern particularly on the art-cinema circuit in cities and university towns.40 The film eventually grossed $3.6 million in rentals, an impressive return on its £350,000 production budget.41 In terms of star persona and performance style the film continued along the twin tracks established by Billy Liar: Christie was simultaneously both energetic and restless and sensitive and caring. One critic remarked on her ‘gasping, sighing, whooping spontaneity which makes even a seasoned actor like Dirk Bogarde sound as if he’s simply reading his lines’, a statement that captured

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the impact and exhilaration of Christie’s performance for many.42 Bogarde himself would later credit the actress with teaching him ‘more about ad-libbing than anyone else in the business … she could ad-lib and overlap endlessly’.43 Bogarde’s observation is astute and illustrates one of Christie’s distinctive characteristics. The ability to ad-lib is the ability to improvise, to be of the moment, but it also entails responding to people and adapting to circumstances as they arise, in effect, another form of empathy. In the case of Darling it was a style of performance that offered audiences compensations for a characterisation that many found less than sympathetic. Diana Scott is a markedly less likeable character than Christie’s Liz in Billy Liar and the critical reception reflects this. Many British reviewers responded negatively to the Diana character, who was variously described as a ‘bitch’, ‘slut’, ‘tramp’ and a ‘trollop’, comments that reveal a general perspective on the figure of the young single woman in contemporary British society.44 In the same reviews, however, Christie’s personality was assessed as ‘sensitive’ and therefore appealing, suggesting a split between character and performer or, in star studies discourse, a problematic fit.45 One critic complained that ‘the problem of the film is that the girl, X-rayed so remorselessly, isn’t worth all that close examination … Miss Christie deserves better, and … her own sensitive personality keeps shining through.’46 Another found that ‘Miss Christie … [is] temperamentally miscast … her niceness is blazingly evident.’47 These comments indicate that reviewers were in some way protecting the actress from the implications of the role she was playing (a bitch) and that they had a particular notion of the figure of ‘Julie Christie’ (i.e. not a bitch). The reference to Christie’s ‘own sensitive personality’ also elided Christie’s work as an actor, aligning her with the widely derided ‘personification’ mode of performance where the actor is just herself on screen.48 This type of naturalisation is not unusual in discussions of star actors and is particularly evident when the subject

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is a young female whose physical appearance and ‘natural talent’ is prioritised over skill and professional training.49 As Karen Hollinger has argued in the context of actresses’ labour, discourses of ‘work, training, and professionalism’ tend to be emphasised for male stars while female stars are readily portrayed as ‘Galatea figures’, whose careers are launched and managed by powerful male directors or producers.50 Press discussions of Christie further illustrate how the actress’s work was negated through discourses constructing her as the result of Janni and Schlesinger’s creative endeavour. The contractual arrangement was widely reported in the British press and a debate about male control and female agency ensued. Schlesinger was often referred to as ‘svengali to her trilby’ while Janni was credited as ‘the man who gave Julie confidence and turned a starlet into a world star’.51 Other reports portrayed Christie as little more than Schlesinger’s puppet while both Schlesinger and Frederic Raphael (the screenwriter of Darling) publicly disparaged Christie’s acting ability, thus positioning themselves and their input into the creative process as crucial to the success of the actress and her films.52 By point of contrast, one of Christie’s male contemporaries, Albert Finney, was praised for ‘giving all our English actors a lesson’ for his performance in the British New Wave film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).53 In this way not only was Christie’s labour elided but the narrative of the independent woman was neutralised. But the men did not have it all their own way. Christie intervened in this narrative of malleable femininity and heroic male endeavour. The actress was reported in the press as saying ‘The contract can end as soon as it’s possible as far as I’m concerned’ and ‘I still don’t like to be tied up in any way at all.’54 This resistance to a narrative of male control was a means whereby Christie exercised her autonomy and it echoed the discourse of independence that was written into the actress’s star persona. But this was more than rhetoric. Christie had spent much of 1965 in Spain filming Doctor Zhivago for David Lean, loaned out by Janni to MGM in return for

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emergency funds to complete Darling. She found the experience of working on an epic production with a large cast and crew overwhelming and not to her liking. Certainly the production context of Zhivago was very different to what she had experienced in Britain when working with Schlesinger. Darling’s £350,000 budget was dwarfed by Zhivago’s production costs, which escalated to $15 million as an extensive cast and crew spent nine months filming near Madrid. It was Lean’s policy to keep his cast on standby, which meant long periods of inactivity, which the actress resented. In Christie’s letters to Schlesinger in 1965, she complained that she and Tom Courtenay ‘moon[ed] around like sick cows’ and Madrid had ‘nothing beautiful to see, architecturally or otherwise’.55 In 1966 Christie confessed ‘I didn’t enjoy making the film’, a statement she later explained as being ‘annoyed by all the money, the cost and the grandiosity of it all’.56 She did take some positives from the experience, however. The production context made different demands of her as an actress and helped her to refine a performance style suitable for romantic roles, something that I will explore in more detail in Chapter 2. And Zhivago seemed to sharpen her resolve about the kind of film she would rather make, where possible. In what can be read as payback for the Zhivago experience, Christie signed up for Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, an art-house film made by one of the leading directors of the French New Wave and the type of cinema to which Christie aspired. An adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s futuristic novel, which depicts a society where books are burned and ideas suppressed, Christie took the twin roles of Linda and Clarisse and starred opposite the classically trained Austrian actor Oskar Werner, who had enjoyed success in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962). The film had little commercial value, relative to Doctor Zhivago, but high cultural cachet and it was Christie’s decision to take the role. The press reported Janni waiving his usual 50 per cent fee on the understanding that he could substitute F451 for a more lucrative role

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elsewhere, with Christie remarking ‘He wants an extra film out of me in place of it. I don’t know whether he’ll get it.’57 F451 was an index of Christie’s agency, indicative of the career she desired as well as her determination to establish herself as more than a cultural object to be battled over by others. But being under contract made it hard to pull in this direction and it was the 1970s before Christie could pursue her preferred path in independent films. What stood in her way was the next stage of her career, the high-profile success of Darling and Doctor Zhivago having turned her, in her own words, into ‘Lassie the Wonder Dog’.58

The girl, the gear, the lifestyle: Christie and the US Christie arrived in New York in December 1965 for the premiere of Doctor Zhivago, to an enthusiastic reception from the American press. Interest in the actress had been mounting since the release of Darling in August 1965, which had received universally positive notices in America. The New York Herald Tribune deemed Christie’s performance as Diana Scott a ‘delight’ while the upmarket Life magazine described it as ‘pure gold’. Newsweek marked Christie’s American arrival with a frontcover and four-page article on the actress with the strapline ‘Voom! Voom! Here Comes Julie Christie’, picking up from the British press the focus on youthful freedom.59 Equally enthusiastic were the fashion press, with Women’s Wear Daily reporting on Christie’s clothes and hair on her arrival in New York while American Vogue featured the actress in a fashion shoot, alongside Françoise Dorleac and Geraldine Chaplin, identifying her ‘look’ as ‘that of the English young’ and the actress as a ‘new English movie meteor’.60 But it was not only Darling that captured the American imagination. Press attention around Doctor Zhivago as MGM’s latest roadshow spectacle also helped to build an audience for Christie. MGM’s generous publicity budget funded a promotional strategy that

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included high-profile East and West Coast premieres, film trailer advertising on American television and television interviews with the film’s stars, including Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, a strategy guaranteeing the actress maximum exposure in the US. But the film was in danger of failing at the box office. It received mixed reviews – with some dismissing it as ‘tedious soap opera’ – and played to empty theatres in New York in the first month.61 Where critics were united was in praise for Christie, hailing her as ‘remarkable’ and ‘a star of the first magnitude’.62 So the success of Christie in Darling, and general interest in the actress in fashion and lifestyle magazines, helped to generate an audience for Doctor Zhivago in its crucial first weeks on release. This simultaneous release of both an independent and a mainstream production played a major factor in Christie’s fortunes, granting her maximum exposure and enabling her to reach a wide audience. In January 1966 she won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress for her role in Darling and in February 1966 her Oscar nomination was announced, at which point the American press became saturated with features on the actress. Christie’s popularity in America can be understood by placing it in context: the cinema audience was diversifying, the cultural scene was changing and the star’s persona was such that she could function simultaneously as an independent and mainstream star, as well as appeal to both men and women.

The American audience and a taste for ‘Britishness’ America’s cinema audiences diversified in the 1960s, continuing a trend that had started in the post-war years and that was accompanied by a gradual shift from urban cinemas to suburban multiplexes. Suburban families, youth audiences and college students were all viable and distinct markets for a film industry dealing with the demise of the studio system, an outdated Production Code

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Administration code and market competition from television.63 As middle-class Americans developed an appetite for European films and consumer goods to satisfy their increasingly cosmopolitan tastes, importing foreign films became a viable strategy for American exhibitors, allowing them to meet the market demands of both college-educated students and their older counterparts. By autumn/winter 1965 and the release of Darling and Doctor Zhivago, Americans had been the enthusiastic recipients of two Beatles tours, Vogue’s editor Diana Vreeland had championed David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton with evangelical zeal (‘Stop! The English have arrived!’) and Bridget Riley’s much-anticipated exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art had sold out.64 On 15 April 1966 (three days before Christie’s Oscar success) Time magazine consecrated London as the Western world’s cultural capital with its special edition on ‘London: The Swinging City’, its declaration that ‘the girls have become as emancipated as the boys’ positioning the figure of the young single woman at the centre of the social and cultural revolution.65 Darling, the Diana Scott character and Julie Christie worked on a number of levels for a heterogeneous American audience. First, the attractive costumes were quickly taken up by the American fashion industry. Second, the character’s lifestyle and attitude appealed to the curiosity and inclinations of an audience with a taste for ‘coolness’ and moral ambiguity. And finally, Christie, who was closely linked to the Diana Scott character, was seen as the embodiment of a new generation and a new femininity. It is worth looking at each of these topics in turn to get a sense of the impact Christie had between 1965 and 1967.

Christie and fashion Darling’s director John Schlesinger was adamant that the clothes and hair of Christie’s character should capture the contemporary

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moment. For the Rome scenes he instructed the film’s costume designer Julie Harris to ensure that the clothes were ‘with it’ and that Diana was very ‘Vidal Sassoon’. In the Paris sequence he wanted Christie to appear ‘very Quantish’ and accordingly the actress was dressed in the now iconic white Courrèges boots and a shift dress.66 Christie’s look in the film is both contemporary and affordable. Diana’s clothes were, according to Julie Harris, the result of ‘a bit of a quick shop with Julie Christie in the High Street’ (which in London in 1964 meant boutiques on the Kings Road) with the items then adapted in costume fittings as Christie persuaded the designer to shorten the skirts.67 Fashion then was both part of the Diana Scott character and written into Christie’s star image. Diana’s ‘look’ – the result of a creative collaboration between the director, designer and actress – showcased British street style (kickpleated skirts, shift dresses, knee-high socks, skinny rib jumpers) alongside French prêt-à-porter and was met with an enthusiastic response by both the American fashion press and its readers. The outfits were easy to copy and the skirts, jumpers and little caps of Christie’s ‘Chelsea Girl’ look quickly became an established uniform for American youth, sold by the country’s department stores, which imported London designers for their enthusiastic customers.68 Julie Harris recalled that ‘America went mad for it’ while Petticoat, the British magazine for ‘the new young woman’, reported that ‘on campus throughout America, college girls have deserted their sweatshirts and Bermuda shorts in favour of pleated kilts and chunky knits – all with the Rule Britannia look’.69 The fashion trend extended to suburban daughters and their older ‘college girl’ sisters. These commercial markets were expanded to include the older readership of Vogue who, with a higher disposable income, might be persuaded to buy an $18 dress by young English designers Tuffin and Foale, as modelled by Julie Christie in a fashion shoot for the magazine in February 1966. Vogue had been gradually introducing its readers to the new British fashions throughout 1964 and 1965 and

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Julie Christie wearing (left) Tuffin and Foale, Vogue, February 1966 and (right) in John Kloss for McCall’s, November 1966

Darling both coincided with and galvanised the American appetite for British designs. Vogue was quick to identify Christie as representative of the new look and the actress made several appearances in the magazine between 1965 and 1968, further establishing the link between fashion and her persona, which was particularly striking in the American market. The ‘Vogue’s Own Boutique’ feature in February 1966, for example, followed Christie around New York where she ‘shops, and shops, and shops, and shops, and shops’, implicitly exhorting its readers to do the same and adopting the tried-and-tested formula of linking a star–fashion relationship to the processes of consumption. Other magazines quickly followed Vogue’s lead, with McCall’s, for example, borrowing Christie’s fashion credentials to promote the work of ‘top young American designers’, who were adapting the British look for an American market. Both magazines shoot Christie in ways that draw on the ‘body in motion’ aesthetic then dominating fashion photography. And a long-sleeved mini-dress designed by Betsey Johnson became known as ‘the Julie Christie’ when the actress was

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photographed wearing it for the fashion magazine Women’s Wear Daily.70 Christie had considerable value in fashion markets. Darling and Christie’s success are very historically specific; a showcase for the English ‘look’ positioned at the vanguard of shifts in fashion and American tastes. It was the confluence of these two elements that boosted Christie’s popularity and saw her star ascend rather than those of her nearest contemporaries Susannah York and Sarah Miles. While both these actresses enjoyed breakthrough roles in America in Tom Jones and The Servant (1963) respectively neither film possessed the fashion cachet of Darling.

Lifestyle, on screen and off These tastes extended to lifestyle and attitude, with the film, and Christie, striking a chord with contemporary audiences, who were equally enthralled by Diana Scott’s partying and Christie’s bohemian life. Diana’s bed-hopping, nudity and relationships with media ‘types’ captured the fantasy of a ‘swinging London’ populated with restless young people motivated by the pleasure principle. Christie was seen as the embodiment of Diana Scott but this equation carried none of the negative connotations that had marked British press reception. Instead American papers wrote enthusiastically about the actress’s home life and domestic arrangements. There were repeated references to Christie’s ‘nomadic’ lifestyle, described as ‘gypsying around London’, and her alleged refusal of ‘materialistic things’, with the actress reportedly worrying about ‘all those dreadful, corrupting, astronomical sums of money film people flash at you’.71 Central to the discourse around Christie was the issue of marriage, with the actress’s ‘special relationship’ with her artist boyfriend Don Bessant a constant source of debate in the press. On the one hand, Christie epitomised the new sexual permissiveness, openly living with Don but with no plans for marriage, which she dismissed as ‘like signing

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your life away’.72 On the other, the actress was reported to be ‘passionately in love with Bessant’ and committed to a long-term relationship. Sceptical of established traditions while remaining invested in romantic love, the Christie persona connected with wider social debates about modern female selfhood and its competing versions of femininity. As the lead in Darling, the values and characteristics attributed to the actress particularly appealed to a college-educated audience with cinephilic appetites and an interest in stars who represented an alternative to mainstream culture. In 1970 Alexander Walker looked back on the emergence of New Hollywood and identified actors such as Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as ‘lifestyle stars’. These were actors whose on- and off-screen lives connected with the ‘confusion, vulnerability, rebellion, alienation, freedom and anarchism’ claimed by young people.73 For Walker these stars had in common a ‘nonHollywood background’, a ‘deep mistrust of acquiring material possessions’ and a sense of ‘conspicuous casualness’, all traits attributed to Christie from 1964 onwards but her significance as a prototype of Walker’s lifestyle star has not been fully appreciated in film history.74

Female identification To what extent can this be explained by gender? Critics have been quick to recognise the appeal of stars like Hoffman and performances such as David Hemmings’s in Blow-Up (1966) to young audiences with an appetite for morally ambiguous protagonists and narratives that engaged with the contradictions of contemporary life.75 But Christie, like Hoffman and Hemmings (whom she predates), also captures the restlessness and moral questioning of her generation, but crucially from a female perspective. The attraction of this for college girls seeking role models in what was a male-defined cinephilic culture should not be

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underestimated.76 Christie made a profound impact on Camille Paglia, for example, when she saw Darling as a college girl in upstate New York in 1966, then aged nineteen. Her diary records impressions of Christie’s ‘quicksilver face’ and later she praised the actress’s performance as an ‘exhilarating burst of cultural vitality … [a] stylish, charming, restlessly kinetic now woman’ when she selected the film for a BFI retrospective in 1999.77 The performance had a similar effect on other women who became central to early feminist film studies. For Marjorie Rosen writing in 1973, Darling (alongside Georgy Girl, 1966) were the cornerstone films in American culture, the few to engage with the sexual revolution from a female perspective. The ‘moral condemnation’ of Schlesinger’s tale was not lost on Rosen but for her, audiences responded to the ‘savvy and style of … Julie Christie’, while the character’s ‘splendid selfishness touched by discontent’ gave viewers the message of ‘a woman saying “My role in this world is not enough.”’78 For Rosen, Paglia and other college-educated young women coming to adulthood in the sixties, Darling was a highly significant film, addressing ideas that American films and stars had yet to tackle. It was this that made Christie a figure for female identification (as well as the more obvious object of desire for male audiences) and laid the groundwork for the actress’s successful transition from the sexual liberation of the 1960s to the women’s liberation of the 1970s and its attention to women’s social roles and self-determination.

Doctor Zhivago: popularising the independent woman While Darling appealed to both the youth market and older, middleclass consumers, Doctor Zhivago popularised the figure of the independent woman and brought it into mainstream cinema. Lean’s film is a romantic drama set against the political and social unrest of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Christie plays Lara, a

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young woman who is seduced by Komarovsky (Rod Steiger) (a friend of her mother), marries someone her own age and later falls in love with the married Zhivago (Omar Sharif) to whom she bears a child. Her character has sufficient depth to convince as both mistress and muse to the poet Zhivago while being independent and strongwilled enough to make her shooting of her seducer Komarovsky plausible. The film offers a more mainstream version of the ‘permissive’ young woman, relative to Diana Scott. Christie’s character is bohemian in her personal relationships by the standards of the day – she acts independently and transgresses social norms – and yet is shown as a romantic who cares deeply for Zhivago. This combination of sexual independence tempered by romanticism struck a chord with viewers. After a slow start at the box office audiences picked up dramatically and by late January 1966 screenings were sold out at the New York Capitol Theatre, with a slower but respectable uptake in Los Angeles.79 By August 1966 the film was selling out in the smaller US towns such as Toledo and Tulsa, indicating widespread interest that went beyond metropolitan areas.80 Film historians have argued that MGM’s strategy of a ‘slow, lengthy release period’ and word of mouth was the ‘commercial salvation’ of Doctor Zhivago but what has yet to be acknowledged was the key role Christie played in this ‘salvation’.81 In an international cast that included Alec Guinness, Geraldine Chaplin, Omar Sharif and Rod Steiger, Christie was once again singled out for praise in reviews. Studio publicity for, and press curiosity about, the film relied heavily on Christie between December 1965 and February 1966, with frontcovers for Life magazine, Films in Review and Newsweek, a strategy that illustrates the commercial viability of the Christie star image.82 The film went on to be a huge commercial hit. From a production budget of $15 million the film’s world rentals totalled in excess of $100 million, of which $60 million came from the American market.83 It was dubbed into twenty-two languages, more than any other in MGM’s history, became one of a small

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number of non-musical films whose soundtrack sold over 1 million units and was MGM’s most commercially successful film of the 1960s.84 Its audiences ranged from the young to the affluent (and aspirational) middle classes. American teenagers voted it ‘the most enjoyable movie of 1967’, the Russian-style winter coats worn by Omar Sharif were the sales hit of New York in the winter of 1965/6 and Christie’s maxi-coat and military tailoring were enthusiastically championed in the pages of Women’s Wear Daily by the magazine’s editor John Fairchild.85 The exhibition strategies for roadshow productions such as Doctor Zhivago – where films opened in prestigious city centre theatres before moving onto first- and secondrun circuits – ensured Christie remained on cinema screens not only in 1966 but throughout 1967 and into 1968.

From the ‘Darling girl’ to ‘Lassie the Wonder Dog’ The high-profile triumph of Doctor Zhivago was to prove both Christie’s making as a star and the undoing of her aspirations for a career in nouvelle vague cinema, at least in the 1960s. The sustained popularity of the film, coupled with her Oscar win in April 1966, made the actress internationally famous. By the end of the year Christie was struggling to cope with the media attention and described herself as ‘Lassie the Wonder Dog’, chased by fans on the streets of New York and ‘gaped and ogled … as if I were a freak’ while holidaying in Greece.86 But her marquee value now pulled her further down the path of mainstream film-making. Janni capitalised on her profile to secure funds from MGM for what was to be another big-budget roadshow production: Far from the Madding Crowd. Directed by John Schlesinger, Christie was cast as Hardy’s nineteenth-century independent heroine Bathsheba Everdene and starred opposite Terence Stamp, Peter Finch and Alan Bates. As a major star relative to the men, Christie was accorded first billing and

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was featured heavily in the film’s marketing, which promised viewers a romantic epic, ‘A big picture in the Gone with the Wind – Doctor Zhivago tradition’. In the event the film did not duplicate the success of Zhivago. It did poor business in the US although it enjoyed moderate success in Britain, where it helped to maintain Christie’s box-office standing. One of the criticisms of the film (alongside its running time and slow pace) was the casting of Christie with reviewers finding her too modern for the role. One journalist described her as ‘indomitably contemporary as the Hardy heroine’ while another felt that Schlesinger had reduced the actress to ‘Miss Christie in gathered gingham’.87 These comments demonstrate the strength of Christie’s star persona and how its brand of liberated young womanhood overshadowed the period setting. In the short term this was not necessarily a problem. If the right film could be found it was an identity with a market value, but it clearly had a shelf-life as Christie became older and fashions changed. The actress’s next two films – Petulia and In Search of Gregory – reverted to type. In the former she pursues a married doctor across the streets of San Francisco; in the latter she pursues an enigmatic young man through the streets of Geneva. Janni probably agreed to the Petulia role because its director Richard Lester had enjoyed significant commercial success in the US with The Beatles’ A Hard’s Day’s Night (1964). Although Petulia was not another Darling for Janni, it did benefit Christie’s career in non-commercial ways. First, it provided scope for Christie to extend her range. Reviewers who had disliked her Darling persona (dismissed by one as an ‘overswung young swinger’) found themselves admiring the ‘restraint’ and ‘depth’ she brought to the role in Petulia.88 Second, it gave her the opportunity to work with Lester, a director strongly influenced by European New Wave film and working in the type of independent cinema to which Christie aspired. The role aligned Christie’s profile with the type of reflexive film-making emerging in New Hollywood

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and in this respect it constituted a stepping stone towards independent cinema as the decade, and the first phase of Christie’s career, came to a close. Conversely Gregory offered nothing new. Janni was unable to find a vehicle that would move Christie beyond the familiar and now stale ground of the Darling girl and the film failed commercially and critically. It was the last instalment in the Janni–Christie contract and at this point the actress astutely stepped back from stardom to review her career options. By 1968 Christie was involved with Warren Beatty and dividing her time between California and Europe. The relationship with the well-connected Beatty broadened her professional network as well as introducing her to American party politics. Notwithstanding the failures of her last two films Christie’s star profile remained sufficiently robust to ensure that her casting could greenlight projects, her commercial value further enhanced by her association with Beatty, his success in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the power of the star couple. On the one hand, this made her an attractive proposition for auteur directors looking to secure funds for their projects. On the other hand, casting a well-known star risked making their project a star vehicle and handing the power of authorship to the actress. It is this tension over authorship in auteur cinema that forms the basis of the next chapter.

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2 PERFORMANCE: THE POETIC AND THE IRONIC

Introduction By the end of the 1960s Christie had fulfilled her contractual obligations to producer Joe Janni and was able to enjoy more professional autonomy. Her freelance status enabled her to pursue her interest in independent production and distance herself from commercial stardom and the roadshow epics she had made with directors such as David Lean. The 1970s was a decade during which the actress chose to consciously limit her film output to those projects that captured her interest. To this end she reportedly turned down several high-profile roles in commercial cinema including Anne of a Thousand Days (1969) and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) in favour of independent/auteur cinema.1 Between 1970 and 1978 she made only six films: The Go-Between (1970, dir. Joseph Losey); McCabe & Mrs. Miller (dir. Robert Altman); Don’t Look Now (dir. Nicolas Roeg); Shampoo (dir. Hal Ashby); Demon Seed (dir. Donald Cammell) and Heaven Can Wait (1978, dir. Warren Beatty). Despite intense media interest in her relationship with Warren Beatty the actress also withdrew from formal press interviews at this time. This was a significant step which entailed seizing control of her star persona and shifting the emphasis from her private life to her film work. The 1970s also saw the actress regain her standing among critics after the disappointments of Madding Crowd and Gregory.

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Her performances were praised as ‘remarkably skilful’ (Mrs. Miller) and ‘perfect in every emotional note’ (Don’t Look Now), and earned her critical recognition in the form of an Oscar nomination (Mrs. Miller), two BAFTA awards (The Go-Between; Don’t Look Now) and a Golden Globe (Shampoo).2 During this stage of her career Christie’s status transitioned from commercial to prestige stardom. Paul McDonald defines this as a form of stardom that prioritises cultural over economic capital and uses the currency of awards to secure an actor’s status as an ‘artistically valorized performer’.3 The decade also witnessed Christie’s increasing politicisation as she supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, through her association with Beatty, was exposed to Democrat Party politics and the issue of gun control. Once again her career seemed to run on parallel tracks, this time the pathways were independent cinema and political activism. The 1970s closed with the actress’s complete withdrawal from Hollywood and the US in favour of a base in Britain and the pursuit of several political causes, the subject of my third chapter. What is significant about the 1970s for Christie is how the period is marked by a number of transitions: from mainstream to independent cinema, from contract to freelance star and from starlet to creative agent. She entered the 1970s marketplace on a more equal footing to her male directors and co-stars and with the potential to exercise greater creative autonomy in her career. This equality, relatively speaking, derived from the combination of five elements: the changes to her contractual status; her cultural capital (accrued through Oscar success and work with auteurs such as Truffaut), and her economic capital, in the form of box-office standing. Alongside this was her high-profile off-screen relationship with Beatty (the power of the star couple) and Christie’s own industry knowledge and experience, gained through ten years in the profession. Collectively these endowed Christie with a degree of leverage that she had not experienced in the 1960s. How Christie

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operated in this production context – as a performer and creative agent – is the broader subject of this chapter.

Acting typologies As an award-winning actor Christie’s performances have attracted considerable debate, with critics, co-stars, directors and audiences describing her style as ‘understated’, ‘delicate’, ‘poetic’, ‘natural’ and ‘instinctive’. In terms of acting typologies this suggests an approach that owes a debt to Stanislavskian naturalism and indeed the training Christie received at the Central School of Speech and Drama in the late 1950s was informed by this theory. But other commentators have characterised her acting in some films as ‘wry and riffy’ or as possessing ‘a modernist edge’, which implies that Christie’s range encompasses aspects that fit within the template of modernist typologies, defined by scholars as ‘artificial, codified, self-reflexive’.4 And some critics have, on occasion, found her performances ‘Method’ in their ability to intimate a ‘purely intuitive’ form of playing.5 These different perspectives on Christie’s acting suggest both the diversity of her craft and the limitation of categories such as naturalism and modernism in the discussion of performance. Notwithstanding their limitations – certainly when mobilised as rigid typologies – these categories remain useful as a critical point of departure through which to approach the study of performance, and I have engaged them in the framework of my discussion.

Approaches to acting: the immediate and the intimate Christie herself has spoken on the subject of acting, making space in interviews to debate her working methods and rehearsal practices.

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Over her long career her views and opinions have not surprisingly evolved but certain themes recur. She sees learning the script as a central component of preparation and through that ‘learning what it is you’re being asked to do’. She eschews long rehearsal periods when filming in favour of working quickly, describing film as ‘spontaneous ... . You do it at that moment for the camera, however much you’ve done before on your own. I don’t like to squander that thing you rely on – which is the immediate – in rehearsal.’6 This preference for working quickly and the idea of ‘the immediate’ as a source of creative energy is what some commentators are responding to when they find her performances natural or instinctive. Underpinning this method, however, is intense concentration. Christie confesses that she is unable to ‘have a joke off the set one minute and the next minute play a big emotional scene. I need to work up a lot to suffer on screen’, comments highlighting the work that the actress does in the execution of ‘naturalism’.7 Calling acting ‘an incredible intimacy with people you don’t know’, Christie prioritises the director over script or co-stars in her choice of projects.8 The actress has stated, ‘I am absolutely a believer in the auteur and I am convinced that the director is the only thing that really matters, that he or she will make or break the film.’9 She believes directors need to strike the right balance between reassurance and autonomy, and values above all intelligent and thoughtful communicators.10 While these are Christie’s expressed preferences and ways of working she still has to adapt to the style of the individual director. One of the principal factors shaping an actor’s performance is the working relationship with the director. As Sharon Carnicke has argued, ‘directors often set the tone for the production process, define the parameters of collaboration, and largely determine the ways in which each individual’s efforts are used’.11 Within the director–star relationship are degrees of control and collaboration. Some directors see actors as little more than ‘plastic elements in the

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mise-en-scène’ while others are highly collaborative, encouraging actors to write their own dialogue, for example.12 Any study of performance needs to be alert to the relationships among ‘film acting, directors’ artistic visions, and/or their respective working methods’, and this chapter puts that framework centre-stage.13 This chapter has two aims: the first is to assess Christie’s performance styles and rehearsal methods alongside her own reflections on her craft; the second is to examine her working relationships with directors to understand the specific dynamics of the director–star collaboration. To this end I draw on textual analysis alongside interview material and archival sources including personal papers and scripts. The first section steps back briefly into the 1960s to consider Doctor Zhivago and Petulia; two films which I argue illustrate the development of two performance styles – poetic and ironic – and which provide the foundation for her 1970s output. The second and more extensive section analyses her work with three auteur directors – Joseph Losey, Robert Altman and Nicolas Roeg – on films that have become canonised in film histories. These films are selected for case study because each director had very different methods giving the actress three very different performance frames. They bring into view then, through the realm of performance, the question of authorship in auteur cinema, allowing us to unpick the dominant narrative of the auteur that surrounds these productions and film history more widely.

Poetic playing: Doctor Zhivago In the opening chapter I discussed David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago as Christie’s first experience of big-budget, Hollywood film-making. A veteran film-maker, Lean’s work is a combination of the epic and the intimate; expansive landscapes alongside expressive close-ups of individuals. In Doctor Zhivago Lean draws on the conventions of

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silent cinema, describing one of its leading directors King Vidor as ‘a wonderful film crib’.14 Lean uses candlelight and frosted glass to foster a sense of intimacy, and many scenes have little or no dialogue, the meaning communicated through editing, framing and close-ups of actors’ faces. Silent cinema prioritises the face and its expressive potential to communicate meaning. As James Naremore has argued in his discussion of women’s melodrama and performance in silent classics such as True Heart Susie (1919),‘The full close up of a woman suffering for love is the very centrepiece of such films’ and Lean was well versed in the expressive, dramatic close-up as a cinematic device, as the success of his romantic melodrama Brief Encounter (1945) testifies.15 The way he filmed his Zhivago stars revealed his creative debt to the silent era aesthetics now common practice in studios such as MGM. He lit the film ‘Hollywood style’ to show off what he described as Omar Sharif’s ‘beautiful eyes’ and used a pup light under the camera lens to illuminate Christie’s eyes, which he thought her best feature.16 This style of film-making gave Christie a type of performance frame that differed markedly from Schlesinger and the British New Wave. There was no scope here for the mobile, expressive body of Billy Liar or the ad-libbing of Darling. Lean needed Christie, as romantic lead, to perform in intimate close-ups, exploiting the expressive potential of the eyes and face to convey a range of emotions. In key dramatic scenes with her male co-stars Christie had no recourse to props or dialogue and had to use the eyes, breath and muscular tension in the head and neck to communicate the scene’s meaning. The scene where Christie’s character Lara is reunited with her long-lost lover Zhivago is a good example of the actress’s style within this performance frame. Shot principally in close-up, there is little diegetic sound and no extra-diegetic music, props or expressive objects. The film’s cinematographer Freddie Young was trained at MGM, where he observed the studio’s first rule was ‘You’ve got to

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Poetic performance: emotional range in Doctor Zhivago (1965)

see the money’, and to this end he lit Christie to enhance her blue eyes and golden hair, creating a striking visual impression.17 But Christie’s performance is also instrumental in generating the scene’s emotional effects. In narrative terms Zhivago’s reappearance in Lara’s life is unexpected and Christie must portray the mixed emotions that this triggers. In this scene Lara sees Zhivago first but he does not immediately see her, thus Christie’s performance is for the audience, intended to show what Naremore calls a character’s ‘private face’.18 This theatrical device builds intimacy with the audience and showcases the actor’s emotional range.

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Christie communicates the emotional impact of the encounter primarily through her face. She draws in two breaths in quick succession, which make her shoulders rise and fall. She swallows, her nostrils flare slightly (registering ‘shock’), her strong jaw infinitesimally clenches and a look of perhaps doubt or caution passes fleetingly across her face. With another breath in, her shoulders rise and fall and she lowers her gaze. Her eyelids flicker, she tilts her head slowly upwards and a tiny frown puckers her brow before she lifts her eyes to meet Zhivago’s, an expression that we can read as ‘love’ on her face. The actress’s performance in this scene conveys a number of conflicting emotions, from disbelief and doubt, to love, forgiveness and joy, as her character is seen to work through all the various emotional and practical permutations arising from the return of her married lover. These close-ups of a woman ‘suffering for love’ represent the very cornerstone of romantic melodrama, carrying the film’s emotional weight. Christie found adapting to this style of performance a challenge and she reflected at the time that the process of filming with Lean required her to learn ‘discipline’ and that her ‘biggest problem in playing Lara was the stillness, the serenity of the character’.19 Writing in hindsight, she credited Lean’s input in shaping her performance, stating, ‘David fathered and mothered me through that role.’20 The experience, in a nutshell, taught her how to adapt her theatrical training to performance in film, specifically when framed in close-up. Lean’s style of film-making harmonised with the MGM/studio approach, which had a long reputation of teaching theatrically trained actors to develop the techniques of ‘projection from the eyes instead of just the voice’.21 Harnessing the dramatic potential of the eyes is one of the cornerstones of film acting and Christie quickly became skilled at performing in close-up. The French director François Truffaut worked with Christie in 1966 (directly after Lean) and recorded in his diaries how impressed he was by the

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actress’s ability to ‘use her eyes to cast wonderful stylised looks’.22 And Vilmos Zsigmond, the cinematographer on McCabe & Mrs. Miller, remarked ‘you see those eyes laughing, smiling. It’s such great acting.’23 Christie finessed her technique in close-up into a type of performance style that I define as ‘poetic’ in its ability to condense and communicate an intensity of thought and feeling.24 The actress used this poetic style to suggest a character’s emotional depth and convey feelings such as ‘empathy’, ‘caring’ and ‘romantic love’. I will return shortly to the question of how this style fared within the parameters set by Losey, Altman and Roeg.

Ironic and smart: Petulia But to describe Christie as only a poetic performer would be misleading. In 1967 she travelled to San Francisco to film Petulia, directed by Richard Lester, an American-born director who had enjoyed critical and commercial success with British films such as A Hard Day’s Night, Help! (1965) and The Knack ... (1965). His methods blended surrealist touches with a stylish irreverence, an approach linking him with the rebelliousness and permissiveness of the ‘swinging sixties’. Petulia, Lester’s first American feature, assumes the backdrop of San Francisco’s 1967 ‘summer of love’, to dissect ‘an American middle-class dissatisfied by mere materialism but disorientated by the new morality’.25 Christie plays the eponymous heroine, who represents the ‘new morality’. She is young, energetic and quirky, married to a rich and handsome American, but outward appearances are deceptive. Her violent husband beats her, leaving her physically and emotionally traumatised, and she turns to an older man Archie (played by George C. Scott) a medical doctor who she thinks symbolises stability and caring. On the one hand, she reaches out to Archie in the hope that he might save her, and on the other hand, she keeps

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him at a distance, cautious about personal involvement. The character must simultaneously suggest both a desire for emotional connection and the need for emotional distancing. To this end, the script describes Petulia as ‘the kind of character who rarely gives a straight answer’, and Lester was keen to cast Christie because he saw in her an ‘ethereal quality ... an extraordinary, unfettling nervousness’ that he thought suited ‘the essence of Petulia, the [character’s] mercurial switches and changes’.26 In performance terms many of Christie’s scenes are marked by a deliberate ambiguity. In the opening, for example, Petulia and Archie check in to a slickly automated motel with the intention of having sex. Christie has to deliver such lines as ‘Stop being so damn casual, we’re about to become lovers’ alongside seemingly random observations about her great-grandmother, waxed moustaches and musical instruments. Her performance style minimises animation and expression. There is little variation in vocal tone or facial movement across these topics; her timbre is light, delivery even and her face relatively neutral, removing any cues as to how her character is feeling. This performance register and its deliberate lack of clarity of expression leaves the viewer uncertain about how to read the scene. Is she casual because, as a swinging young thing, sex is no big deal? Or is it a studied casualness that belies the significance of the act for her? Or is her manner offhand because she is distracted, thinking through the potential consequences of her actions? All of these readings are possible, misunderstandings are signalled, and indeed the scene ends with no consummation of the affair. Christie’s performance indicates that the meaning of the scene cannot be fixed and in this respect she works in an ironic register. Reviewers were quick to identify a masklike quality to Christie’s character, what one called Petulia’s ‘brittle outer skin’.27 This performance style was particularly well suited to modernist cinema and Christie, as we will see shortly, developed this ironic approach

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further in Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between, filmed in 1970. But Christie’s character and Lester’s film more broadly step back from the extreme modernism characterising films such as Antonioni’s Blow-Up.28 Christie’s portrayal combines elements of ironic playing alongside her poetic style to suggest the contradictory impulses of her character. In a later scene Petulia intercepts Archie at his hospital and must segue from a flippant opening gambit (‘I think I’ve discovered a cure for cancer’) into tender concern for her would-be lover (‘You look exhausted’). Lester’s script direction is revealing, recording his desire that the scene’s emotional impact be communicated through Petulia’s gaze: ‘her eyes are devouring him with infinite tenderness which Archie finds very touching’.29 In this scene Christie switches between different modes, alternating between flippant and poetic, the latter intended to convey love. Film critic Dilys Powell responded to this dichotomy in her review, describing the actress as ‘out of place as a purely romantic character, but in a situation in which, as here, a romantic instinct struggles against a protective covering of smart absurdity she shines’.30 Powell’s comment is insightful because it helps us understand something of the range of performance styles that Christie was to use in her career. The actress could portray characters as inviting or uninviting, hard to read or open and friendly. She could confound audience expectations of empathy and meet those expectations through poetic playing. In the next section I examine in more detail how Christie coped with the demands of auteur directors in the modernist cinema of the 1970s, which prioritised ambiguity, reflexivity and play. Although the actor is often seen as at the service of the director in this type of cinema, I argue that this work showcases both Christie’s skill as a performer and her commitment to be seen as more than just a pretty face, something that in turn lays the foundations for her avowedly feminist oeuvre of the 1980s.

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‘Smart absurdity’ and ‘infinite tenderness’ in Petulia (1968)

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Acting for modernist directors: ‘nothing is what it seems’ An actor’s performance is shaped by the demands of genre and narrative and the working relationship with the director who, as Sharon Carnicke has argued, ‘sets the tone for collaboration’.31 By the early 1970s not only was Christie exercising artistic autonomy in her career but her directors – Joseph Losey, Robert Altman and Nicolas Roeg – were at the height of their creative powers; experienced and confident operators with considerable influence over script and casting. Aesthetically these directors operated in a modernist vein, fracturing or reflecting on film form to problematise narrative, identity and motivation. All three start with the camera rather than the actor in terms of their creative approach to filming but within that framework each deals differently with an actor’s imaginative input.32 Altman is famously collaborative, encouraging his actors to contribute ideas and even write their own dialogue, Losey and Roeg less so, preferring to keep communication to a minimum. For the actor Dirk Bogarde, who made four films with Losey, he ‘never tells one what to do, or how to do it’, while Donald Sutherland found that his extensive suggestions to Nicolas Roeg on script development in Don’t Look Now were met with a dismissive ‘No’ by the director.33 How then did Christie’s ambition for greater creative freedom fare within the parameters set by these three auteur directors?

The Go-Between In 1970 the actress filmed The Go-Between with director Joseph Losey. Set in turn-of-the century Edwardian England, the narrative centres on the experiences of Leo (Dominic Guard), a twelve-yearold middle-class boy who spends a summer at the country-house

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estate of a schoolfriend and carries illicit messages between the family’s beautiful young daughter Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie) and her lover, tenant farmer Ted Burgess (Alan Bates). Marian is destined for marriage to an altogether more eligible suitor, Lord Hugh Trimingham (Edward Fox), and when her affair is uncovered by her mother, events end tragically; Ted commits suicide, Marian (pregnant with Ted’s child) marries Trimingham and a traumatised Leo spends the rest of his life in emotional stasis. An adaptation of L. P. Hartley’s novel, the screenplay was written by the playwright Harold Pinter and was the third and final collaboration between Pinter and Losey (following The Servant and Accident, 1967). These collaborations focus on the ‘closed universes’ and ‘small worlds’ of upper-class settings where respectable appearances belie a less palatable reality of snobbery and obsession.34 Both director and playwright use their respective art forms to deconstruct the English class system and its structures of power. Pinter had a reputation for producing ‘laconic dialogue, with … characteristic ellipses, pauses and protracted silences’, and characters who ‘use language to mock and punish each other’, with words that function as a form of ‘tactical evasion/invasion’.35 Losey adhered to conventional film form but, as befitted his Brechtian principles, introduced innovations within that framework in the hope of ‘educating the audience rather than alienating it’.36 To this end his frame compositions in The Go-Between favour long and medium shots rather than facial close-ups, his objective camera disrupting audience identification with characters to position viewers as questioning observers of the action. Losey and Pinter’s artistic vision made particular demands of their actors in terms of performance. The foregrounding of language required actors to pay particular attention to vocal intonation, while the focus on a closed class-bound world regulated by codes of propriety and behaviour demanded that tension between characters be expressed obliquely. This demanded a scaled-back performance

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style that worked through hint, suggestion and nuance, a type of layered minimalism that suited the modernist impulse for ambiguity. Characters are largely unsympathetic in conventional terms and are shown to be self-serving, carelessly manipulating Leo for their own ends. While Losey understood people as neither ‘good or bad, they’re both at the same time’, Christie had a particularly challenging task as her character is the film’s most unsympathetic.37 The script conceives her as ‘beautiful, willful, spoilt, rebellious, wasted’ and she oscillates between friendly overtures and angry dismissal in her exchanges with an increasingly bewildered Leo.38 Losey reserves his most damning indictment for her as ‘At the end of the film … as an old woman she knows herself no better than when she was young.’39

The performance frame Within this performance frame and characterisation Christie used her body, face and voice in very particular ways. At times her body is passive and inviting; reclining languorously in a hammock. On other occasions she assumes a more confident stance, her hands on hips, feet planted firmly on the ground. Both postures suggest someone who knows the power of her body and more specifically her sexuality. By contrast her face is less mobile, more impassive, giving little away in terms of emotional expression. Minute glances serve to imply meaning and suggest significance while smiles are carefully measured out and used to disarm and dissemble. This portrayal of an extreme version of upper-class decorous femininity led one critic to label her performance ‘wooden’.40 In terms of language the register and tone of Christie’s line readings had to suit the questioning and evasive purpose of Pinter’s script. Christie frequently delivers her lines in a way that leaves a question mark hanging in the air. In one scene, for example, the Maudsley family go to bathe at the river, where they stumble across

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Body posture and sexual power: The Go-Between

the farmer Ted Burgess. Social snobbery prevents mixed-class bathing and Burgess prepares to leave. Leo’s attention has been captured by Burgess’s appearance (he silently observes the farmer’s muscular and hirsute body as he changes out of his bathing costume) and he earnestly asks Marian whether she knows the man: ‘His name is Ted Burgess, he’s a farmer, do you know him?’ Marian’s reply, ‘Oh, I may have met him’, is delivered in an offhand, casual manner, the grain of the voice smooth and honeyed with a slight rising inflection. She sidesteps a direct answer in favour of opening up multiple possibilities for the audience and the innocent Leo to ponder: does she know the farmer, how have they met, what is the nature of their relationship?

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This is the dominant vocal pattern adopted by Christie throughout the film whenever her lines are intended to imply that something – whether a shopping trip or a social visit – is simultaneously frivolous and significant. And in scenes opposite Leo and her fiancé Lord Trimingham she repeats back words addressed to her, reframing them into new sentences to suggest the ambiguity of language and therefore meaning: ‘Is “seize” an appropriate word?’, ‘Do you mind if I’m “gathered”, Leo?’ she asks the puzzled young boy. Her performance is knowing and self-aware, further enhanced by her facial expression and body language, a minutely raised eyebrow and slight tilt of the head emphasising the playfulness of the questions. While Pinter’s laconic and evasive dialogue requires all characters (with the exception of Leo) to engage in forms of wordplay – even Ted Burgess with his ‘earthy peasant strength’ must grapple with the concept of ‘spooning’ – it is Christie’s performance that is most marked in its ironic delivery.41

Irony as proto-feminism Why should this be so? The film historian Sue Harper has noted that a new performance style of ‘ironic disavowal’ emerged in British films of the 1970s, with performers using ‘minimal shifts in facial expression or vocal tone to imply that the material or the proposition is not worth taking seriously’.42 Actresses such as Joan Collins, Beryl Reid, Glenda Jackson and Julie Christie, specifically in The Go-Between, engaged this style, which Harper attributes to the conditions of ‘dire cultural emergency’ in Britain where all forms of identity and social customs were up for negotiation, effectively the first stirrings of postmodernism in the early 1970s.43 Harper’s observation is astute but I want to argue that Christie provides a way to understand this style as not narrowly confined to Britain. Christie’s light tone and seemingly casual delivery in The

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Go-Between recalls the offhand manner of her vocal performance as the ‘smart’ Petulia, a character who ‘rarely gives a straight answer’. Christie’s work with Richard Lester, both operating transatlantically at this point in their careers, allows us to tease out the cultural connections between Britain and America as regards performance styles in the late sixties and early seventies as actors like Christie moved fluidly across national boundaries and production contexts. Harper speculates that the actresses arrived at this performance style ‘via their heightened awareness of feminism … . The ambiguities, distance and irony’ in their playing ‘probably a testament to their uncertainties about themselves in society … [and] the dramatic roles they were required to play’.44 This is an interesting suggestion but Harper does not provide any biographical evidence to support her statement. What we know of Christie, however, does add weight to this claim. In later interviews the actress recalled reading ‘things like “The Female Eunuch”, revelationary (sic) stuff, which made me realise what I’d done to myself ’.45 Greer’s work, published in 1970, became a landmark text for many women of Christie’s class and generation. And Christie would later characterise the early 1970s as a time when ‘I had managed to look outside myself’, a statement indicating the actress’s growing self-awareness and analysis of her position as a woman in a highly gendered industry.46 Indeed her role in The Go-Between probably heightened this self-awareness as Christie, then aged thirty, was playing an eighteen-year-old woman, a scenario that invited critical reflection on the distance between actress and character. Christie would later draw parallels between Marian from The Go-Between and her character Diana Scott in Darling, suggesting that both were ‘ruthless’.47 Christie’s ironic delivery in this film is an index of her growing political awareness and feminist consciousness. I will return to the link between performance and feminism shortly in my analysis of Don’t Look Now.

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Working with Losey: ‘a strange pair of non-communicators’ Christie was not Losey’s first choice for Marian because he considered her too old for the role. He was persuaded to cast her by the film’s financial backers EMI, who thought Christie and co-star Alan Bates would have the necessary ‘box-office appeal’ to lift an ‘arty picture’ into the marketplace and to this effect Christie received first billing.48 Despite the director’s initial reluctance concerning Christie in this role, he was generally keen to work with the actress and had been communicating regularly with her throughout the sixties about potential collaboration on projects. These included an adaptation of William Faulkner’s Wild Palms, which Losey had proposed to Christie in early 1966. Christie was a reciprocal correspondent, her letters indicating she was as eager to work with the director but hamstrung by contractual obligations to Janni in the 1960s, which kept her production schedule full.49 No doubt Losey’s political leanings and art-house credentials appealed to the actress. Nothwithstanding their mutual interest, archival evidence suggests the actress and director found each other, and their respective approaches, challenging. In their correspondence Losey characterised them as ‘a strange pair of non-communicators’ while the actress makes reference to their ‘communication problems’.50 They had very different methods. Christie categorised Losey ‘as a cinematographic rather than an actor’s director’ who ‘pre-planned movements and frames before each take rather than chat[ting] to actors about their roles’.51 Losey then did not offer the reassurance and communication she preferred from her directors. Under these circumstances it is likely that she relied on Pinter’s script and Hartley’s source novel to develop her characterisation.52 Losey for his part found Christie rather less biddable than his camera. In letters to the actress he complained petulantly that he had not ‘gotten any apparent serious recognition from you about the problems of post-sync’ and was infuriated when Christie failed to make

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her contact details readily available to him.53 Losey was under pressure to complete the film, not least to meet the competition window for entry at Cannes, but Christie was no longer the ingénue under contract and could operate on her own terms. While Losey’s film did not allow Christie any opportunity to collaborate on, for example, script or character development, it does seem to have afforded her a creative space for self-reflection, which influenced her performance in particular ways. Her next project with Robert Altman offered a different experience again.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a central film in Christie’s oeuvre. Director Robert Altman’s collaborative methods gave the actress space to develop a performance that garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. The romance narrative is strengthened by the Christie–Beatty casting, and the couple released a small number of posed photographs to coincide with the opening, which appeared in American and European magazines such as Look and Paris Match.54 Notwithstanding the narrative of the star couple, what is most pressing for my discussion is the film’s performance frame. I argue that within Altman’s framework Christie made significant contributions to the development of her character. And I examine the concept of ‘star acting’, making a case for Christie’s agency also emerging in the play between impersonation and personification modes. Through these channels I open up the question of authorship in auteur cinema.

Genre revisionism McCabe is Altman’s revisionist take on the Western, a genre associated with heroic individualism and male authority, conventions

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that Altman’s film ‘manages both to honor and to utterly subvert’.55 Set in a northwest frontier town, McCabe (Warren Beatty) is a chancer and hustler who opens an upmarket sporting house (brothel) with Mrs Miller (Julie Christie), a business-minded prostitute. The success of the operation attracts the attention of a mining corporation, which offers to buy him out but McCabe, who has delusions of grandeur, refuses and the film ends in his death, an ironic comment on the mythic figure of the male hero. As a revisionist piece Altman’s Western is modernist in its approach to identity and narrative. The director uses overlapping dialogue, for example, to suggest a multiplicity of voices and stories that move in and out of the central frame. But where Losey’s style demanded a minimalist performance from actors, Altman’s is attuned towards naturalism. He often cast nonprofessional actors and favoured improvisation but, as Robert T. Self argues, ‘An irony in Altman’s narratives is the energy devoted to creating a verisimilitude in acting that ultimately must be read not as naturalistic but as expressionistic.’56 The point here is that acting in Altman’s cinema communicates what it feels like to have an unstable and fractured identity, which is the modern condition. This inflects the film with a certain poignancy, enhanced by its autumnal colour palette of reds, yellows and golds, and a soundtrack featuring the bittersweet songs of Leonard Cohen. Many commentators, including Christie herself, have described the film as ‘romantic’ or ‘poetic’.57 That a revisionist piece that works to subvert genre conventions can also be read in this way points to Altman’s approach of ironic counterpointing in this film, and I will show how Christie as a star plays a central role in this dual address.

Altman’s method: collaborative working Altman’s collaborative approach to film-making is well documented. The director would typically encourage actors to develop their

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characters by writing their own dialogue and improvising during rehearsals and shooting. Screen performances for Altman were ideally collaborative enterprises; ‘the combination of what I have in mind, with who the actor is and then how he adjusts to the character, along with how I adjust’.58 The director’s motivation was to give actors ‘artistic freedom to assist me’.59 Christie had never worked in this way before and she initially found it challenging: ‘at the beginning I found it most unnerving to work with a democratic director’.60 She recalled, ‘We didn’t have a clue what we were making because he [Altman] would get ideas overnight, or somebody would do a brilliant improvisation that just went on and on and he’d suddenly incorporate that.’61 But other aspects of Altman’s methods suited the actress. The director had extensive experience in television and had developed a fast shooting style, avoiding multiple takes, an approach that Warren Beatty disparagingly termed ‘loosey-goosey’, but which suited Christie, who disliked long rehearsal periods and also preferred to work quickly.62 It took some time to adjust to Altman’s methods but she enjoyed the challenge, writing with hindsight that working with him was ‘a treat ... . He is a very good director of actors.’63 According to Joan Tewkesbury, script supervisor on Mrs. Miller, on the shoot Altman would give his actors a brief character and scene sketch and then send them off to write lines that they would ‘work over’ in rehearsal: Bob would ... rehearse those things and see what would come out of the rehearsal. Then I would write all the stuff down and they would all be asked to repeat their own lines. On occasion ... he would dictate to me a couple of the scenes he wanted done, specific ways, and this stuff would be embellished by the actors.64

In the case of Christie’s character Constance Miller,

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He simply turned Julie’s stuff over to her. She had a companion with her who knew all the different kinds of dialects, and they would go off and take these scenes and redo them as a woman would do them in this position ... . They wrote very specifically because they needed lines, they needed script.65

A good example of this is Mrs Miller’s introduction in the film and her speech to McCabe in the saloon. In the novel Mrs Miller has less dialogue than McCabe, and it is the male narrator who mediates the reader’s understanding of the female character. Mrs Miller’s business proposition is only briefly sketched out and McCabe takes the lead, shaking hands with her, we are told, ‘on a hunch ... . He believed she would make him money.’66 In the film Mrs Miller’s dialogue is significantly extended; she leads the business discussion with McCabe and Christie’s delivery is direct and forceful. Shot in close-up, the camera alternates between the couple as Mrs Miller lays out her plan, deftly sidestepping McCabe’s objections: What do you do when one girl fancies another? How do you know when a girl really has her monthly or if she’s just taking a few days off? What about when they don’t get their monthlies, ’cos they don’t. What do you do then? I suppose you know all about seeing to that? And what about the customers? Who’s gonna skin ’em back and inspect ’em? You gonna do that? ’Cos if you don’t this town’ll be clapped up inside two weeks, if it’s not already. What about when business is slow? You just gonna let the girls sit around on their bums? ... Now I haven’t got a lot of time to sit around and talk to a man who’s too dumb to see a good proposition when it’s put to him. Do we make a deal or don’t we. ... Well?

In the transition from novel to screen how do we unpack this scene in terms of authorship and tease out the relationship between the director, the scriptwriter and the star? There is no comparable dialogue in the novel. Brian McKay supplied the original film script, with Altman rewriting it and Beatty later making a claim for a

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co-writing credit. What we know of Altman’s methods, coupled with the script supervisor’s observations, adds weight to a case for Christie making a major contribution to the dialogue. Her companion on the film, referred to by Tewkesbury, was Alfreda Benge, the lyricist and illustrator who was a close friend of Christie. The creative and professional paths of the two women were intertwined; Christie provided vocals for an album recorded by Benge’s husband Robert Wyatt in 1972 while Benge acted as an uncredited assistant editor on Christie’s next film Don’t Look Now.67 Benge was also a dressmaker, responsible for the outfit that Christie wore in 1966 to accept her Oscar for Darling, and functioned as ‘Julie’s dresser’ on McCabe & Mrs. Miller.68 Not only did the women write dialogue for the film but it is likely that they came up with the look for Christie’s character. The film was made in British Columbia, Canada where the entire cast and crew lived, shooting the production while the set grew up around them. Altman asked the production company to send out a truckload of clothes to the shoot and instructed the actors to put together their characters’ costumes. He gave each of them responsibility for their wardrobe, telling them: ‘Now, you’ve got to live in these clothes in this fucking weather, so you’d better get out there and sew those holes up.’ He also encouraged the cast to customise their garments with ‘little artefacts’ to make ‘their characters more real’.69 Christie’s look in this film is distinctive. She wears a short fur cape, anklelength aubergine skirt, little crocheted bag, a dark-brown short velvet jacket, a curly-haired wig and carries a carpetbag. The look is pure Biba. Popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Biba’s aesthetic revolved around a signature palette of ‘visceral reds, dusky pink, ochre and cream, shading into bruise colours, plum, sage and aubergine’ and drew on the influences of Hollywood glamour and art nouveau to devise ensembles that were ‘theatrical rather than “natural”’.70 The earth tones and textured fabrics (velvet, feather, fur) that characterise Mrs Miller’s look are probably the result of

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interventions by Christie and Benge, reworking the production company clothes to reflect their aesthetic tastes and interpretation of the character. Tewkesbury’s comment – a seemingly casual aside – affords a brief but fascinating glimpse into Christie’s working practices and rehearsal processes. While existing accounts in film history focus exhaustively on the creative clash between Altman and Beatty on set, the creative relationship between Christie and Benge has not been acknowledged. At this point in her career Christie was becoming increasingly aware of and critical about her isolation as a woman on male-dominated film shoots and her work with Benge on this film can be read as a form of proto-feminist practice that found its fullest expression with Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers in 1983, discussed in the next chapter. Altman’s methods then opened up a collaborative space that Christie took advantage of, contributing dialogue, costume and character development to the production. Through this analysis, not only does the star’s agency become visible, but the limitations of auteur narratives come into view.

Star acting Christie had to alter her physical appearance to play the character of the nineteenth-century whore in an American frontier town. Her trademark long blonde hair is hidden under a frizzy wig, she speaks with a working-class Cockney accent and displays ‘rough’ table manners (mopping her plate with bread and wiping her mouth with her hand, the grease glistening in the candlelight). As befits her character as a no-nonsense businesswoman, Christie’s performance style is brisk and economical. She speaks through a close-lipped mouth and clenched teeth, her stride is exact, measured and purposeful, she sets her facial expression into a scowl and her gaze is direct and brief. This very physical portrayal involves being seen eating and drinking hungrily and audibly inhaling cigarette smoke.

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There is, initially at least, no sign of the Julie Christie smile and empathic gaze that had brought the actress commercial and critical success in her earlier films. This role allowed Christie to display her craft as an actor, a crucial factor leading to her Oscar nomination. But while her transformation in the role was significant, she does remain recognisable as a star. Paul McDonald argues that star acting works on a play between impersonation and personification. McDonald builds on Barry King’s distinction between impersonation – which foregrounds the actor’s transformation in character – and personification – where the performance appears to be consistent with the actor’s personality.71 For McDonald stars complicate this binary in particular ways as their status as known figures with cultural significance means that ‘personification is ... achieved in the midst of impersonation’ while ‘the specific character is filtered through the recognisability and visibility of the star’s body and voice, so that impersonation is achieved through personification’. Ultimately he concludes that ‘star acting demands thinking about the co-presence of these principles within the same performance’.72 Two examples serve to illustrate how Christie as star remains visible. The actress’s trademark smile, friendly demeanour, empathic gaze and wide inviting eyes are most evident in romantic close-ups in love scenes opposite McCabe. Here the lighting and framing complement Christie’s poetic performance style (which utilises the full dramatic potential of the eyes) and recall her work with David Lean in Doctor Zhivago. And when Mrs Miller rounds on McCabe and his sentimental platitudes, dismissing them with ‘Don’t you give me any of that “little lady” shit’, the performance is inflected through the independent and rebellious associations of Christie’s star persona, which add weight to the characterisation of Mrs Miller as an equal business partner. On the one hand, the lighting, framing and camerawork in these scenes combine with recognisable aspects of the Christie star

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Poetic playing as personification: star acting in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

persona and appearance to suggest how personification is achieved in the midst of impersonation. On the other hand, this sense of personification is disrupted by script and performance that foreground Christie’s transformation in character. Christie’s physical appearance and vocal delivery are part of an impersonatory mode through which the star actor transforms into character. And, as befits Altman’s modernist cinema and genre revisionism, these romantic scenes are queered by the topic of the couple’s conversation (which includes setting up a brothel, accompanied by graphic lines such as ‘Who’s gonna skin ’em back and inspect ’em’) and the knowledge that Mrs Miller’s ‘look of love’ is opium-induced and that McCabe pays for her professional services. Through this ironic counterpointing, Altman honours and subverts not only the conventions of the Western genre but those of classic Hollywood, the star system and heterosexual romance. Critical response to Christie in this film is revealing, with reviewers discerning how the actress was distancing herself from her former ‘Darling-girl’ persona. For Alexander Walker, it was a ‘remarkably skilful performance ... [which puts] a hatchet edge on those Golden Girl features’.73 Pauline Kael described Christie as possessing ‘that gift that beautiful actresses sometimes have of

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Transformation in character: star acting in McCabe & Mrs. Miller

suddenly turning ugly’, and would later suggest that Christie ‘has the knack of turning off her spirituality totally’.74 What critics identify as a ‘gift’ or a ‘knack’ is the labour of a craft specialist. These comments point to Christie’s skill as an actor; an impersonation mode allowed her to showcase her range and ensure that her work as an actor was seen as work. Moreover I would argue that making herself look ugly was a symptom of the actress’s growing political awareness of, and refusal to be, the object of the gaze. This period marked the beginning of Christie’s conscious dismantling of her star image, a process that culminated in her rendering herself virtually unrecognisable in films such as Memoirs of a Survivor.

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‘Nothing is what it seems’: performance in Don’t Look Now Christie’s next film, Don’t Look Now, witnessed the actress’s evolving resolve to challenge codes of normative femininity. Christie saw in the film’s director Nicolas Roeg someone with ‘an unusual eye and an unusual mind’, and professed herself ‘impressed by the script … [which] came at things tangentially’.75 Roeg for his part ‘thought Julie was ideal … Her person, her manner, her acting all made her perfect.’76 Her character Laura, is a married woman grieving the death of her young daughter, emotionally frayed but not beaten by the experience. Roeg presumably recognised Christie’s ability to signify vulnerability and determination as ideal for the role. The actors had little opportunity to intervene in the script, with Christie describing Roeg as ‘quite secretive, not enormously collaborative’. But the couple developed a good working relationship as they had much in common.77 Roeg, like Christie, preferred to work quickly rather than rehearse extensively, and would ‘tell the actors stories about the persons they are playing’, a method that suited Christie, who liked to discuss her role with her directors.78 Perhaps most significantly, Roeg characterised himself as ‘not of the theatre and I couldn’t possibly direct technique’, a statement suggesting the level of creative autonomy actors could expect on his sets.79 If the film’s direction (cinematography, editing) is attributable to Roeg, Christie’s performance is her own. Roeg’s psychological thriller reworks elements of the gothic to explore themes of romance, grief, mystery, horror and spiritual belief. John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura travel to Venice following the accidental drowning of their young daughter Christine (Sharon Williams). Here they become involved with two psychic sisters who claim to have ‘seen’ Christine. Laura becomes convinced of the existence of ‘other’ worlds, which John stubbornly refutes and, following a series of bizarre accidents, John is murdered.

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The film draws a contrast between John’s commitment to science and rationality and Laura’s willingness to countenance other possible states of being. John dies because he is unable to accommodate what Roeg called ‘faith in a wider sense’.80 Christie here employs two distinct performance styles. The first is emotionally expressive in conventional terms, as befits the genres of the gothic and the romance. The second builds on the notion of ironic disavowal, previously discussed in my reading of The GoBetween. Here I extend Harper’s understanding through the concept of ‘flat affect’ to argue that Christie also underperforms emotion in this film in a manner that functions as a critique of normative femininity and its codes of emotional expressiveness. Focusing attention on these two contrasting yet complementary styles not only brings into view Christie’s remarkable skill and range as a performer, but allows us to position her portrayal within the wider context of cinema history.

Emotional expressiveness: playing gothic Within the space available to me here I want to focus my discussion on the gothic as this illustrates Christie’s emotional expressiveness in what was a new genre in the actress’s oeuvre. As a brief aside, however, it is worth mentioning how Christie’s skill as a poetic performer effectively conveyed romantic aspects of Don’t Look Now, helping her to establish the fact that Laura loves her husband. Early scenes show Laura–Christie gazing tenderly at John, her eyes caressing him with a ‘look of love’, and both Christie and Sutherland are visibly tactile with each other, suggesting their characters’ emotional connection; they hold hands and touch each other tenderly. Emotional expressiveness in the gothic genre, however, required the actress to work in a different emotional register.

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The film opens with the accidental drowning of the Baxters’ young daughter in the family pond, then picks up the story in Venice a few months later. During this time we learn that Laura has received medication and therapy while John has distracted himself with work. In an emotionally vulnerable state, they try to put their lives back together but any recovery is fragile and quickly unravels. Disorientated in the watery city, at key points in the narrative the couple get lost and race around the alleyways in panic. Their bodies respond viscerally to their environment: Laura faints, John vomits, and falls. Laura attends a séance and pleads with her husband to leave the city. John responds angrily, lashing out at Laura and losing his temper. As a genre, the gothic demands a particular style of playing: fearful and panicked. The most economical way to demonstrate Christie’s emotional performance style in gothic mode is to examine a pivotal scene in detail as many of the techniques which she employs throughout the film can be seen. The scene occurs near the beginning when the Baxters are establishing a routine in Venice. It opens with an attempt at domestic normality; the couple meet for lunch in a restaurant, Laura writes a letter, John orders food. Laura goes to the cloakroom to assist two middle-aged sisters and the sisters’ psychic abilities are revealed when one claims to have seen Laura’s deceased daughter. Laura enters the cloakroom and her exchanges with the women are initially perfunctory, shaped by a veneer of middle-class politeness. One sister apologises ‘I hope you don’t think us rude ... we’re frightful starers.’ Laura’s reply is polite but disinterested: ‘Oh, I didn’t notice it even if you were so don’t worry’, she says, preoccupied with primping her hair in the mirror. Perhaps a comment on the invisibility of middleaged women? As one sister struggles to remove a piece of grit from her eye, Laura offers to help. Christie’s body language and speech at this point indicate her character’s hesitancy and reluctance to become involved: ‘Perhaps I can help ... do you think?’ she asks, as her hands flutter across her body. The sisters accept, but Laura’s

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Composure in Don’t Look Now (1973)

composure does not last long. A close-up draws attention to the sightless eyes of one sister while the sighted sister remarks to Laura, ‘Goodness, you do remind me of my daughter, only, her hair is darker.’ Christie plays Laura as confused and unsure how to react, seemingly disconcerted by the mention of a daughter and the sister’s personal comment about her appearance. The blind sister now addresses Laura directly: ‘You’re sad, you’re so sad and you’ve no need to be, she wants you to know ... I’ve seen your little girl and she’s happy ... she’s with you my dear.’ In her reaction to this statement Christie has to shift the whole tone and dynamic of the scene to convey how the axis of Laura’s world is tilting. She lets out a sharp breath, a faintly audible ‘harumph’, her breathing deepens, her face exhibits panic, bewilderment, fear as she tries to process what she has heard. The raw emotion of her recent bereavement is etched onto her face. She appears winded. There is no let-up as the blind sister continues, ‘She’s wearing a shiny little mac’, at which Laura gasps for breath, her breathing deepens again and, we imagine, bile rises in her throat. A tiny lift of the eyebrow

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Discomposure and salvation in Don’t Look Now

suggests hope: could it have been her daughter, are they telling the truth? The scene cuts briefly away to John in the restaurant and then back to Laura, now seated as one sister revives her with smelling salts. Before the sisters depart Laura catches the elbow of the blind sister. ‘Did you really see her?’ she asks, her eyes wide open,

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eyebrows raised, imploring and eager. With an infinitesimal gesture Laura then lowers her eyebrows and the minutest expression of anger is registered, which perhaps hints at jealousy, that a stranger claims to know her child. The sister responds with ‘She was there’, and Laura’s ragged breath is audible before she drops her head and warmth seems to infuse her face. This incredibly complex scene involves Christie communicating conflicted and confused emotions. Not only do we see but we sense her fear, discomposure and anguish, the panic as it rises from her stomach to her throat, the hope that warms and animates her face. None of this is expressed through words; in fact Christie’s dialogue is minimal and mundane. The emotional turmoil and depth of feeling are conveyed through facial expressions, breathing, tension in the neck and shoulders, skilfully aided by Roeg’s use of mirrors, cutting between the principal characters and an aural leitmotif. This form of visceral playing recurs throughout the film. When John loses his temper with Laura – ‘Christine is dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead’ he shouts – his wife recoils from him as though his words are physical blows. And as the action builds to a crescendo, the couple tear across Venice in a frenzy, John to his death, Laura trying to save him (‘Darlings’ she cries), their wild shouting to no avail.

Underperforming emotion: flat affect in Don’t Look Now Remarkably, given these scenes, the novelist Daphne du Maurier commented that Christie’s Laura demonstrates ‘a wonderfully selfpossessed calmness’.81 And scholars such as Sue Harper have followed du Maurier’s lead in their assessments, finding Laura remarkably ‘sang-froid’ in the face of demanding circumstances: ‘She gives very little away, and there is a gap between how we know she

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The ‘patient wife’: Laura’s bored gaze at masculine endeavour

should feel, and her self-sufficient manner.’82 How do we reconcile these observations with my analysis above? Certainly there are sequences in the film where it is hard to read Laura, where emotional expressivity is withheld and her motivations are unclear. The day after

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the couple make love, for example, Laura watches John at work repairing a church. Her face is expressionless, bored perhaps, nonplussed by the spectacle of heroic male endeavour unfolding before her. The action is too dull to hold her attention and she drifts away from the scene seemingly without aim or purpose. And what motivates her impulsive kissing of the Bishop’s ring? ‘Are you Christian, Laura?’ the Bishop asks. ‘I don’t know’, she replies, and neither do we. Perhaps the most sustained sequence of emotional inexpressivity comes in the closing scenes after John’s death. At the head of the Venetian cortege carrying her husband’s body, Christie’s Laura is expressionless, her face a blank canvas with the merest hint of a smile. The connections with Garbo in Queen Christina (1933) are there to be made. Famously directed to ‘do nothing’ in this sequence, Garbo’s portrayal is commonly read as a tabula rasa onto which audiences project their meanings of the image. Critics found the final image of Laura unnerving, both ‘moving [and] ... scary too’.83 I suggested in my reading of The Go-Between that Christie’s ironic playing represented a form of proto-feminism, a critique on the dramatic roles that cultural forms demanded of actresses. Scholarship by Jackie Stacey on ‘flat affect’ in the work of Tilda Swinton allows us to push this analysis further. Stacey argues that Swinton underperforms emotion in many of her films, engaging techniques such as ‘affectless deadpan’ and a flat style of delivery. These ‘styles of unavailability’ are qualitatively different from the emotional underplaying of male actors such as Clint Eastwood in that Swinton’s ‘contradicts the conventional expectations of feminine emotional expressiveness and legibility in popular cinema’.84 Where codes of normative femininity promise empathy, compassion, self-sacrificial motherhood etcetera, Tilda Swinton often either confounds or interrupts these expectations in a way that sets up a conversation with ‘histories of femininity that travel from Hollywood cinema into the genres of our everyday life and back again’.85

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The ‘grieving widow’: Laura leads John’s cortege

A similar dynamic is at play in Don’t Look Now, which includes sequences where Christie is emotionally expressive in ways that resonate with our expectations of normative femininity: gazing fondly at her husband, being deeply upset by her daughter’s death. But equally there are sequences that contradict these conventional feminine responses: her husband’s death most obviously, but also shots of her looking blankly out across the Venetian canal as she returns to England to visit her injured son. In fact the trope of maternal femininity is mobilised in contradictory ways. On the one hand, Laura is a devoted mother, devastated by her daughter’s death, dashing back to England when her surviving child is injured. And yet we never see her with her children; they exist in her world only

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through the letter she writes to her son and the red toy ball in her suitcase that belonged to her daughter, surely an ‘odd’ memento in conventional terms as it led to the child’s death? Christie’s performance both conforms to and interrupts generic expectations around motherhood and romance. As Laura stands and watches John working, for example, Christie holds the pose long enough to suggest the role of wife as helpmeet, before walking away from it. Significance is also attached to clothing and make-up: hats and coats are repeatedly shown being put on and taken off, and make-up is toyed with as Laura contemplates her reflection in the bathroom mirror, an image evoking Hollywood’s history of the duplicitous femme fatale. In this way Christie’s performance as Laura sets up a conversation with ‘histories of femininity’ in a manner that is reflexive and questioning.

Contemplating the image: flat affect in Don’t Look Now

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Moving towards feminism Looking at these three films in the round brings into view Christie’s range as a performer, skilled at emotionally expressive poetic playing and at withholding emotional connection through styles of ‘flat affect’, which refuse codes of empathy. While the performance styles of other actresses of the period also suggest disavowal, none had the romantic resonance of Christie. This made her uniquely placed to set up a series of expectations for audiences, which could then be contradicted. Her interest and success in this method was probably the result of the actress’s growing awareness of politics and feminism.86 Her later comments about ‘looking outside myself’ and her criticism of film roles that objectified women indicate that the politics of cultural production was shaping the actress’s decisions and performances at this point in her career. It took the remainder of the 1970s and another three films however (Shampoo, Demon Seed and Heaven Can Wait) before Christie could carve out a niche for herself as a feminist woman in the film industry.

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3 POLITICS: FEMINIST PRAXIS IN CULTURAL PRODUCTION

Christie returned to live in the UK in the mid-1970s, setting up home in a remote farmhouse in North Wales, a move widely reported in the British media as ‘A Simple Life for Julie’.1 Between 1976 and 1980 she made only two feature films, both Hollywood productions; Demon Seed (directed by Donald Cammell) and Heaven Can Wait (directed and starring Warren Beatty). Now in her late thirties, the gendered politics of ageing came to bear on the actress. Casting agents view this age bracket as the crossover period when actresses transition from ‘leading lady into character actor’, with many, including stars, commonly struggling to find work during this phase.2 Christie herself commented on the speed of this transition: ‘Suddenly you start to get these roles of the mother of the ingénue you’d have played five years ago and it happens in a very swift moment.’3 While the subject of ageing is not a central concern of this chapter – I address it in my concluding discussion of Afterglow – I mention it here as one of the environmental factors impacting upon the actress’s professional options. Other factors were shaping Christie’s professional decisions. As an established star operating in a freelance economy and without contractual obligations she was free to accept and decline film scripts and projects on the basis of her personal preferences, tastes and beliefs. By this point in her career she had become increasingly critical of commercial film-making, its norms and sexual politics,

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and declared herself not prepared to ‘alter my taste to fit into an economic pattern’ of Hollywood film-making.4 She let the press know that she was turning down scripts on the basis of what she later described as their ‘misinformation ... [about] women’s roles, racial, environmental or emotional stuff’.5 Instead she prioritised the smallscale, niche projects proliferating in the British independent sector at this time, often helmed by young or first-time directors such as Sally Potter and David Gladwell. She began, as the British film critic Alexander Walker observed in 1985, ‘willingly len[ding] herself as a sort of currency for what other talents might wish to purchase’.6 As this chapter will examine, Christie exchanged one kind of ‘worth’ for another, using her commercial value to leverage projects that she deemed politically or socially acceptable. In this respect she functioned as both a star and a critique of stardom. Reflecting on working with Christie on The Gold Diggers, Sally Potter described it as bringing the ‘two impenetrable worlds’ of stardom and low-budget film-making ‘into collision’.7 This dynamic is the leitmotif of Christie’s career in the 1980s and this chapter is concerned with both how the actress brought these worlds together and why.

The politics of prestige From 1980 onwards, the year in which Christie turned forty, the actress’s film output became intermittent. Periods of activity were interspersed with gaps and absences from the screen when she used her time, and celebrity status, to publicly support political causes such as environmentalism and feminism. The combination of the actress’s film work, political activities off screen and her muchreported ‘alternative’ lifestyle in Wales consolidated the shift towards prestige stardom begun in the 1970s.8 Throughout the 1980s the British press forecast Christie’s ‘comebacks’ and debated her ‘Garboesque’ qualities, described by one journalist as ‘an almost total

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unactressy public silence.’9 This debate ensured the actress remained in the public domain while it simultaneously earned her a reputation for eschewing stardom and being discerning in her film choices. This ‘invisibility in the midst of visibility’ narrative is, as Paul McDonald has argued, typical of prestige stars.10 Her performances were well received by the British press, particularly the more mainstream Heat and Dust, The Return of the Soldier (1982) and Separate Tables (1983) and while significant box-office success eluded the actress – as much through her own choice as through the gendered and ageist practices of the industry – she featured consistently in British public discourse in the 1980s and maintained a public profile consistent with the values she espoused.11 Prestige stardom is also a fruitful line of enquiry for opening up the topic of political activism. While one is not a precondition of the other, the two can be interconnected and are in the case of Julie Christie, who built a reputation for actorly activism in the 1980s. Her political activities meant less time for work but her screen absence was also intended as a direct comment on screen politics and what the actress identified as forms of ‘misrepresentation’ in the cultural realm, especially concerning women. As I will demonstrate, Christie made a number of statements to the press explicitly connecting her absence from the screen to the politics of representation. Also widely reported in the British press was her willingness to accept a non-star salary and occasionally to work for free on non-mainstream projects tackling such themes as vivisection, social collapse and gender politics (The Animals Film, 1980, Memoirs of a Survivor, The Gold Diggers). The critic Joan Goodman, writing for Cosmopolitan magazine, commented that Christie ‘could have earned more than ten times the money in Hollywood which has long been trying to woo her back’, an indication of how these activities functioned as both a form of political activism/social commentary and an anti-star gesture through which symbolic capital accrued for the actress.12 As McDonald argues ‘Symbolic capital, in the form of artistic prestige,

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is prized and obtains value precisely for how it appears to disavow economic (in the financial sense) capital.’13 Christie’s economic disinterest and gestures of solidarity with marginalised groups were both the means through which she exercised agency and a vehicle to accrue symbolic capital. As this chapter will argue, this period of Christie’s life represented a key transitional phase in which she began to think about and experiment with how to use her prestige stardom and emergent feminism in tandem, within the context of working in a global film industry.

Actorly activism In situating Christie as a political actress, what are the traditions she builds on and the possibilities for, and risks of, political expression? In the context of this chapter I use the term ‘political actress’ to define an actress involved in political and social activism who also has a publicly recognised reputation for political engagement. In 1986 Christie categorised herself in press interviews as a political person, as distinct from a politician, who felt it her duty as someone in the public domain to ‘draw attention to ... injustice’. Speaking out was, she insisted, ‘something an actress can often do’.14 Her political activism was socially conscious, issue-based and unconnected to party politics. Her political profile has something in common with her contemporaries Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson but, unlike those actresses, Christie’s politics never extended to membership of a political party, as with Redgrave’s affiliation to the Workers Revolutionary Party, or to forfeiting the acting profession altogether in favour of election to the British parliament, as Jackson did in 1992. Christie, who had lived and worked in the US at the height of Jane Fonda’s activism, saw the American actress as the leading figure of her generation of politically motivated actors. Fonda was, in Christie’s words, someone who ‘set an example’,

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demonstrating how a star ‘could use your availability to the media not just to talk about yourself’. Christie accepted there was a price for this; ‘Actors and actresses are easy to ridicule because they’re stepping out of line ... we saw that with Jane ... [who] had to bravely go through that process of being shot down.’15 As this chapter will illustrate there were close parallels between Christie and Fonda in terms of the negative treatment both received from the press as political women in the public arena. The first section of this chapter briefly outlines the range of Christie’s political ‘acts’ before moving on to examine in more detail how the British press responded to Christie as a political woman and the pejorative image they created of ‘Battling Julie’. I then interpret how this image was recuperated by sections of the British and American press within the context of a popularised feminism. The third section scrutinises Christie’s self-expressed feminism and her observations of the gendered and sexual politics of her own profession, before attending in detail to four films (Memoirs of a Survivor, Heat and Dust, The Return of the Soldier and The Gold Diggers) to examine the extent to which they evidence a feminist praxis.

The politics of Julie Christie Christie’s politics are expressed in three main ways: off-screen activism, films and behind-the-screen interventions. Her activism reached a peak in the 1980s when she was publicly outspoken about several causes. In 1984 she visited Nicaragua to draw attention to US involvement in the country and in 1988 travelled to Cambodia to make a film for the British charity Oxfam, which was campaigning to bring political stability to the region.16 An active supporter of the British-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, she was also involved with the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp. She narrated a number of documentaries criticising animal vivisection, chemical

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warfare and male bias in the media, and took an Open University course in Eastern religions.17 Her politics focused on the four key areas of environmentalism, feminism, animal rights and capitalism/Western imperialism and were broadly in step with contemporary left-leaning politics of the 1980s. This raft of activities earned Christie the pejorative title of ‘Battling Julie’ in some sections of the popular British press, a label I will return to shortly. The actress’s body of film work broadly reflected her liberal, leftleaning sensibilities. Her films range from the explicitly radical, in content and occasionally form (The Animals Film, The Gold Diggers, Memoirs of a Survivor) to those offering a more liberal political critique (The Railway Station Man, 1992; Fools of Fortune, 1990; Power, 1986; Heat and Dust, The Return of the Soldier). The radical films tackled the issues of experimentation on animals, social breakdown, gender politics and the sexual economy (thankfully not all at once) and were produced on small budgets for limited release. Their minimal economic return was offset by a dividend of symbolic capital. For The Gold Diggers, for example, Christie was paid £30 per day, the same rate as the rest of the cast and crew, but the role was pivotal in elevating her in feminist film circles to the status of a ‘distinguished woman’.18 Her liberal films, modestly budgeted relative to the Hollywood blockbusters of the day, take a stand on a number of moral issues, including the ethics of new technologies (Demon Seed), the politics of capitalism and corporate corruption (Heaven Can Wait, Power), and Britain’s colonial past and present (Miss Mary, 1986; Fools of Fortune and The Railway Station Man). Christie played various roles, including those of artist, journalist, environmental campaigner, post-apocalyptic survivor, aristocrat and repressed governess, resulting in a body of work that may encompass but also goes beyond traditional ‘feminine’ concerns of love, marriage and personal relationships. Despite the different production contexts – Hollywood’s Power emerges from a very different industry tradition from the Argentinian Miss Mary – this body of work can be seen to be linked thematically with a common

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interest in challenging social injustice and foregrounding the imbalances of power between genders, peoples, species and nations. Clearly there were parts for actresses like Christie, who were politically motivated and willing to take professional risks but to support these films on to production involved working for less money, cultivating and actively supporting a circle of committed film-makers, and gradually building up a reputation for doing certain kinds of film. At first glance there would appear to be a close correlation between Christie’s offscreen political work and her on-screen roles, with the latter endorsing the former, although in my film analysis I will test this observation more robustly. Finally, and running parallel to Christie’s film roles are her behind-the-screen choices and interventions, themselves another form of political expression. The actress lent her support to projects such as The Return of the Soldier, her backing helping the former script supervisor Anne Skinner transition into the role of producer. Christie’s readiness to sign up as Ruby in The Gold Diggers and ‘D’ in Memoirs of a Survivor reassured the films’ financial backers (respectively the BFI and Thorn-EMI/NFFC) about the likelihood of a return on their investment in projects helmed by directors new to feature-length production. Christie was cast in Memoirs at the behest of the film’s backers on the grounds that she had the potential to attract an audience to a film whose topic was not immediately commercial.19 Christie’s name had sufficient commercial clout to attract the interest of financial backers and the way that she still figured as a kind of currency, as she did in the mainstream film industry, is revealing about the autonomy she could exercise.

Media response: ‘Battling Julie’ Christie aligned herself with the political ‘other’ across the board, her willingness to be outspoken, in word and deed, putting her acutely at

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odds with gendered expectations of normative femininity, and social norms of class and race more generally. Nowhere was this more evident than in her press campaign to promote the general release in Britain of Victor Schonfeld’s documentary The Animals Film. Schonfeld’s film exposed the horrors of animal experimentation, vivisection and intensive farming practices, interspersing documentary footage, cartoons and vox pops, with a soundtrack written by Robert Wyatt and David Byrne. Schonfeld was convinced that Christie had the right blend of celebrity status and political credibility for the project and he pursued the actress to provide, unpaid, voiceover narration for the film.20 Christie did this and more, making statements at the film’s premiere at the London Film Festival in November 1981 and posing alongside members of the radical animal-rights group, the Northern Animal Liberation League, on the film’s general release in Britain in April 1982.21 With Christie dressed in what one journalist described as a ‘black beret and brown battle-dress trousers – and no make-up’ the promotional campaign received widespread coverage in the British broadsheets and tabloids.22 Indeed this powerful image of Christie, in an iconographic black beret posing next to a figure wearing a ‘ski mask’, was to recirculate throughout the decade, reappearing in the British press whenever a new Christie film was released. The iconography has a particular, and historically specific, resonance. Christie’s Che Guevara-style black beret is commonly associated with countercultural values and political dissent, while the image of the ski-mask was associated in 1980s Britain with the Irish Republican Army, which was positioned in the mainland and mainstream British consciousness as a terror organisation. Collectively these images and her reappropriation of them constitute an extremely potent and radical gesture by a mainstream, commercial star. With four feature films in circulation by 1983 (Memoirs, Soldier, Gold and Heat and Dust) and publicly involved in a range of political

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‘Battling Julie’ in the popular press, Daily Mail, 7 April 1982

acts and gestures, the British press could not ignore the actress. How then did the media engage with this highly visible woman, who was unmarried and, as the press repeatedly pointed out, ‘childless’, who voiced her opinion on topics such as environmentalism and women’s roles in the workplace? The language adopted by the mainstream British press to describe Christie constructed the identity of a militant woman: ‘Battling Julie drops the face of stardom for a message’, an ‘Agitprop’s Garbo’. For the press, the actress’s politics rendered her physically unattractive, with Christie repeatedly disparaged for ‘dowdy looks’, having joined the ‘dowdy crowd’ and being a ‘fearsome, unsmiling blonde’.23 Christie’s activism was dismissed by some tabloids and broadsheets as bandwagon politics – ‘think of a cause and the 42 year old actor, who reputedly earns £300,000 a film, seems to embrace it’– while others categorised her

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as ineffectual, reporting facts ‘with a rather steely authority’ while finding her ‘far less certain about how to act on them’.24 The pejorative commentary drew comparisons with other similarly derided political actresses. The Daily Mirror found Christie ‘as boringly committed as Jane Fonda’, while for the Sunday Correspondent she was ‘humourless and spinsterish, somewhere between a stridently left-wing Vanessa Redgrave and Brigitte Bardot with her animals’.25 The treatment of Christie highlights some of the issues at stake for a political actress in the public arena. Well-established tropes of the woman with opinions as ‘strident’ and lacking in ‘feminine’ grace or charm are mobilised, while implicit in this press commentary is the spectre of a more recent figure, the ‘Women’s Libber’, characterised as dowdy, boring and humourless. The press’s sceptical tone towards the actress’s political motivation implies her activism is merely a publicity exercise, a common charge that stars have to negotiate. Christie was sanguine about this reception: ‘Anyone who talks against government policy is going to be trashed. Actors and actresses are easy to ridicule, because they’re stepping out of line.’26 This press stance on a female star engaged in politics is not unusual. Feminist film scholar Tessa Perkins has illustrated how the British press treated Jane Fonda in a similar manner in the 1970s. Fonda, who earned the pejorative nickname ‘Hanoi Jane’ for her involvement in the anti-Vietnam campaign, was variously denigrated as a ‘mouthy twerp’, ‘not loveable’, ‘no fun at all’ and ‘being on a “cause” kick’.27 Perkins argues that the ways in which Fonda was talked about in the popular press revealed ‘a sort of desperate need to bring her back into some recognizable, normal feminine role [and] to undermine … her claims to be a political being’.28 She goes on to suggest that feminist women could then use this publicly visible ‘attack’ on the actress as ‘the basis of a sympathetic identification with the Fonda image’.29

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The Christie image, as with that of Fonda before her, functioned in similar and suggestive ways, which illuminate how feminism was received and contested at this historical moment. Readers could align themselves with the press’s derisive dismissal of the actress, for example, or sympathise with her in the face of patronising treatment, or use the image’s associations with ‘rebellion’ to negotiate the terms of their own feminism. There is certainly a case to be made, mobilising an ‘image and spectator-effects’ model, for Christie as an ego-ideal (or alternatively a bad object) for audiences and readers of the 1980s. The specific sociopolitical context of the early 1980s had created a need for feminist role models of different dispositions and hues. As the singular cause of feminism as a political movement fragmented (grappling with questions of race, class and sexuality) feminist academics and activists were left facing an uncertain future. But the idea of women’s liberation, in populist terms (understood as concepts of ‘emancipation’ and ‘freedom of choice’), reached many more women in the 1980s than it had in the 1970s, through vehicles such as the Guardian’s ‘women’s page’.30 There was an interest in the professional and personal activities of high-profile women such as Christie whose experiences offered readers points of connection and negotiation in relation to a popularised feminism. Two examples serve to illustrate how the Christie image was appropriated into these discourses. In an interview for The Times in 1984 Christie reflected on various topics, including working in a male-dominated profession, the power dynamics of the workplace, female role models, definitions of women and challenging patriarchy. She described a typical working environment as one where ‘almost everyone around me was male’ and a working culture where it was impossible to ‘talk about women in what is a male-dominated profession … [because] you literally get laughed down’. Survival in this environment was a matter of ‘censoring [everything] you did when you were with men … . Language, behaviour, everything’.31

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These scenarios had the potential to strike a chord with the middleclass female readers of publications such as The Times, some of whom were making their own inroads into male-dominated professions in the 1980s. An earlier interview with Christie, entitled ‘Woman’s Point of Contact’, demonstrates how Christie was positioned and appropriated as a role model for women in the 1980s.32 Nowhere was this more evident than in the response of the influential American film critic B. Ruby Rich to Julie Christie in the 1980s. Rich, as a journalist, festival organiser and scholar, had played a central role in programming women’s cinema into film festivals in the 1970s and circulating ideas about feminist film-making through magazines and journals such as Village Voice and Sight and Sound. By the mid-1980s Rich and her peers were responding to the wider fragmentation of feminism as a political movement and the questions this raised for women’s cinema. Should film-makers work outside the mainstream and seek to develop new systems of representation – as Sally Potter had endeavoured with The Gold Diggers – or should they work within the existing system and weather all the compromises that entailed? Within this context Rich appropriated Christie as a positive example of how to live and work as a feminist. Rich had been successful in securing one of the few press interviews Christie undertook to promote the US release of The Return of the Soldier in 1985 and the women went on to forge a longstanding friendship. The film premiered at an upmarket fundraising benefit in Washington DC organised by ‘Women in Film and Video’, a professional group supporting women in the media industries. Rich was highly critical of the event and its ‘power crowd’, which she characterised as ‘the face of savvy feminism’, whose members betrayed the politics of women’s film festivals by exhibiting the films of an American elite. In the face of this she valorised Julie Christie, finding in the actress’s politics and film choices an integrity she deemed ‘unassailable’ and an enviable

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sense of commitment and optimism. For Rich Christie functioned as a role model who had turned her back on easy fame to ‘take her career in hand and make of it something different than it might have been’, building, she concluded, ‘a career of solidarity with marginalized voices’.33 There is evidence then that the Christie image became a potent symbol in the 1980s, circulating through the mainstream and specialist press in ways that shed light on how feminism was being received and contested. To extend this analysis I want to move from the star as image to the star as social subject and investigate Christie’s films as feminist praxis. To do this I need to attend in more detail both to Christie’s press interviews and her awareness of the industry in which she worked.

Feminism, in theory Like many women of her generation Christie’s feminist principles had been shaped by classic second wave texts such as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, which Christie described as ‘revelationary (sic) stuff ... [it] made me realise what I’d done to myself. I’d taken it on faith that men were more intelligent than women.’34 Christie’s feminism was of the liberalist/social constructionist variety that sought to challenge the gendered social roles ascribed to men and women. In a 1985 interview she reflected: I’ve been trying for quite a long time now to live my ordinary everyday life in ways that would try to break through the barriers imposed upon me by society ... [including] those relating to men. I’ve tried to overcome my fear and awe of men, an attitude to which I was conditioned by both school and society.35

Trying to think and live differently as a woman was a challenge for the actress who described it as ‘quite a struggle. ... I’m not always

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successful. Sometimes you say “This is just too tiring,” and you give up.’36 This challenge was a familiar one to feminists. As the historian Sheila Rowbotham observed, ‘Hanging onto utopia and getting your kit together for repeated journeys into the unknown ... becomes rather a strain as the years go by.’37 The central dilemma for Christie was that she recognised that she worked in an industry with a disabling structure, that is, one that objectified women. She was critical of what she termed ‘sex objectivism’ in film, summing up women’s function in sixties cinema as ‘to be disliked by the heroes over and over and over again’.38 She found the majority of films from the 1970s and 1980s reduced women to ‘operating as some satellite to a man’ and criticised the medium for its ‘camouflage of action and romance’, which glossed over its sexual politics.39 Her investment in feminist principles could not be easily accommodated by an industry predicated on heterosexual romance and the sexual objectification of women, its structure of representation in fact openly hostile to expressions of feminism in either content or form. Her attempts, for example, to ‘talk about women in what is a male-dominated profession’ bear witness to that hostility. As an actress she faced a number of options. She could withdraw her labour, endorse feminist projects, start her own production company (à la Jane Fonda), work in the system and try to improve women’s roles, perhaps incrementally or, in her own words, ‘give up’ and accept her role within a gendered status quo. With the exception of the production company scenario she was to experiment with all of these options for the remainder of her career.40 Certainly she was outspoken in the 1980s about what she was and was not prepared to do as an actress and what she wanted to achieve with her work. She ‘object[ed] to parts in which women do things through the male protagonists. Playing those sorts of roles can’t change anything.’41 She described herself as ‘very pernickety, very picky, and happy to be so. I look at a script and think “this is reinforcing this or that prejudice or attitude”, and I turn it down.’42

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There is archival evidence to support Christie’s claims that she was selective. She refused the lead role in Curtis Harrington’s proposed adaptation of Iris Murdoch’s gothic novel The Unicorn (1963) on the grounds that her character was ‘another passive woman dominated by men’ and ‘the worst role I could possibly play’. 43 In the same year, 1983, she rejected a role in Joseph Losey’s adaptation of Nell Dunn’s Steaming on the grounds of its nudity, having elsewhere objected to women’s screen nudity because she found it ‘always in some way exploitative’.44 Furthermore, she articulated a new sense of social responsibility vis à vis screen representations, declaring, ‘I don’t think that then I knew what the women I played represented for women. Now I do’, as she reflected on her earlier film roles.45 As a counterpoint to negative screen imagery she foregrounded the work of European actresses, positioning them as her role models: I could watch Delphine Seyrig forever and ever. And Nathalie Baye, and Hanna Schygulla. ... It’s not just that they take their craft seriously, but they seem to force us into thinking about definitions of women. They present more than images; they give us a psychology of a type of woman and continue to develop that throughout their career.46

Not only did she value their achievement in reshaping cultural representations of gender, she appreciated the work of feminist directors such as Chantal Akerman, whose Jeanne Dielman (1976) showed ‘washing up, drying up, tidying, putting things away ... all those tiny things that can take up a woman’s life’.47 Collectively the actress’s statements suggest her acute awareness of the politics of representation and the explicit connection she drew between her feminist consciousness and her film work. The extent to which she was able to bring a feminist consciousness to that work, however, was complicated by two factors: film’s status as a collaborative practice and the industry’s

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current commercial concerns. As a star she had a degree of latitude, relative to the production context, budget and other voices in the production process, but it was not her ideas alone driving the production and she had to fight to exert power. My discussion in Chapter 2 diagnosed the challenges Christie faced when directed by auteurs. These were exacerbated by a mainstream British film industry in the 1980s that foregrounded screen images of aggressive masculinity or exclusively male worlds.48 Putting feminist principles into (film) practice presented her with difficulties on a number of fronts.

Transition and diagnosis Christie was well aware of what was at stake and how things could turn out in film production. Two of the most striking elements of Christie’s career from this time are, in my opinion, Demon Seed and the publicity campaign for The Animals Film, which engendered the ‘Battling Julie’ image. Although neither text is explicitly feminist, they shed light on the central importance of feminism as a political force in Christie’s career, which connected and underpinned other aspects of her politics. How do we understand Demon Seed within the context of the actress’s emerging feminism? Christie would have caught the attention of director Donald Cammell, who had an interest in transformative sexuality and had worked on Performance (1970) with Nicolas Roeg, a film-maker with whom she had a well-established professional relationship. On paper the film fitted with the actress’s politics. Adapted from a novel by Dean Koontz, Christie’s character Susan is a professional woman, a psychiatrist whose humanistic values oppose the rationalism of her husband, a technophilic scientist whose overreaching AI creation Proteus impregnates Susan to give physical form to its offspring. The script is critical of the corporate exploitation of natural resources, describing seabed mining as ‘the

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The risks of feminist politics in mainstream film production: Julie Christie in Demon Seed (1977)

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rape of the earth’, and Koontz’s assessment of the novel as a ‘scathing satire of a panoply of male attitude’ suggests a philosophy in step with Christie’s principles.49 Certainly film critics of the time discerned its feminist potential, reading it as a (failed) attempt to cross ‘Women’s Lib with Computer Lib’.50 The finished result is rather different and featured sadistic scenes of an increasingly distressed Susan being trapped, hounded and finally raped, spreadeagled on a gurney while being penetrated by a computer-guided robot at the behest of Proteus. Feminist indeed. Christie’s intentions for the role had been principled. In a 1980 interview she reflected, ‘I thought the idea was interesting and the film could be interesting, too … it didn’t turn out in a way I’d wanted it to.’51 The film’s chequered production history – it was taken from Cammell and re-edited by the production company MGM – illustrates how easy it was to lose control when working with big budgets and production companies where the profit margin was always the bottom line. Hollywood production of the mid-1970s may have tolerated a ‘scathing satire … of male attitude’ but its objectification of women remained intact. Equally pertinent was how Christie was subsequently held to account by others for the role. The director Curtis Harrington, for example, defended his ‘Unicorn’ script against Christie’s charges of misogyny on the grounds that it could not have been worse than her part in Demon Seed.52 For Harrington the role meant the actress was complicit, undermining her complaints about gender representation in his film. The charge of complicity can also be seen in the misogynistic response of some critics. Gary Arnold, writing for the Washington Post, described Christie as a star who had not transcended her Darling image as ‘a spiteful, amoral girl who degraded herself ’ and associated the actress with ‘girls who’ll try anything once’, ergo her ‘loose morals’ justify her sexual abuse.53 Choosing less conventional films risked backlash from industry professionals.

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Demon Seed represents a transitional moment in the actress’s career. It marked the end of Christie’s Hollywood films and the beginning of a three-year absence from the screen. The actress’s reflections on the film and this period of her career are revealing: My relationship with film directors was paternalistic, completely irresponsible in the way I put myself in their hands. That’s changed. I’m no longer the little girl letting Daddy do all the work. With Demon Seed, I had to take a lot of responsibility; otherwise, it would have turned into something I would not have cared to be in. After that, I wasn’t relying on father figures any more, which is great, since I’m less frightened.54

Her comments imply that Demon Seed had been an attempt on her part to exercise professional control, while the unsatisfactory outcome strengthened her resolve to take charge of her career. The film was part of the process through which the actress took stock of career options and possibilities and worked out, by trial and error, how to operate as an autonomous i.e. feminist woman within the film industry. Christie’s return to the screen came in 1981 with the lowbudget, niche British film Memoirs of a Survivor, but what attracted attention was not so much this feature but the 1982 publicity campaign for The Animals Film, which was covered by the British broadsheet and tabloid press. How do we understand this campaign within the context of the actress’s feminism? Animal activism was undoubtedly one of the causes of her generation, alongside the peace movement, environmentalism and feminism. But her statements about the film and her involvement with it are illuminating. She had initially been suspicious of it in case it was ‘a kind of Disney “Let’s be kind to the fluffy bunnies” type of thing’.55 For the actress the film hit home because, in her words, it, reached to the roots of our confusions about our treatment of animals. Because it’s not about animals – it’s about us. It’s about human nature and the atrocities

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some factions of it can quite blandly commit … exactly in the same way they’re being committed, for example, in El Salvador today.56

For Christie, animal suffering was one facet of a human nature that was capable of committing multiple atrocities against not only animals but groups of humans and the environment. The strands of the actress’s activism (marginalised groups, animals, ecology) are not disparate but are drawn together through an understanding of inequalities of power that is compatible with feminist analyses and specifically ecofeminist critiques of the functioning of gendered power. There is a longstanding connection in feminist scholarship between the women’s movement and the ecology movement, which are linked by the recognition that socioeconomic relationships are predicated on dominance. Ecofeminism is concerned with what the philosopher Karen Warren terms ‘the interconnections … between the unjustified domination of women and other human Others … and the unjustified domination of nonhuman nature’.57 Ecofeminists making a case for animal welfare would argue that ‘the unjustified dominations, objectification, and commodification of women and nonhuman animals occur in mutually reinforcing and conceptually inseparable ways’.58 While Christie does not make these connections across the strands of her activism explicitly in print, her statements about her career show an acute insight into the functioning of power and control. She described her Hollywood career as a time when ‘I absolutely lost control, it was part of not having control over anything. I’d let directors tell me what to do, and I was extraordinarily happy to do so because I didn’t think I could accomplish anything myself.’59 Stardom was similarly associated with a loss of control: People used to go potty when they saw me in the streets of New York: they used to scream, run at me and pull at me – I wasn’t a real human being. And I got so furious! I got angry ....60

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Control was to become a central issue for the actress, returned to repeatedly in her press interviews through the 1980s, and in these statements about control we can read a kinship with animals that is produced by her feminist beliefs. Demon Seed and The Animals Film press campaign are central to the process through which Christie exercised agency and discovered through the subsequent backlash where the socially set limits of that gendered agency lay. The reaction to her and her responses shed light on how gendered narrative cinema and commercial/economic structures sustain norms of powerlessness. Christie herself, through her own words, illustrates both her astuteness in diagnosing it, and her honesty in examining her own successes and failures in combating those norms. If Hollywood was a time when the actress did not think she could accomplish anything by herself, to what extent do her films from the British period achieve her professional aims and ambitions vis à vis feminism? The final section of this chapter will examine four films from the early 1980s that build on the transitional period of the late 1970s and signal a new phase in Christie’s career. Here I interrogate the extent of her feminist praxis within the context of the British film industry of that time.

Feminist praxis Christie’s professional decisions were motivated by two factors: representation and control. To summarise, she was critical of the sexual politics of her profession and gendered ways of looking and did not want to create characters that reinforced gender stereotypes or objectified women, preferring instead roles that ‘force us into thinking about definitions of women’. Professional control was important to the actress – taking responsibility for herself and not being told what to do – but she was acutely aware of the limitations of working in a male-dominated environment and the costs incurred

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when speaking out as a woman on set. More broadly she was seeking to challenge herself to break down the social barriers imposed on her, especially those that demanded she have, in her words, ‘fear and awe of men’. It is within this framework that I situate the four British films Christie made between 1980 and 1983. Three are adapted from the novels of feminist authors: Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974); Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Ruth Prawar Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust (1975), while the fourth The Gold Diggers is a text of radical feminism, scripted and directed by Sally Potter, Rose English and Lindsay Cooper. Modestly budgeted by the standards of the day, the films prioritise a female perspective and cast women as protagonists and narrators. They open up the question of ‘feminine’ identity to scrutiny, often showing it to be complex and contradictory, and there is an engagement with the history of women and women’s history that engenders a dialogue between generations of women. Rebecca West’s 1918 novel was reissued by Virago in 1980 offering second wave feminists a point of connection with an earlier generation of feminist writing. Ruth Prawar Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust locates its two female protagonists in their respective historical periods of the 1920s and 1980s while the historical sweep of Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers is more expansive, encompassing the silent movie star, the Hollywood belle and film noir’s femme fatale in its critique of the cinematic heroine. Lessing’s famous exploration of feminine identity The Golden Notebook (1962) prefigured the central concerns of second wave feminism, and Survivor builds on this, foregrounding a female protagonist and her quest for selfknowledge. I address the question of representation by exploring each film and character in relation to Christie’s feminist politics and tackle the issue of control by assessing such factors as the actress’s input into the production process and her selection of nonpatriarchal working environments. A secondary line of enquiry is reception. The films serve as examples not only of how feminism is

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materialised in aesthetic production but how it is received and contested. The difficulty for an actress of ‘doing feminism’ in and through film can be measured by critical and commercial response.

Memoirs of a Survivor: the quest for self-knowledge Memoirs of a Survivor is an adaptation of Lessing’s dystopian novel about the disintegration of a modern civilisation. Made on a modest budget of $1 million, the film called for Christie to deglamorise, eschewing flattering make-up and stylish clothing in favour of a down-at-heel aesthetic, which befitted the film’s depiction of a ruined society.61 It is the first example of the ‘two impenetrable worlds’ of stardom and low-budget film-making colliding in the Christie oeuvre. The cast were predominantly young actors from television and the film marked the feature directorial debut of David Gladwell, whose background was in editing and directing documentary shorts. Gladwell had little experience of directing professionals and none of working with stars. Christie turned this production context to her advantage. Her character ‘D’ is an observer, her narrative function to bear witness to the disintegration of civilisation around her, where public services have ceased to run and food shortages and street gangs are part of everyday life. Some feminist scholars of Lessing’s fiction have found ‘D’ ‘passive’ and compared her unfavourably to the active female protagonists in the novelist’s earlier fiction.62 Others see ‘D’ in more positive terms, capable not only of watching and waiting but of wisdom, compassion, learning and leadership.63 Director David Gladwell, who co-wrote the script, was clear about his interpretation: ‘the role was passive and Julie wasn’t called on to do much apart from being there, witnessing everything going on around her, rather like Malcolm McDowell in O Lucky Man!’.64 Christie had other ideas and resisted Gladwell’s direction, depicting

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her character engaged in a variety of activities, such as upholstering chairs and mending clothes. This presents ‘D’ as a practical, resourceful woman, with domestic skills of value in the new economy. It also suggests a reference to the feminist position on domesticity as work, which Christie had noted in Chantal Akerman’s films. This was not Gladwell’s intention. The director confessed, ‘I would have been quite happy with her just observing.’ Nor was collaboration his usual practice. His complaint that Christie ‘wouldn’t just be a jobbing actress and do as she was told’ illustrates how he had to adapt his working methods to accommodate her interpretation of the character, as well as revealing directorial expectations of actors.65 Christie had clearly graduated from an unquestioning acceptance of paternalist directorial authority. More broadly the film and Christie’s role are consistent with the actress’s off-screen pronouncements. ‘D’ is the main protagonist, a single woman who lives alone and is not defined by a relationship with a man. She is both a pragmatist and a thinker, engaged in what the literary critic Sheila Conboy termed ‘a transcendental quest for self-knowledge’.66 She shares the fruits of this quest with other survivors, whom she helps break through into a new and better world. At the centre of the film is a relationship between two women, ‘D’ and Emily Cartwright (Leonie Mellinger), a young woman evacuee who is entrusted, without explanation, to ‘D’s’ care. This relationship is mutually beneficial. In attempting to understand Emily’s background ‘D’ comes to a better understanding of herself and society’s norms, which better equips her to support Emily and others in developing their own critical awareness. And Emily shows ‘D’ what Lessing terms ‘the business of survival, its resources and tricks and little contrivances’, such as adapting clothes, growing food and trading goods.67 The character, as portrayed by Christie in the film (and as distinct from some interpretations of the literary character) is an agent of change, in her own life and the lives of those

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around her, someone with wisdom and compassion, who is open to learning and capable of guiding others. While the film may have satisfied Christie’s ambitions for positive gender representation and agency, it made little impact commercially or critically. Reviewers found Christie the only compensating factor in a film otherwise obscure and lacking in realism. Photoplay praised her ‘strong performance’ while the actress Maria Aitken, reviewing for the Daily Mail, enthused that the star was ‘shining with sincerity and more beautiful than ever’.68 The film features some relatively flattering close-up shots of a smiling Christie. Walter Lassally’s cinematography softens the bleakness of the setting and draws out the empathic traces of Christie’s star persona, but Aitken overstates the case, perhaps indicating how critics sought some justification for the star’s appearance in this low-budget production. Critics may have welcomed Christie’s return to the screen but Memoirs remained for the Photoplay critic ‘one of the most mystifying films I can recall’ while the Daily Telegraph’s reviewer complained that the survivors were suffering from food shortages rather than starvation. It seems that more than a few close-up shots of Christie were needed to make palatable a woman’s ‘transcendental quest for self-knowledge’.

The Return of the Soldier : ‘ornamental through and through’ By contrast the actress’s next film – The Return of the Soldier – was a period drama set in Edwardian England with Christie playing the beautiful and imperious Kitty. As lady of the manor, married to the handsome Chris Baldry (Alan Bates), the setting and character recalled Christie’s role as Marian in The Go-Between, offering critics and audiences a familiar point of entry to the film. At first glance a period piece with high production values (relative to Memoirs), may

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seem to yield little scope for feminist politics, but the script’s exposure of the false values by which Kitty lives opens up the category of ‘the feminine’ in illuminating ways. The plot centres on the relationship between Chris Baldry and the three women in his life; his wife Kitty, an unmarried cousin Jenny (Ann-Margret) and the lower-class Margaret (Glenda Jackson). Injured during the Great War and suffering from shell-shock, Chris is unable to remember much of his adult life including his marriage to the selfish Kitty. He returns to the family home, Baldry Court, where he resumes a courtship with his childhood sweetheart Margaret, a plain and homely woman. Kitty is furious that her assets of beauty, breeding and refinement have no currency in Chris’s new world and seeks a cure for her husband. Following the intervention of a psychotherapist, Chris ‘returns’ to present-day life, his marriage and, inevitably, military conflict on the frontline. Christie was drawn to play Kitty Baldry because it was, in the actress’s words, ‘an unsympathetic role ... [and] a part unlike any I had done before’.69 Being cast against type was a form of professional control, allowing her to extend her range as an actress and push back against producers and directors who expected her to bring what she described as ‘a quality of vulnerability’ to film roles.70 Kitty is marvellously unlikeable and Christie plays her with relish: kicking her pet dog and being outrageously offended by Margaret’s shabby yellow raincoat, ‘That dowd!’ she haughtily proclaims. The production context also held attractions for her. She declared her professional respect for Glenda Jackson (‘She’s just so good and I admire her’) and her commitment to the project allowed her to support her ‘old friend’ Anne Skinner in her first outing as a producer.71 The slower narrative pace of period drama allowed for the development of characters, which Christie found ‘low-key and complex’ in this film, and a female ensemble drama meant that women’s stories assumed priority.72 Positioning herself in an ensemble cast with well-regarded actors such as Jackson ensured that

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Christie continued to accrue symbolic capital in the form of artistic prestige. Critics were largely complimentary about the acting – ‘cheers for the harmonious quartet of players’ – and the film’s selection for the British entry at Cannes in 1982 consolidated its position, and that of its cast, at the ‘quality’ end of the market.73 What does this unsympathetic part have to say about questions of gender identity and women’s social roles? Kitty and Jenny are dependent women whose lives only have meaning in relation to Chris. The film opens with the two women sitting in the nursery, awaiting a letter from Chris bringing news of the outside world. The setting links them in status to dependent children and makes the point that these social roles infantilise women.74 Kitty is beautiful and glamorous and lives by false values, over-investing in physical and social appearances. In the novel’s opening pages the narrator Jenny describes Kitty as ‘so like a girl on a magazine cover that one expected to find a large “7d” somewhere attached to her person’.75 In the film this version of idealised femininity is constructed through costume and production design. The costume designer Shirley Russell dressed Kitty in shimmering silks in a dazzling array of colours, from burnt orange to peacock blue, and richly embroidered robes to indicate Kitty’s femininity as ‘fabricated’. Her fair hair is flatteringly backlit and dressed in pre-Raphaelite curls. The film mobilises the machinery of stardom (close-up, cinematography, costume) to offer up Kitty–Christie for visual pleasure. This image is juxtaposed with the heavy velvets worn by Jenny, which make her appear, by contrast, matronly, her dark hair dressed to look matt and lacklustre. Luciana Arrighi’s production design includes sets of luxurious interior decoration, with cushions, curtains and soft furnishings of richly textured fabrics. This surface is seductive: beautiful, perfectly arranged and visually pleasing. Kitty is pure decoration or, in film critic Pauline Kael’s verdict, ‘ornamental through and through’ and prepared to sacrifice her husband to military conflict to preserve her version of femininity as normative.76 By contrast Margaret is constructed as

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physically plain yet, unlike Jenny, a warm, sexual being, able to confirm to the psychotherapist that Chris was ‘always very physical’ during their youthful courtship. Kitty and Margaret thus represent opposing versions of domesticity and the ensemble cast brings the diversity and social capital of womanhood into view. But the role also requires the disruption of visual pleasure. Kitty is physically attractive but invested in false values and therefore repellent. Christie’s performance communicates this very effectively. She purses her lips, the famously fleshy lower lip compressed to the point that her nose takes on an aquiline appearance. She scowls, her eyes cold and hooded and, under pressure, she accuses Chris of ‘shamming’, her voice taking on what one critic called a ‘curdled quality’, which undercuts her gracious hostess act.77 In the closing scene Chris is brought out of his amnesiac state and remembers his adult life, including the tragic death of his child. Kitty witnesses her husband’s return to his ‘proper’ role and Christie’s performance portrays her character’s triumph as ugly and unappealing. Critics were quick to identify how Christie’s performance shaped the characterisation of Kitty. For Steve Vineberg, Christie was one of a small number of beautiful actresses to have ‘the wit to use their looks dramatically’. Her Kitty is ‘shrewdly coquettish ... her anger can be either beautiful ... or ugly ... [and] the way in which her fury disfigures her is as shocking as the insensitivity and selfishness her words expose’.78 Pauline Kael for the New Yorker astutely observed that Christie was ‘a ravishing camera subject who knows how to turn her beauty against herself’.79 Making herself look ugly – disfiguring the self – was a form of deglamorisation practised by the actress to construct Kitty as unattractive. But it also served a secondary purpose of subverting notions of female beauty, the cinematic spectacle and the patriarchal gaze, ideas that were to find their fullest expression in Christie’s next film The Gold Diggers. It is no coincidence that Christie was reading the script for Gold while shooting The Return of the Soldier in autumn 1981.

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‘Turning her beauty against herself’: feminist praxis in The Return of the Soldier (1982)

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In this respect the film is consistent with the actress’s political ambitions for cinematic representation but how did it fare critically and commercially? Certainly its version of feminism, constructed around women’s social roles and identities rather than radical politics, was broad enough to appeal to a diverse audience. The film was presold to readers of feminist literature through the Virago reissue of West’s novel in 1980 but its appeal went beyond this narrow group. It was widely and positively reviewed across specialist and mainstream press in Britain and, to an extent, America.80 Although reliable box-office figures are not available, the audience for Edwardian-set costume drama was considerable in both Britain and the US in the seventies and early eighties, as the success of Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–5) evidences. Critics have argued that, in an era of post-Women’s Liberation, Edwardian dramas both informed audiences about the historical roots of contemporary feminism and addressed questions of class, family life and gender relations in ways that resonated directly with the immediate concerns of present-day viewers.81 Locating The Return of the Soldier within the context of Edwardian period drama – film and television – highlights how it, and Christie, responded to an audience need for versions of popularised feminism. The actress’s next film The Gold Diggers moved from popular to radical feminism to interrogate gender politics and the cinematic form in a way never before tried in British cinema.

The Gold Diggers: ‘Julie’s was the face we wanted – the only face’82 The Gold Diggers is a complex, multifaceted text that occupies a central place in feminist film-making and film theory. Experimental in form, it was Potter’s first feature film in a career built across short film, performance art and dance. Funded by the

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British Film Institute and the then newly formed Channel 4, Potter defined the film as ‘a musical describing a female quest’, the quest being to deconstruct the imagery of women circulating in cinema, history and society, and to draw parallels between that and the circulation of money in capitalist economies.83 Christie plays Ruby, a passive woman, the object of the patriarchal gaze, revered for her white beauty and passed between men. She is kidnapped by Celeste (played by black French actress Colette Laffont), a computer clerk in a bank, who is trying to uncover the mechanisms behind the movement of money. Celeste is intrigued by Ruby and instructs her to ‘Tell me everything you know’, a command that triggers Ruby’s investigation of her own past and that leads to a shift in her consciousness towards full subjectivity. The film concludes with an interracial union as the two women ride off into the sunset. The film is an adventure story and a quest, which foregrounds and critiques the gendered history of cinema, its genres and fictional forms. For Potter one of the film’s key concerns was an engagement with ‘the history of cinema itself as our collective memory of how we see ourselves, of how we as women are seen’.84 Potter understands cinema, its structure and forms, as playing a central role in shaping our identities and sense of self. Christie’s politics were running along similar lines; her awareness of the industry in which she worked, its gender politics and the politics of representation made the actress open to Potter’s feminist project. Potter’s statements about casting Christie are revealing. She wanted the character of Ruby to ‘suggest aspects of the history of the cinematic heroine ... silent movie stars ... the Hollywood belle ... the film noir mystery woman’.85 To achieve this she sought an actress to fulfil her wider remit to ‘make an image of woman in a feature film that related to the history of screen heroines and yet was a departure from it’.86 Potter recognised that she needed a star to play Ruby, somebody ‘so well known it was crystallised in her face ... an icon’,

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but a star who could simultaneously intimate the sense of ‘departure’ she was looking for.87 Christie was one of the few actresses able to fill this brief, her oeuvre encompassing the epic form of Doctor Zhivago and silent cinema, the counterculture cinema of Robert Altman and, most recently, low-budget British film-making and off-screen political campaigning. Her body of work enabled Christie to carry the weight of signification required for Ruby. In 1981 Potter sent Christie a draft outline of the script (when the actress was shooting The Return of the Soldier) and once she had agreed to play the part the script was further developed around her. The director described the actress as ‘the perfect vehicle for the point of the script. Her presence makes the connection between the glamour of the mainstream film world and the criticism of it we are trying to put across.’88 Christie embodied the iconicity and critique of stardom that made the role of Ruby such a success. The role represented a highly personal project for Christie, crystallising her concerns about stardom and female beauty and giving her a language with which to make sense of her own history as a performer. It was another risk-taking venture for someone who had spent much of her early career thinking she could not accomplish anything by herself. Initially challenged by the film’s concepts, she confessed, in her disarmingly frank manner, ‘When it was first explained to me I didn’t understand a word of it ... It was very intellectual and sort of structuralist. I decided to do it even though the idea scared me.’89 It was to prove to be, in her words, ‘a wonderful experience’.90 The production context of an all-female crew liberated her from the censoring of language and behaviour that was the norm on a male-dominated shoot, and she was, in her words, ‘delighted’ to find she shared a ‘common experience’ with women who had been through ‘a similar politicization process’.91 She would later quip that it was the sight of ethically sourced toothpaste in Potter’s bathroom that sealed the deal.92 From such seemingly inconsequential beginnings is cinema history made.

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But Christie’s interest in the project went beyond an appreciation of its feminist production context. Ruby’s quest is to discover how she is constructed as an ideal woman, a fantasy figure who circulates in the sexual economy and, having made that discovery, to remove herself from the market. In self-reflexive mode she watches herself performing as the ingénue of silent cinema, under-rehearsed, reliant on male direction and subject to the whim of male critical approval. These scenes evoke Christie’s earlier work history, performing at the behest of male directors whose paternalism she had readily accepted. Ruby’s search, described by Sally Potter as ‘a look behind herself as an iconic figure’, is a direct parallel of Christie’s own diagnosis of the film industry and her place within it as a woman and a star.93 The role of Ruby and the experience of working with a feminist community sharpened Christie’s insights and gave her the language and authority to debate cultural politics. In subsequent press interviews she talked at length about the film’s themes, keen to ascertain whether male critics had understood them. ‘Did you get the fact that women are worshipped as objects the same way as money is worshipped’, she reputedly asked The Times reviewer.94 She would often return to the topic of the function of the performer, describing actors as ‘all products in films anyway, to be used or consumed or sold’, and the social function of stars, ‘totems, really, rather than icons’ for the projection of people’s ‘unhappiness, their longings, their desires’.95 The role did not win Christie any new fans amongst the mainstream or specialist film press, many of whom were hostile to Potter’s ambition. Alexander Walker complained that the part ‘wilfully marked a wider withdrawal from “popular” cinema’ for Christie (emphasis added).96 The male critic’s hurt and resentment are palpable and illustrate the investment of his desire in Christie’s star persona, which he feels the actress has betrayed. But one social group’s loss is another’s gain and Christie gained the status of ‘distinguished woman’ in feminist film circles for playing Ruby. The

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Christie’s self-reflexive performance as silent film star: The Gold Diggers (1983)

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final film in my discussion is another quest drama Heat and Dust, a movie that is similarly concerned with questions of being, knowing and woman’s history.

Heat and Dust : ‘a searcher after truth’ Heat and Dust is a Merchant–Ivory production, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, adapted from her own Booker Prize-winning novel. The film won Jhabvala a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay and James Ivory a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes.97 The novels and screenplays of Jhabvala (from The Bostonians, 1984 to Room with a View, 1986) are complex affairs, which prioritise female protagonists and explore the nuances and complexities of identities, ‘feminine’ and otherwise, opening up their intersections with class and race. More specifically Heat and Dust foregrounds questions of history, specifically women’s history, and the generational connections between women. The feminist structure of feeling in Jhabvala’s literature was consistent with Christie’s ambitions for her own work. The film centres on the stories of Olivia and Anne, situated in their respective historical periods of the 1920s and the present-day 1980s. Olivia (Greta Scacchi), a headstrong young Englishwoman, moves to India in 1923 with her new husband Douglas (Christopher Cazenove) and shocks both the resident English colonialists and the local community by engaging in a love affair with the princely Nawab of Khatm (Shashi Kapoor), which ends in her divorce and social exile. Her great-niece Anne (Julie Christie) learns about Olivia through her personal letters and sets off for India to retrace the life of her rebellious relative in a journey that is both literal and metaphorical. As a professional researcher Anne seeks truth but is open to the ‘unofficial’ sources of personal letters and oral history testimony in her enquiry. At a transitional point in her own life – will

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she marry, have children, pursue a career – she draws on Olivia’s life to make sense of her own world. At the time, Christie had little to say about the character of Anne, describing her as ‘not particularly strong’ but conceding that ‘at least she didn’t do things through a man’.98 Perhaps after the radicalism of The Gold Diggers, the feminist politics of Heat and Dust seemed tame but this understates the case. The producers for their part cast Christie for what Ismail Merchant identified as her combination of ‘intelligent acting’ and ‘star personality’.99 Certainly Christie was the biggest star in the film, her name helping to secure financing and publicity. Christopher Cazenove at the time was less well known in the US and Olivia marked the first substantial film role for newcomer Greta Scacchi. More specifically, the nomadic elements of Christie’s star persona, dating from the 1960s, lent substance to the film’s theme of the wanderer, a déraciné individual searching for a way to live. This connection was readily picked up by the British popular press, with one critic describing Anne as ‘a searcher after truth ... [who] has something of Julie Christie in her’,100 so reading the character as expressive of a quality in the performer – the idea of Christie as popularly characterised as ‘truthseeking’. Perhaps some of the more positive connotations of the ‘Battling Julie’ image were entering the public consciousness. Christie’s assessment underestimates the significance of Anne as a figure of autonomous womanhood. It is her intellectual curiosity about her female relatives that triggers the narrative process, and sets in motion her personal journey of exploration and discovery. As she retraces Olivia’s steps, Anne is increasingly drawn into a sympathetic understanding of her relative through Olivia’s long and highly personal letters, which reveal the aimless passivity expected of British colonial wives, Olivia’s desire for romantic excitement and the social conventions that drove her to abort a pregnancy, the result of her affair with the Nawab. The intergenerational connection between the two women is made explicit as Anne’s story begins to follow a similar

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trajectory. She has an affair with a local Indian man Inder Lal (Zakir Hussain) and becomes pregnant, but the contemporary setting affords her greater control. She does not tell Inder Lal about the pregnancy and contemplates abortion before deciding to raise her child alone, the narrative dramatising some of the choices and dilemmas of middle-class womanhood that would have resonated with contemporary audiences, even if they lacked Anne’s economic independence. At a thematic level Jhabvala’s interest in the themes of identity and choice situates her work in the context of the ‘epistolary novel’, which the literary scholar Elizabeth Campbell argues was refreshed in the 1970s in the light of second wave feminism. Novelists such as Jhabvala shifted the genre’s focus, producing what Campbell describes as a more revolutionary text concerned less with love and more with an exploration of woman’s individual identity.101 This is made explicit in the film with scenes of Anne dressing in front of a mirror in newly acquired Indian robes and contemplating her growing pregnant belly. The mirror as a recurring motif in epistolary fiction and cinematic representation is a space where women seek themselves, question the image and look to bring together multiple facets of identity.102 In formal terms Heat and Dust may lack the radicalism of The Gold Diggers but its feminist politics do extend to structure. The narrative shifts effortlessly between the past and the present, eschewing conventional flashback to interweave the lives of the two women, the two parts of the narrative proceeding on parallel tracks. The past and present are not neatly closed off and intergenerational connectedness – made explicit by Anne’s voiceover stating Olivia ‘wrote long and revealing letters which my grandmother gave to my mother, and she to me’ – disrupts conventional linear narrative and masculine notions of teleological history. Indeed the film draws a distinction between the official mechanisms of history associated with men (the seals and records of the British administration held by

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Personal testimony and women’s history: Heat and Dust (1982)

Douglas) and the ‘other’ histories of women, written through informal sources such as personal letters and the memory work of oral history. In valuing these sources and bringing them into history – as Anne’s authoring of her own and Olivia’s story does – the film’s self-consciousness about history, narrative and femininity is entirely feminist. While Christie had little to say about the role at the time, a later interview reveals her personal investment in the project. The shoot marked the first time she had returned to India, the country of her birth. She had been looking forward to discussing the experience with her mother but the latter died during filming. Describing it as ‘a very emotional film for me’, Christie drew parallels between herself and the character of Anne: ‘this person going back ... it was all very intermingled’.103 The theme of intergenerational dialogue, and the

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questions about women’s history and women’s place in history which this and the other films raise, are of their time, the interests of a generation of women who came to feminist consciousness through the sexual liberation of the sixties. Their chronology is closely interwoven, four films in two years, after which Christie took a threeyear break from feature film production, suggesting how this period functioned as a specific moment in the actress’s career. It was at this point that she liberated herself from what she had experienced as the confines of Hollywood stardom and worked out how to successfully function as a woman in a deeply patriarchal industry.

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CODA: AFTERGLOW AND AWAY FROM HER

After the intense period of the early 1980s Christie once again scaled back her film-making activities. For the next decade or so she worked intermittently and continued to choose her projects with care. A feature film in Hollywood with Sidney Lumet (Power) was followed by one with the feminist Argentinian director Maria Luisa Bemberg (Miss Mary). Her politics led her to films that engaged with the British involvement in Ireland (Fools of Fortune and The Railway Station Man) and a television drama on capital punishment (Dadah Is Death, 1988). Her next period of concentrated creative output occurred in the mid-1990s when she starred as Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996), was Academy Award nominated for her role in Afterglow and played the enigmatic Kate in the West End production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times in 1995. Collectively this output shows how the actress continued to push herself and take up new challenges. Theatre, never her natural forte, was always a risk, but with the support of director and friend Lindy Davies she turned in a performance in Old Times that left critics ‘run[ning] out of superlatives’.1 The rehearsal methods in Hamlet did, by her own admission, terrify the actress, who claimed she ‘went and cried in the loo’, but she signed up because it pushed her to new places and she wanted to work with Kenneth Branagh.2 Another risky venture was her decision to undergo minor plastic surgery at this time, modifying her jawline to eradicate what

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she referred to as ‘all these double chins’ and to be open about this with the press, attracting disapprobation in some quarters.3 Characteristically frank, the actress reflected, ‘It’s very hard going to America, where people who are older than you appear to be younger ... you look like their mother.’4 The actress was under no illusion about her position as an ageing woman in the labour market: ‘the loss of beauty does worry me … . Actresses … are like surgeons in the way they look at themselves. They have to be: their face is part of their tools.’5 But surgery was not the actress’s only strategy. She worked with a performance coach to enhance her acting skills and increasingly adopted a wry sense of humour to deal with her status as an ageing woman.6 When asked why she was Oscar-nominated for her role in Afterglow she quipped ‘me not being dead was one factor. People are glad you’re still able to function.’7 This final section focuses first on Afterglow before concluding with a discussion of Away from Her, Christie’s last substantial film role to date. Both films are consistent with the overall pattern of Christie’s career. In confronting the contemporary issues of ageing and Alzheimer’s disease the actress maintains her commitment to producing socially relevant work. The films also share a selfconscious structure of feeling. Afterglow deconstructs the narrative of female stardom that Christie had begun with The Gold Diggers, while Away from Her relies on the actress’s style of ironic playing to bring out the ambiguities in the source material. Christie recently described the film industry as ‘still a very male world’, a comment suggesting that, in her perspective, the political economy of film production is largely unchanged in terms of its gender politics.8 Nevertheless, these films bear witness to the actress’s determination to steer her career in the direction of her own choosing, albeit it under circumstances she finds less than hospitable to women’s agency.

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Afterglow Afterglow is a modestly budgeted production with Christie starring opposite Nick Nolte as a middle-aged couple whose marriage has gone stale. Nolte plays Lucky, a philandering plumber; Christie is Phyllis, a former B-movie actress. In an industry, and culture, predicated on youth and beauty, all films featuring older stars are always already metafilmic, the ghosts of the younger self haunting the diegesis. This is profoundly gendered. As Ginette Vincendeau has argued, ‘unlike male stars who are able just to be old, older female stars, where they find parts, must always dramatise the process of their ageing’.9 Indeed Hollywood, on the few occasions when it represents the figure of the older woman, typically does so through the vehicle of the ageing female star, who is portrayed as ‘grotesque and traumatic’ in mourning the loss of her career and youthful beauty.10 Afterglow confronts this narrative trope directly. It casts Christie as a former actress whose lethargy is so extreme that she spends her days in slippers and pyjamas, her spectacles perched atop her unwashed hair. The film sketches in a stereotypical lifestyle for Phyllis as an older woman and aged female star. She picks fights with her philandering husband, suffers from imaginary illnesses and empty-nest syndrome, and watches daytime reruns of her old movies. Finally roused to action she dons full make-up, sunglasses and expensive clothes and looks every inch a glamorous star and desirable woman, shot in warm, amber tones by cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita.11 But the tragicomic tone of the film undermines this clichéd scenario. Attempts by a young male admirer to shower her with compliments become an exercise in ironic wordplay, and she cools his efforts at gallant seduction by age-induced squinting at his business card, exclaiming, ‘I can’t see a thing without my glasses.’ The tone is reminiscent of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which, as discussed in Chapter 2, both honours and subverts genre

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Playing with the conventions of ageing stardom: Julie Christie in Afterglow (1997)

conventions. This is not a coincidence: Afterglow’s director Alan Rudolph had worked as an assistant to Robert Altman in the 1970s. Phyllis’s sardonic self-mockery is highly self-conscious, an ironic play with both the conventions of heterosexual romance and the tropes of female stardom. But the film goes beyond irony. Christie portrays Phyllis as suffering real pain, especially over the loss of her daughter, who left home abruptly after discovering Lucky was not her biological father. The trauma of this separation is given expression in a profoundly uncomfortable scene where Phyllis wails inconsolably, her face disfigured with grief as she gasps for air. Rudolph’s style of directing, like Altman, is to start with a slender script that he works up collaboratively with actors, and he credits Christie as the sole author of this scene.12 The technique has echoes of the visceral bellow used by Donald Sutherland to communicate horror and grief in films such

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as Don’t Look Now, and it is plausible that Christie, who was working with an acting coach in the mid-1990s, drew on her previous experience of collaborating with Sutherland to refine her performance. It was the combination of humour, emotional depth and some flattering cinematography that brought Christie critical recognition and earned her an Oscar nomination. The role continued the actress’s conscious dismantling of her star image and her questioning of the stereotypes of idealised femininity, a narrative pattern stretching back through films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Gold Diggers, and updated here to touch on topics such as ageing, loss and desire.

Away from Her Following the critical success of Afterglow Christie worked steadily over the next fifteen years, with small but memorable parts opposite Brad Pitt in Troy (2004), Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet in Finding Neverland (2004) and Shia LaBeouf in New York, I Love You (2009). Indeed her ability to connect with each new generation of directors and stars is a major factor accounting for her longevity. Her last substantial role to date was as Fiona, a woman with Alzheimer’s disease, in Away from Her, directed by Canadian Sarah Polley, renowned for her frank, unsentimental depictions of women. Christie had struck up a friendship with Polley – almost forty years her junior – when the pair worked together on No Such Thing (2001) and The Secret Life of Words (2005). Polley chose Alice Munro’s short story The Bear Came over the Mountain (1999) for her directorial debut, describing it as ‘the most interesting portrait of a marriage, of memory and guilt, that I’d ever seen’.13 The subjects of Munro’s short story are Fiona and Grant, a well-to-do, long-married couple who discover that Fiona has Alzheimer’s disease. In the film the couple are vibrant and physically close but the marriage has not been

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without incident. Grant, a college professor, had affairs with several of his students, something Fiona reminds him of when she comments, ‘There are things I wish would go away ... things we don’t talk about.’ As the condition worsens Fiona checks herself into a care home where she forms a deep attachment to another man and seems to forget her husband, failing to recognise him when he visits. What is never completely clear is whether her forgetting is entirely the consequence of the disease or a form of punishment for Grant’s infidelities. The film closes with Fiona seeming to recognise Grant in a manner that suggests her forgiveness and his redemption. Critics have argued that Munro’s stories, and the short story format more generally, are characterised by ambiguities, ellipses and contradictions that obscure meaning and character motivation, making the form itself an apposite one for dramatising the topic of Alzheimer’s disease and the fragmentation of memory.14 For some critics, however, Polley as a director and screenwriter was guilty of ‘grafting familiar narrative structures onto highly ambiguous source material’, making the film a more straightforward story of Grant’s atonement and ‘unconditional love’ for Fiona.15 Although persuasive at the level of narrative this reading fails to take account of casting and what Christie as a performer brings to the role. For Polley, Christie was central to the project: ‘I did write it for her; I immediately saw her face in my mind when I read this character.’ She spent months coaxing the actress to take the part and credited Christie as being ‘a huge factor in my wanting to make it in the first place’.16 It is likely that Polley was responding to Alice Munro’s description of Fiona as ‘direct and vague … sweet and ironic’, a portrait that resonates with the independent and caring contours of Christie’s star persona and her poetic-ironic performance style.17 For her part Christie’s comments on the script are illuminating. She drew parallels between Polley’s dialogue and Harold Pinter’s script for The Go-Between, admiring the actress-director’s writing as ‘subtle’ and nuanced: ‘She observes slyly with a sting in the tail.’18 Christie then

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was alert to the ambiguities in the material and reminded of her work with Pinter when scenes could be played to suggest double meanings. One key scene serves to illustrate how Christie’s performance imbues the material with a sense of ambiguity. As the couple leave their home to check Fiona into the care home she applies her lipstick and turns to her husband, enquiring, ‘How do I look?’ Grant’s dialogue ‘direct and vague … sweet and ironic’ is lifted directly from Munro’s story, but the film departs from the source material in holding Christie in close-up. As the camera lingers on Christie’s face her right eyebrow momentarily flickers upwards in a quizzical expression while the vocal intonation of her reply – ‘Is that how I look’ – is deliberately light, almost playful. Christie’s performance reframes the meaning of the scene, leaving it on an ambiguous note, which asks the viewer to reflect on what they have been told. How accurate is Grant’s description of his wife? What other readings are possible?

Layered minimalism: ambiguous playing in Away from Her (2006)

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Christie’s close-ups prompt viewers to look beyond the surface for deeper, alternative meanings. They also serve to indicate Fiona’s struggle to communicate with her husband. In one exchange her character slips between seeming to speak to Grant as ‘old Fiona’ (i.e. the wife who recognises him as her husband) and ‘new Fiona’, whose artificially bright response categorises him as a stranger. I was reminded of Christie’s work in Petulia, where the actress deftly switched between the different modes of poetic and ironic, sometimes in a single scene. Her skill at shifting across registers, engaging minute facial gestures to convey a range of complex and at times contradictory emotions, is a key characteristic of her work. Her style of layered minimalism has repeatedly earned her critical praise. Away from Her was no exception. Her performance garnered a slew of awards, including a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild, and further nominations for an Oscar and BAFTA. This recognition brought her, reluctantly, once more into the media spotlight. Her appearance at the Belfast Film Festival in 2007, for example, famously ousted the historic meeting between Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams from the front pages of the city’s papers, much to the chagrin of Christie.19 But she used the press interest to voice support for Sarah Polley and accounted for the film’s success in characteristically political terms, claiming that it satisfied people’s hunger ‘for something that didn’t pretend ... we were immortal ... [or that] life is sweet from beginning to end’.20 If older women are typically rendered invisible by a gerontophobic society that sees the post-reproductive woman as having no value, Christie’s commitment to keep on working is itself a feminist statement: a commitment to speak, to not be silenced as a woman, to remain visible and on her own terms. This final point is crucial. Despite her recent success she has refused to engage with the chat-show circuit, in favour of supporting projects that resonate with her personal and political interests. In 2014, for example, she appeared at the Warwick Arts Centre Cinema, reading work by the

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Chilean poet and activist Pablo Neruda in a celebration of Neruda’s life. Her most recent film project was voiceover narration for a documentary short The Afectados (2015) about the contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon by the US oil giant Chevron. Characteristically acerbic and playful, Christie remains steadfastly clear about what matters, from the horrors of torture and global warming to the perks of sitting next to Brad Pitt on the set of Troy (‘absolutely lovely!’). The actress remains, in her own words, ‘a very conflicted person’.21 *** Christie’s contribution to cinema and society, as a star, an actor and a political activist, is significant. Negotiating the parameters set by directors and the wider political economy of a male-dominated film industry, she has exercised her ambitions for creative freedom as an actor and a woman. Her relative absence from standard film histories is not unsurprising: the actress herself is dismissive of celebrity while her brand of politically informed prestige stardom fits awkwardly into categories of both normative femininity and female stardom. But, as this study has demonstrated, attending to her participation in the history of cinema interrogates the fundamental relationship between gender, creativity and cultural production. From that follow vital questions about how we write film history.

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NOTES

Introduction 1 Alexander Walker, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London: Orion, 2005 [1985]), p. 245. 2 Gerard Garrett, ‘Girl Caught in Cross-Fire’, Evening Standard, 29 November 1963; ‘Voom! Voom! Here Comes Julie Christie’, Newsweek, 20 December 1965, pp. 58–61 (p. 58). 3 Robert Abele, ‘Julie Christie’, Variety, 10 December 2007, p. 7. 4 Michael Feeney Callan, Julie Christie (St Martin’s Press: New York, 1984); Anthony Hayward, Julie Christie (London: Robert Hale, 2000); Tim Ewbank and Stafford Hildred, Julie Christie: The Biography (Deutsch: London, 2008). Marsha McCreadie, ‘Between Valuelessness and Vacillation in the Films of Julie Christie’, Journal of Popular Film vol. 6 no. 3 (1978), pp. 216–28; Nick Davis, ‘Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave: Performance and the Politics of Singularity’, in James Morrison (ed.), Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 182–201. See also Melanie J. Williams, ‘Julie Christie: Honey-Glow Girl’, Sight and Sound vol. 15 no. 12 (2005), pp. 36–40. 5 Christie has starred in films produced in Europe, North America and Latin America, in mainstream, independent and avant-garde cinema, and has been involved in political activism including demonstrations, boycotts, consciousness-raising and voiceover documentary narration.

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6 Virginia Wexman, cited in Karen Hollinger, The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star (Routledge: London, 2006), p. 55. For a fuller discussion of the problematic relationship between women and authorship see Alison Butler, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (Wallflower Press: London, 2002). 7 Danae Clark, Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors’ Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. xi–xii. 8 Deborah Dean and Campbell Jones, ‘If Women Actors Were Working …’, Media, Culture, Society vol. 25 no. 4 (2003), pp. 527–41 (p. 530). Coming at the issue from an industrial relations perspective Dean and Jones make a significant contribution to the debate about gender and how it shapes ‘the experience of being a cultural subject in a labour process’ (p. 533). 9 Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight, ‘Introduction’, in Gledhill and Knight (eds), Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

1 Persona: becoming ‘Julie Christie’ 1 This was due to the low cultural value attached to film and television, relative to theatre, despite the fact that the majority of British actors’ careers would involve different media. Christie herself initially subscribed to this value system, telling the film critic Nina Hibbin in a 1967 interview that she had thought of herself as ‘a stage actress ... I had a kind of bias against them [films]. It just wasn’t the medium I intended to take up.’ See ‘Julie Blazed to the Top but She’s a Shy Star’, Morning Star, 4 February 1967. 2 The male dominance on this list reveals how frequently Christie was the sole female lead, a fairly typical scenario given the masculine bias of film culture. 3 See Tim Adams, ‘The Divine Miss Julie’, Guardian, 1 April 2007 at http://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/apr/01/awardsandprizes. Accessed 5 June 2015.

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4 Julie Christie, interviewed by Brian McFarlane in Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema (London: Methuen, 1997), pp. 121–7 (p. 123). 5 See Richard Lester in Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 93. 6 David Nathan, Sun, 23 February 1966. 7 See Christie in Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 16. 8 Alexander Cockburn, ‘Don’t Look Now ... but Julie’s Back’, American Film vol. 11 (January–February 1986), pp. 16–22 (p. 20). 9 McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 122. 10 ‘A Star Is Weaned’, Time, 6 September 1963. Alexander Walker, ‘Golden Girl’, Evening Standard, 6 February 1997. 11 By point of contrast, the more buoyant production base of the late 1940s meant that actresses were able to gain steady employment in supporting roles, building up experience and public exposure before hopefully moving into lead roles. Diana Dors, for example, made thirteen films between 1947 and 1949 but levels of production in the early 1960s could no longer support that type of career development. 12 Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 102. 13 See Celia Hughes, ‘IAS Workshop: Narrating a Gendered Self in Post-war Britain’ at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/current/ earlycareer/2011-12/celiahughes/narratingagenderedself/. Accessed 19 December 2012. 14 Harper, Women in British Cinema, p. 123. 15 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1998), pp. 52–4. 16 See ‘The Quiet Life of Rebel Girl Sarah Miles’, Petticoat no. 5 (19 March 1966). See Garrett, ‘Girl Caught in Cross-Fire’, and David Lewin, ‘I Like to Love’, Daily Mail, 15 April 1965, for representative discussions of Christie as volatile and shy. 17 Andrew Pixley, ‘Viewing Notes’, The Andromeda Anthology DVD Box Set (2006), pp. 8–9. 18 Philip Purser, Sunday Telegraph, 12 November 1961, cited in Pixley, ‘Viewing Notes’, p. 19.

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19 Ken Annakin, So You Wanna Be a Director? (Sheffield: Tomahawk Press, 2001), p. 131. 20 See Sun, 22 February 1966 in Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 36. 21 Ibid., p. 37. 22 Hilary Radner, ‘Embodying the Single Girl in the 1960s’, in Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Body Dressing (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 183–97 (p. 193). See also Hilary Radner, ‘On the Move: Fashion Photography and the Single Girl in the 1960s’, in Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 128–42 (p. 129). 23 Schlesinger is known to have seen the pictures of Christie shot by Terence Donovan for Town magazine in 1962. The original actress Topsy Jane was diminutive like Christie but round-faced, dark-haired and less physically striking. 24 Dilys Powell, ‘Billy Liar’, Sunday Times, August 1963, reprinted in George Perry (ed.), The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films (London: Headline, 1990), pp. 197–8. See Leonard Mosely, Daily Express, in Ewbank and Hildred, Julie Christie, p. 50. 25 Garrett, ‘Girl Caught in Cross-Fire’. 26 Schlesinger in Jack Hamilton, ‘Julie Christie: New International Darling’, Look, 3 August 1966, pp. 93–8 (p. 95). For a discussion of the Darling crew, see Dirk Bogarde, Snakes and Ladders (London: Triad-Grafton Books, 1979), p. 289. An unnamed reviewer described Christie as ‘butch’ in ‘Women behind the Scenes of Success: Julie Harris’, The Times, 19 July 1967, p. 9. 27 See Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, Diana Vreeland: Empress of Fashion (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013) for a discussion of how Vreeland, from 1964 onwards, introduced her American readers to her new prototypes of femininity, the Chicerino and the Funny Girl, both of whom had ‘distinctive faces’ (p. 195). 28 Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 282. Bailey’s photographs appeared in the new British Sunday supplements and American Vogue, from 1960 onwards.

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29 Alexander Walker, Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Orion, 2005 [1974]), p. 167. 30 Garrett, ‘Girl Caught in Cross-Fire’. 31 Cynthia Baron, ‘Peter Sellers: A Figure of the Impasse’, in Pamela Robertson Wojcik (ed.), Movie Stars of the 1960s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), pp. 115–38 (p. 133). The American success of films such as La Dolce Vita (1960) and stars such as Brigitte Bardot should be understood within this context. 32 Walker, Hollywood England, p. 447. It is within this context that we should understand the US popularity of not only the Bond films but Tom Jones (1963) and roadshow productions by David Lean such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago. 33 Jack Hamilton, ‘A Star in Eleven Minutes’, Look, 25 August 1964, pp. 40–2 (p. 45). 34 Ibid. 35 The salary increased as she became more commercially bankable, from £8,000 per film to £150,000 per film. See Callan, Julie Christie, p. 44; Ewbank and Hildred, Julie Christie, p. 55. 36 Italian born and educated at Rome Film School, Janni moved to Britain in 1939 and established himself in the British studio system. It was his commercial acumen that delivered the popular hit A Town Like Alice (1956) for the Rank Organisation and he astutely bought the rights to Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in the 1950s. 37 Life, 12 February 1965. 38 ‘The Money-making Film Stars’, The Times, 31 December 1968, p. 7. 39 In the 1970s she made only two mainstream Hollywood productions, Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. 40 Kine Weekly, 30 September 1965. 41 Sarah Street, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 170. 42 Nina Hibbin, Daily Worker, 18 September 1965. 43 Bogarde, Snakes and Ladders, p. 289.

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44 For an overview of press response, see Carrie Tarr, ‘“Sapphire”, “Darling” and the Boundaries of Permitted Pleasure’, Screen vol. 26 no. 1 (1985), pp. 50–65. 45 Dyer, Stars, p. 129. 46 Saturday Review, 21 August 1965. 47 Kenneth Tynan, ‘Identikit Girl on the Make’, Observer, 19 September 1965, p. 24. 48 See Hollinger, The Actress, p. 48. Hollinger draws on the distinction in traditional film criticism between the personification mode, where ‘the star is always seen behind the role’ and is thus designated a ‘poor actor’, and the ‘impersonatory mode’, where the actor ‘transforms himself into the character’, a technique afforded higher cultural value (p. 48). These distinctions have increasingly been challenged by scholars such as Cynthia Baron but the distinction continues to have traction in critical debate. 49 Ibid., p. 55. 50 See Wexman, in ibid., p. 55. 51 Nathan, Sun. 52 See John Schlesinger in Nathan, Sun. See Frederic Raphael in Sally K. Marks, ‘Screenwriter Wants to “Relive” Hardy’, Los Angeles Times, 18 October 1967. 53 See Dilys Powell in Perry, The Golden Screen, p. 168. 54 Christie in Nathan, Sun. 55 Schlesinger Papers, Box JRS/4/7, Special Collections, BFI Library. 56 Christie in McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 125. 57 Christie in Nathan, Sun. 58 Julie Christie in Clive Hirschhorn, ‘The Trouble Is I’m So Shy, Says Julie Christie’, Sunday Express, 6 November 1966. 59 ‘Voom! Voom!’. 60 Vogue, 1 August 1965. 61 See Judith Crist for the Herald Tribune cited in Kevin Brownlow, David Lean: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 538. 62 See Variety, 24 December 1965 for a roundup of US press notices.

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63 Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann and Art Simon, The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, Volume III 1946–1975 (Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 3–25. 64 See Gundle, Glamour, p. 283 for a discussion of Vreeland, Shrimpton and Bailey. 65 Peri Halasz, Time, 15 April 1966, p. 41. 66 Script meeting notes, 10 August 1964, Schlesinger Papers, Box JRS/4/6, Special Collections, BFI Library. 67 See ‘Julie Harris, Darling 1965’ at http://costumeonscreen.com/ 2011/06/25/julie-harris-darling-1965/. Accessed 5 June 2015. See also Julie Harris, interview 487 (2000), BECTU History Project, British Film Institute Collections. 68 ‘Fashion in 1960s London’ at http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/f/ 1960s-fashion-london/. Accessed 5 June 2015. 69 Harris, costumeonscreen.com; ‘English Fashion’, Petticoat, 29 April 1966. 70 ‘The House of Mod’, Spring Fashion 2003 at http://nymag.com/nymetro/ shopping/fashion/spring03/n_8337/index1.html. Accessed 22 March 2013. 71 Hamilton, ‘A Star in Eleven Minutes’, p. 96. ‘Andrews and Christie: “The Two Julies”’, Screen Stories, May 1966, pp. 20–1, 57, 59 (p. 59). 72 Ibid. 73 Alexander Walker, Stardom: The Hollywood Phenomenon (New York: Stein & Day, 1970), p. 334. 74 Ibid., p. 369. 75 Michael Zryd, ‘“The Rise of a Film Generation”, Film Culture and Cinephilia’, in Lucia et al., The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, pp. 371–2. 76 Male directors, freed from censorship, explored and exploited the new sexual freedoms from a male perspective while the sexual politics of the countercultural/youth revolution were neo-conservative: men and women might both be free to fuck, but the women still did the cooking and cleaning, a fact that was not lost on the emerging women’s movement.

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77 ‘Camille Does the Movies: Program Notes’ at http://www.salon.com/ 1999/06/16/notes/. Accessed 5 June 2015. 78 Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream (London: Peter Owen, 1975 [1973]), p. 309. 79 Brownlow, David Lean, p. 538. 80 Variety, 10 August 1966. 81 Sheldon Hall, ‘Tall Revenue Features: The Genealogy of the Modern Blockbuster’, in Steve Neale (ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 11–26 (p. 22). 82 By point of contrast, Geraldine Chaplin featured in MGM publicity during the production phase but the studio and press shifted the focus to Christie on release after her breakthrough success in Darling. 83 Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacle and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010), p. 181. 84 Ibid., p. 298. 85 Regine and Peter Engelmeier, Fashion in Film (Munich: Prestel, 1990), p. 241; Paula Reed, Fifty Fashion Looks That Changed the 1960s (London: Conrad Octopus, 2012), p. 42. 86 Hirschhorn, ‘The Trouble Is I’m So Shy, Says Julie Christie’. 87 Champlin for the Los Angeles Times, quoted in Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 88; Penelope Mortimer, Observer Review, 22 October 1967. 88 Margaret Hinxman, Sunday Telegraph, 16 June 1968; Ann Pacey, Sun, 12 June 1968.

2 Performance: the poetic and the ironic 1 Henry Ehrlich, ‘Warren and Julie: Together at Last’, Look vol. 35 no. 11 (1971), pp. 70–4. 2 Alexander Walker, ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’, Evening Standard, 17 February 1972; Alexander Walker, ‘Don’t Look Now’, Evening Standard, 11 October 1973.

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3 Paul McDonald, Hollywood Stardom (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 215–16. 4 For a discussion of Christie as ‘wry’, see Davis, ‘Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave’, p. 187. For Christie as ‘modernist’, see Sue Harper and Justin Smith, British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 188. For modernist typologies, see Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson and Frank P. Tomasulo (eds), More than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), p. 6. 5 Steve Vineberg in his discussion of Blythe Danner argues that her acting is based on ‘discovery’, a style he categorises as Method, and he lists Christie (alongside Brando, De Niro, Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave) as ‘sometimes’ working in this vein. See Vineberg, ‘Intuition and Discovery: The Career of Blythe Danner’, Threepenny Review no. 28 (Winter 1987), pp. 17–19 (p. 18). 6 Julie Christie in conversation with Sally Potter in Sally Potter, Naked Cinema: Working with Actors (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), p. 240. 7 Julie Christie interviewed by Joan Goodman, ‘Woman’s Point of Contact’, The Times, 13 January 1983, p. 9. Co-stars have made similar observations of Christie’s approach. Hilary Mason, who worked with the actress on Don’t Look Now, observed that ‘she couldn’t switch off in between takes’ (Ewbank and Hildred, Julie Christie, p. 192). 8 Goodman, ‘Woman’s Point of Contact’, p. 9. 9 McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 125. 10 Potter, Naked Cinema, pp. 238, 247. 11 Sharon Marie Carnicke, ‘Screen Performance and Directors’ Visions’, in Baron et al., More than a Method, pp. 42–67 (p. 42). This is particularly relevant to the auteur cinema of the 1970s, when directors such as Joseph Losey and Robert Altman had considerable creative control over their productions including final editorial cut. 12 Baron, Carson and Tomasulo, ‘Introduction: More than the Method, More than One Method’, in Baron et al., More than a Method, pp. 1–19 (p. 7).

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13 Ibid., p. 10. 14 Brownlow, David Lean, p. 532. 15 Naremore is discussing Lillian Gish’s performance in the film. See James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 113. 16 See Brownlow, David Lean, p. 521; Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 66. 17 Brownlow, David Lean, p. 533. 18 This is a standard theatrical convention where actors ‘register conflicting emotions as if they were only thinking to themselves, outside anyone’s view’ (Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, p. 75). 19 Christie, quoted in Ewbank and Hildred, Julie Christie, p. 126. 20 McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 125. 21 Lillian Burns, drama coach for MGM, quoted in Cynthia Baron, ‘Crafting Film Performances: Acting in the Hollywood Studio Era’, in Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer (eds), Screen Acting (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 31–45 (p. 37). 22 François Truffaut’s diary, published in Cahiers du cinema (English version), November 1966, cited in Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 76. 23 Mitchell Zuckoff, Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), p. 223. 24 It is this poetic performance style that underpinned the caring/sensitive dimension to Christie’s star persona, discussed in Chapter 1. 25 Neil Sinyard, Richard Lester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 65. 26 Lester Papers, Box RLE/1/8/5, Special Collections, BFI Library. On Lester’s reading of Christie’s ‘ethereal quality’, see his interview in Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 93. 27 Ann Pacey, ‘Petulia’, Sun, 12 June 1968. 28 See Frank Tomasulo for a reading of modernist acting in Blow-Up, where he characterises David Hemmings, as ‘impassive’, with a voice and face that are deliberately ‘expressionless and deadpan’. See Tomasulo, ‘“The Sounds of Silence”: Modernist Acting in Michelangelo Antonioni’s BlowUp’, in Baron et al., More than a Method, pp. 94–125 (p. 108).

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29 Lester Papers, Box RLE/1/8/5, Special Collections, BFI Library. 30 Dilys Powell, Sunday Times, 16 June 1968. 31 Carnicke, ‘Screen Performance and Directors’ Visions’, p. 63. 32 The director Jean Renoir distinguished between two types of directors: those who start with the camera and those ‘ who start with the actors’, cited in ibid., p. 43. 33 Bogarde, Snakes and Ladders, p. 278. Donald Sutherland, quoted in Callan, Julie Christie, p. 132. 34 Richard Roud, ‘Going Between’, Sight and Sound vol. 40 no. 3 (1971), pp. 158–9. 35 Colin Gardner, Joseph Losey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 134–5. 36 Joseph Losey, cited in Michel Ciment, Conversations with Losey (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 306. 37 Ibid., p. 311. 38 Losey Papers, Box JWL/1/17/13, Special Collections, BFI Library. 39 Losey, cited in Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 311. 40 Michael Wood, New Society, 23 September 1971. 41 See Cecil Wilson, Daily Mail, 25 September 1971 for a description of Bates in the film. ‘Spooning’ is the euphemism used in the film to discuss sex. 42 Harper and Smith, British Film Culture in the 1970s, p. 188. 43 Ibid., p. 189. 44 Sue Harper, ‘The British Women’s Picture: Methodology, Agency and Performance in the 1970s’, in Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams (eds), British Women’s Cinema (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 124–37 (p. 135). 45 Beatrix Campbell, ‘Miss Julie’, City Limits, 17–24 September 1987, pp. 10–11 (p. 10). 46 Christie, interviewed in McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 125. 47 Ibid. 48 See interview with the film’s director of photography Gerry Fisher, in Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 108.

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49 Losey Papers, Box JWL/1/17/13, Special Collections, BFI Library. 50 Ibid. and JWL/1/21/18, Special Collections, BFI Library. 51 Christie, quoted in David Caute, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 258. 52 Christie found studying the source novel valuable: ‘all the signposts up, it’s an enormous help’, in McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 124. 53 Losey Papers, Box JWL/1/17/13, Special Collections, BFI Library. See also letters from Losey to Christie dated 1971 where the director implored Christie to contact him. This style of communication continued through the decade when Losey tried to cast Christie in The Romantic Englishwoman (1974) and Steaming (1980). 54 ‘Warren and Julie: Together at Last’, Look, 1 June 1971; ‘Julie Christie, prend un nouveau départ’, Paris Match, 26 June 1971. 55 Thomas Schatz, cited in Robert T. Self, Robert Altman’s Subliminal Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 91. 56 Robert T. Self, ‘Resisting Reality: Acting by Design in Robert Altman’s Nashville’, in Baron et al., More than a Method, pp. 126–50 (p. 130). 57 Christie described it as ‘one of my favourite films, I love it. I think it’s very romantic ... . There is a strange, intangible atmosphere that captures you’. In McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 125. 58 Altman, cited in Carnicke, ‘Screen Performance and Directors’ Visions’, p. 45. 59 David Sterritt (ed.), Robert Altman Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), p. 14. 60 Ibid. 61 Julie Christie, interviewed by Brian Case, ‘Fraught in the Act’, Time Out, 12–19 February 1997, pp. 14–16 (16). 62 Warren Beatty, quoted in Zuckoff, Robert Altman, p. 227. 63 Christie in McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 125. 64 Joan Tewkesbury in Patrick McGilligan, Robert Altman: Jumping off the Cliff (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 340. 65 Ibid.

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66 Edmund Naughton, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (London: Fontana Books, 1971 [1959]), pp. 16–17. 67 Both women contributed vocals to the album ‘Little Red Record’ recorded by Wyatt’s band Matching Mole. See David Sheppard, On Some Far-away Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (London: Orion, 2009), p. 103. 68 Christie credits Benge with making her Oscar dress in David Jenkins, ‘Julie Christie: Still Our Darling’, Telegraph, 3 February 2008. See ‘Warren and Julie’ for a description of Benge as ‘Julie’s dresser’, one of a small number of the couple’s ‘inner circle’ on the shoot. 69 Altman in Zuckoff, Robert Altman, p. 213. 70 Carole Dyhouse, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (London: Zed Books, 2010), p. 126. 71 Paul McDonald, ‘Story and Show: The Basic Contradiction in Film Star Acting’, in Aaron Taylor (ed.), Theorizing Film Acting (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 169–83 (p. 172). 72 Ibid., p. 173. This is an elaboration on the personification/impersonation dynamic where there is always a tension between ‘the actor’s craft in impersonating a character ... and the physiognomy of the actor ... which personifies the character’ (see Self, ‘Resisting Reality’, p. 134). In McDonald’s account casting stars brings additional layers of complexity to this dynamic. 73 Walker, ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’, 17 February 1972. 74 Pauline Kael, ‘Pipe Dream’, New Yorker, 3 July 1971. See also Kael’s review of ‘Shampoo’, New Yorker, 17 February 1975. 75 Julie Christie in Mark Sanderson, Don’t Look Now (London: BFI, 1996), p. 19. 76 Nicolas Roeg in Sanderson, Don’t Look Now, p. 17. 77 Sanderson, Don’t Look Now, p. 19. 78 Nicolas Roeg in McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 491. 79 Ibid. 80 Sight and Sound vol. 43 no. 1 (winter 1973/4), pp. 2–8 (p. 5). 81 Daphne du Maurier in Ewbank and Hildred, Julie Christie, p. 202. The film is adapted from a Du Maurier short story published in 1971.

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82 Harper in Bell and Williams, British Women’s Cinema, p. 133. 83 Sanderson, Don’t Look Now, p. 78. 84 Jackie Stacey, ‘Crossing over with Tilda Swinton – the Mistress of “Flat Affect”’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, March 2015 (no p.n.) at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10767-0149193-8. Accessed 17 May 2015. 85 Ibid. Stacey makes the point that Swinton is not the only proponent of flat affect in the history of cinema, noting Garbo as an obvious predecessor. Both have in common an androgynous quality, something that Christie, with her masculine jaw and butch quality (discussed in the Introduction) shares with them. Indeed the critic Pauline Kael felt that Christie and Sutherland worked well together ‘because their sexual differences are so muted’ in this film (New Yorker, 24 December 1973). 86 In her interview with Brian McFarlane the actress’s comment that ‘I saw the world through a political spectrum from before the ’80s’ points towards the significance of the previous decade in understanding her politicisation. See McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 126.

3 Politics: feminist praxis in cultural production 1 ‘A Simple Life for Julie’, Daily Mirror, 27 October 1980. 2 See Deborah Dean, ‘Recruiting a Self: Women Performers and Aesthetic Labour’, Work, Employment and Society vol. 19 no. 4 (2005), pp. 761–74 (p. 770). Stars of course are better able to weather any economic downturn in their fortunes. 3 Sheila Johnston, ‘A Survivor’s Memoirs’, Independent, 16 September 1987. 4 Cockburn, ‘Don’t Look Now’, p. 22. 5 McFarlane, The Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 127. 6 Walker, National Heroes, p. 245. 7 Sally Potter in McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, pp. 456–61 (p. 458).

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8 The media reported on her lifestyle in ways that positioned it as ‘unexpected’ in the context of stardom and the ways in which it was reported in the popular press were one of the means through which the transition to prestige stardom was enacted. 9 Marcel Berlins, ‘Digging for Real Gold in the Hills’, The Times, 7 May 1984, p. 8. 10 McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, p. 227. 11 Her profile in America was more complex. She largely eschewed the mainstream press in favour of longer interviews with select publications such as Cineaste, American Film and Village Voice. 12 Joan Goodman, ‘Julie Christie Strides On’, Cosmopolitan, July 1982, pp. 132, 206 (p. 206). 13 McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, p. 217. 14 Karen Jaehne, ‘Seeking Connections: An Interview with Julie Christie’, Cineaste vol. 15 no. 2 ( 1986), pp. 4–7 (p. 6). 15 Cockburn, ‘Don’t Look Now’, p. 22. 16 The actress made a rare appearance on a British chat show (Michael Aspel) in 1988 to talk about Cambodia. 17 The actress’s vocal work deserves greater attention than I am able to afford it in this context. Christie is one of a number of actresses whose voice carries what Stella Bruzzi describes as the necessary authority required for documentary voiceover work. See Bruzzi, New Documentary (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 65. 18 Christie’s contribution to feminist film-making was acknowledged at the Eighth International Festival on Latin American Film, Cuba (1986), alongside peers such as the Mexican film-maker Matilde Landeta and French actress Delphine Seyrig. See Feminist Studies vol. 14 no. 2 (1988), pp. 371–4 for a review of the festival. 19 Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 145 20 Ibid., p. 149. 21 The League was a radical group whose modus operandi was to break into facilities where animal testing took place and take photographs to expose the conditions and practices to which animals were subjected.

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22 ‘Battling Julie Drops the Face of Stardom for a Message’, Daily Mail, 7 April 1982. 23 See reviews in Daily Mail, 7 April 1982; Evening Standard, 6 June 1988; Daily Express, 30 December 1983; Sun, 31 December 1983; Daily Mail, 26 February 1983; Daily Mail, 7 April 1982. 24 See Daily Mail, 26 February 1983; Sunday Correspondent, 1989. 25 Daily Mirror, 27 October 1980; Michael Watts, ‘The Face of 1965’, Sunday Correspondent, 13 May 1990. 26 Cockburn, ‘Don’t Look Now’, 1986, p. 22. 27 Tessa Perkins, ‘The Politics of “Jane Fonda”’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 237–50 (pp. 242–3). 28 Ibid., p. 243. 29 Here Perkins mobilises a Gramscian model of ‘resistance’ to explore the Fonda image as a site of negotiation (ibid., p. 237). 30 The Guardian’s women’s page was, by the early 1980s, a well-established feature of British liberal journalism, and an indication of how debates about women’s liberation, and its manifestations across work, sexuality and marriage, were reaching middle-class audiences. 31 Berlins, ‘Digging for Real Gold in the Hills’, p. 8. 32 Goodman, ‘A Woman’s Point of Contact’, p. 9. 33 B. Ruby Rich, ‘Julie Christie Goes to Washington’, Village Voice, 1985, reprinted in Rich, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 329–36 (p. 336). See also Rich, ‘Prologue, Film Star as an Outstanding Human Being’, in ibid., pp. 326–8. 34 Campbell, ‘Miss Julie’, p. 10. 35 Barbara Gamarekian, ‘Finding a Voice of Her Own’, New York Times, 18 January 1985 at http://www.nytimes.com/1985/01/18/style/finding-avoice-of-her-own.html. Accessed 13 August 2014. 36 Ibid. 37 Sheila Rowbotham, Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 284.

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38 ‘Everybody’s Darling: An Interview with Julie Christie’, in Sara Maitland (ed.), Very Heaven, Looking Back at the 1960s (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 167–72 (p. 170). 39 Cockburn, ‘Don’t Look Now’, pp. 18–19. 40 In the 1980s male journalists often interrogated her about why she declined to start her own production company. Marcel Berlins, writing for The Times, posited: ‘She has a good reputation, good contacts, and presumably access to sufficient funds to set up a production company to make the sort of films she wants’ (‘Digging for Real Gold in the Hills’, p. 8). Berlins and others professed to interpret Christie’s failure to take this option as evidence of her complicity in her own oppression, using the fact to delegitimise her criticisms of the film industry and generally undermine any other actions she took. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Harrington Papers, Box 16-f.327, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library. Harrington presents this as a paraphrase of Christie’s words, in his letter to the actress. 44 Losey Papers, Box JWL/1/17/13, Special Collections, BFI Library. For Christie’s comments about nudity, see Maitland, Very Heaven, p. 171. 45 Campbell, ‘Miss Julie’, p. 11. 46 Jaehne, ‘Seeking Connections’, p. 7. 47 Cockburn, ‘Don’t Look Now’, p. 19. 48 The 1970s had offered slim pickings for actresses in British cinema and things were no better in the 1980s. Production companies with commercial clout (Goldcrest for example) had no interest in women, while male auteurs grappled with their fear of, and fascination with, Thatcher and her political ideology. For a fuller discussion, see Harper, Women in British Cinema, pp. 139–42. 49 James Leggott, ‘Demon Seed’, unpublished essay courtesy of the author. 50 Richard Combs, ‘Demon Seed’, Sight and Sound vol. 46 no. 3 (Summer 1977), pp. 190–1 (p. 190). 51 In Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 138.

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52 Harrington Papers, Box 16-f.327, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library. 53 Gary Arnold, ‘“Demon Seed”: A Computerized Horror’, Washington Post, 8 April 1977, p. 11. Although the film has subsequently acquired cult status, its reception on release was lukewarm, with British and American reviewers unimpressed by Cammell’s efforts, describing the effects as outdated, while audiences preferred the spectacle and heroics of Star Wars (1977). 54 Cockburn, ‘Don’t Look Now’, p. 19. 55 In Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 149. 56 Ibid. 57 Karen Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), p. xiv. For Warren ‘others’ are human (women, people of colour, children, the poor) and ‘earth Others’ (animals, forests, the land). 58 Ibid., p. 126. 59 Campbell, ‘Miss Julie’, p. 11. 60 McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 127. 61 See Walker, National Heroes, p. 213 for a discussion of budget and production context. 62 For a discussion of this point, see Gayle Greene, Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 145. 63 Ibid. It is for these reasons that Greene describes the passivity of ‘D’ as ‘potent’. 64 Gladwell in Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 146. Gladwell had worked as an editor on O Lucky Man! 65 Ibid. 66 Sheila Conboy, ‘The Limits of Transcendental Experience in Doris Lessing’s “The Memoirs of a Survivor”’, Modern Language Studies vol. 20 no. 1 (Winter 1990), pp. 67–78. 67 Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor, cited in ibid., p. 71. 68 For the Photoplay review, see Ewbank and Hildred, Julie Christie, p. 216. See Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 148 for Aitken’s review.

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69 Goodman, ‘A Woman’s Point of Contact’. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. Speaking out in support of women technicians, who she recognised had ‘a tough time even getting hired’, became a recurring theme in Christie’s politics during the decade. 72 McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 126. 73 David Hughes, ‘The Memory Lingers On’, Sunday Times, 9 January 1983, p. 42. The film’s quality status was further consolidated by director Alan Bridges’s nomination for the Palme d’Or. 74 For a discussion of this theme, see Ann V. Norton, Paradoxical Feminism: The Novels of Rebecca West (Lanham, MD: International Scholars Publications, 2000), p. 8. 75 Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (London: Virago, 1980 [1981]), p. 11. 76 Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 11 March 1985. 77 Steve Vineberg, ‘Surface and Depth’, The Threepenny Review no. 23 (Autumn 1985), pp. 23–5 (p. 24). 78 Ibid. 79 Kael, New Yorker. 80 Its release in the US was delayed until 1985. 81 D. L. LeMahieu, ‘Imagined Contemporaries: Cinematic and Televised Dramas about the Edwardians in Great Britain and the United States, 1967–1985’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 10 no. 3 (October 1990), pp. 243–57. 82 Potter, Naked Cinema, p. 237. 83 Pam Cook, ‘British Independents: The Gold Diggers’, Framework no. 24 (1984), pp. 12–30 (p. 12). 84 Sally Potter, cited in Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Gold Diggers: A Preview’, Camera Obscura no. 12 (Summer 1984) at http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1984/07/the-gold-diggers-apreview/. Accessed 18 June 2012. 85 Ibid. 86 Potter in Cook, ‘British Independents’, p. 14.

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87 Potter in Sheila Johnston, ‘Like Night and Day’, Monthly Film Bulletin vol. 51 (1984), p. 142. 88 Potter in Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 152. 89 Goodman, ‘A Woman’s Point of Contact’, p. 9. 90 Ibid. 91 Berlins, ‘Digging for Real Gold in the Hills’, p. 8. 92 Julie Christie, ‘Foreword’, in Sophie Mayer, The Cinema of Sally Potter (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), p. viii. 93 Potter in Rosenbaum, ‘The Gold Diggers’. 94 Berlins, ‘Digging for Real Gold in the Hills’, p. 8. 95 See Campbell, ‘Miss Julie’, p. 10; McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 127. 96 Walker, National Heroes, p. 245. B. Ruby Rich suggested that the film’s poor critical reception was due not only to its critique of capitalism and nationalism being out of step with the country’s conservative culture but ‘for taking Christie away from the boys who reviewed it’. In Mayer, The Cinema of Sally Potter, p. 62. 97 The film also won BAFTAs for costume design (Barbara Lane), cinematography (Walter Lassally) and direction (James Ivory). 98 Berlins, ‘Digging for Real Gold in the Hills’, p. 8. 99 In Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 171. 100 ‘Julie Christie’s Indian Summer Lingers On’, Daily Express, 1 May 1982. There are elements of orientalism in the white protagonist’s journey of self-discovery in an ‘exotic’ land. 101 Elizabeth Campbell, ‘Re-Flections, Re-Creations: Epistolarity in Novels by Contemporary Women Author(s)’, Twentieth-century Literature vol. 41 no. 3 (Autumn 1995), pp. 332–48. 102 Ibid., p. 335. The film can also be located in the context of women’s independent cinema of the 1980s. What took precedence here was the figure of the investigator and/or producer of culture, who took an active interest in women and their role in history. See Sylvia Harvey, ‘The “Other Cinema” in Britain: Unfinished Business in Oppositional and Independent Film, 1929–1984’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays:

NOTES

149

90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 225–51 (p. 244). Jhabvala’s script illustrates how the figure began to cross over into more mainstream cultural production with Christie’s casting highly symptomatic, demonstrating how stars carry associations across different genres and production contexts. 103 McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema, p. 126.

Coda: Afterglow and Away from Her 1 Benedict Nightingale, ‘Pinter Boils in the Cold Heat of Julie’, The Times, 13 July 1995, p. 35. 2 Christie, cited in Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 195, 197. 3 On Christie’s reflections on her surgery, see Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 201. For comments on Christie’s decision, see Emma Cook, ‘When Being Beautiful Is Not Enough’, Independent on Sunday, 25 January 1998, professing disappointment on the basis that Christie’s actions compromised her status as a ‘principled’ actress. 4 In Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 201. 5 David Lewin, ‘Growing Old Doesn’t Fill Me with Fear’, Mail on Sunday, 22 February 1987. 6 Hayward makes reference to Lindy Davies as Christie’s ‘performance consultant’ for Fools of Fortune, The Railway Station Man and Dragonheart (1996)(p. 189). This seems plausible, with the actress herself mentioning ‘work[ing] very hard’ to develop her skills (see Mick Brown, ‘The New Face of Julie Christie’, Daily Telegraph, 19 May 1998, p. 19). 7 In Hayward, Julie Christie, p. 200. 8 Tim Adams, Observer, 1 April 2007. 9 Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Ageing Cool’, Sight and Sound vol. 13 no. 9 (August 2003), pp. 26–8 (p. 28). 10 Deborah Jermyn, ‘“Get a Life, Ladies. Your Old One Is Not Coming Back”: Ageing, Ageism and the Lifespan of Female Celebrity’, Celebrity Studies vol. 3 no. 1 (2012), pp. 1–12 (p. 4).

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11 Ron Magid, ‘A Luminous Afterglow’, American Cinematographer vol. 79 no. 3 (1998), pp. 52–64. 12 John Wrathall, ‘The Bulb’s Got to Blow’, Sight and Sound vol. 8 no. 6 (June 1998), pp. 18–22 (p. 20). 13 Andrew O’Hehir, ‘Beyond the Multiplex’, 3 May 2007 at http://www.salon.com/2007/05/03/btm_tribeca/. Accessed 18 August 2015. 14 Rachel Lister, ‘Adapting the Short Story: Fidelity and Motivation in Sarah Polley’s Away from Her’, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance vol. 6 no. 1 (2013), pp. 43–54. 15 Ibid., p. 45. 16 O’Hehir, ‘Beyond the Multiplex’. 17 Alice Munro, ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain’, New Yorker, December 1999. Kindle file. 18 Abele, ‘Julie Christie’, p. 7. 19 Adams, Observer. 20 Jenkins, ‘Julie Christie’. 21 Ibid.

NOTES

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

The bibliography lists books and articles in the text. Online, press and other resources including fiction and archival material are dealt with in the notes. Annakin, Ken, So You Wanna Be a Director? (Sheffield: Tomahawk Press, 2001). Baron, Cynthia, ‘Crafting Film Performances: Acting in the Hollywood Studio Era’, in Lovell, Alan and Krämer, Peter (eds), Screen Acting (London: Routledge, 1999). Baron, Cynthia, ‘Peter Sellers: A Figure of the Impasse’, in Wojcik, Pamela Robertson (ed.), Movie Stars of the 1960s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), pp. 115–38. Baron, Cynthia, Carson, Diane and Tomasulo, Frank P. (eds), More than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004). Bogarde, Dirk, Snakes and Ladders (London: Triad-Grafton Books, 1979). Brownlow, Kevin, David Lean: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). Bruzzi, Stella, New Documentary (London: Routledge, 2006). Butler, Alison, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (London: Wallflower Press, 2002). Callan, Michael Feeney, Julie Christie (New York: St Martin’s Press: 1984). Campbell, Elizabeth, ‘Re-Flections, Re-Creations: Epistolarity in Novels by Contemporary Women Author(s)’, Twentieth-century Literature vol. 41 no. 3 (1995), pp. 332–48.

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Carnicke, Sharon Marie, ‘Screen Performance and Directors’ Visions’, in Baron et al., More than a Method. Caute, David, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Ciment, Michel, Conversations with Losey (London: Methuen, 1985). Clark, Danae, Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors’ Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Conboy, Sheila, ‘The Limits of Transcendental Experience in Doris Lessing’s “The Memoirs of a Survivor”’, Modern Language Studies vol. 20 no. 1 (1990), pp. 67–78. Cook, Pam, ‘British Independents: The Gold Diggers’, Framework no. 24 (1984), pp. 12–30. Davis, Nick, ‘Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave: Performance and the Politics of Singularity’, in Morrison, James (ed.), Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 182–201. Dean, Deborah, ‘Recruiting a Self: Women Performers and Aesthetic Labour’, Work, Employment and Society vol. 19 no. 4 (2005), pp. 761–74. Dean, Deborah and Jones, Campbell, ‘If Women Actors Were Working …’, Media, Culture, Society vol. 25 no. 4 (2003). Dyer, Richard, Stars (London: BFI, 1998). Dyhouse, Carole, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (London: Zed Books, 2010). Engelmeier, Regine and Peter, Fashion in Film (Munich: Prestel, 1990). Ewbank, Tim and Hildred, Stafford, Julie Christie: The Biography (London: Deutsch, 2008). Gardner, Colin, Joseph Losey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Gledhill, Christine and Knight, Julia, ‘Introduction’, in Gledhill and Knight (eds), Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015). Greene, Gayle, Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

153

Gundle, Stephen, Glamour: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Hall, Sheldon, ‘Tall Revenue Features: The Genealogy of the Modern Blockbuster’, in Neale, Steve (ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood (London: BFI, 2002). Hall, Sheldon and Neale, Steve, Epics, Spectacle and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010). Harper, Sue, Women in British Cinema (London: Continuum, 2000). Harper, Sue, ‘The British Women’s Picture: Methodology, Agency and Performance in the 1970s’, in Bell, Melanie and Williams, Melanie (eds), British Women’s Cinema (London: Routledge, 2010). Harper, Sue and Smith, Justin, British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Harvey, Sylvia, ‘The “Other Cinema” in Britain: Unfinished Business in Oppositional and Independent Film, 1929–1984’, in Barr, Charles (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986). Hayward, Anthony, Julie Christie (London: Robert Hale, 2000). Hollinger, Karen, The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star (London: Routledge, 2006). Jermyn, Deborah, ‘“Get a Life, Ladies. Your Old One Is Not Coming Back”: Ageing, Ageism and the Lifespan of Female Celebrity’, Celebrity Studies vol. 3 no. 1 (2012), pp. 1–12. LeMahieu, D. L., ‘Imagined Contemporaries: Cinematic and Televised Dramas about the Edwardians in Great Britain and the United States, 1967–1985’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 10 no. 3 (1990), pp. 243–57. Lister, Rachel, ‘Adapting the Short Story: Fidelity and Motivation in Sarah Polley’s Away from Her’, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance vol. 6 no. 1 (2013), pp. 43–54. Lucia, Cynthia, Grundmann, Roy and Simon, Art, The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, Volume III 1946–1975 (Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Mayer, Sophie, The Cinema of Sally Potter (London: Wallflower Press, 2009).

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McCreadie, Marsha, ‘Between Valuelessness and Vacillation in the Films of Julie Christie’, Journal of Popular Film vol. 6 no. 3 (1978), pp. 216–28. McDonald, Paul, ‘Story and Show: The Basic Contradiction in Film Star Acting’, in Taylor, Aaron (ed.), Theorizing Film Acting (New York: Routledge, 2012). McDonald, Paul, Hollywood Stardom (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). McFarlane, Brian, An Autobiography of British Cinema (London: Methuen, 1997). McGilligan, Patrick, Robert Altman: Jumping off the Cliff (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989). Naremore, James, Acting in the Cinema (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). Norton, Ann V., Paradoxical Feminism: The Novels of Rebecca West (Lanham, MD: International Scholars Publications, 2000). Perkins, Tessa, ‘The Politics of “Jane Fonda”’, in Gledhill, Christine (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991). Potter, Sally, Naked Cinema: Working with Actors (London: Faber and Faber, 2014). Radner, Hilary, ‘On the Move: Fashion Photography and the Single Girl in the 1960s’, in Bruzzi, Stella and Church Gibson, Pamela (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2000). Radner, Hilary, ‘Embodying the Single Girl in the 1960s’, in Entwistle, Joanne and Wilson, Elizabeth (eds), Body Dressing (Oxford: Berg, 2001). Reed, Paula, Fifty Fashion Looks That Changed the 1960s (London: Conrad Octopus, 2012). Rich, B. Ruby, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Rosen, Marjorie, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream (London: Peter Owen, 1975 [1973]). Rowbotham, Sheila, Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action (London: Routledge, 1992). Sanderson, Mark, Don’t Look Now (London: BFI, 1996).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

155

Self, Robert T., Robert Altman’s Subliminal Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Self, Robert T., ‘Resisting Reality: Acting by Design in Robert Altman’s Nashville’, in Baron et al., More than a Method . Sheppard, David, On Some Far-away Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno (London: Orion, 2009). Sinyard, Neil, Richard Lester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Sterritt, David (ed.), Robert Altman Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000). Street, Sarah, Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (London: Continuum, 2001). Stuart, Amanda Mackenzie, Diana Vreeland: Empress of Fashion (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013). Tarr, Carrie, ‘“Sapphire”, “Darling” and the Boundaries of Permitted Pleasure’, Screen vol. 26 no. 1 (1985), pp. 50–65. Tomasulo, Frank, ‘“The Sounds of Silence”: Modernist Acting in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up’, in Baron et al., More than a Method. Walker, Alexander, Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Orion, 2005). Walker, Alexander, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London: Orion, 2005). Warren, Karen, Ecofeminist Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000). Zuckoff, Mitchell, Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

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FILMOGRAPHY

Feature films and television CALL OXBRIDGE 2000 (Richard West, UK, 1961) [television series] Ann (1 episode) A FOR ANDROMEDA (Michael Hayes, UK, 1961) [television series] Christine/Andromeda (6 episodes) CROOKS ANONYMOUS (Ken Annakin, UK, 1962) Babette La Verne THE FAST LADY (Ken Annakin, UK, 1963) Claire Chingford ITV PLAY OF THE WEEK, J. B. Priestley Season (‘Dangerous Corner’) (Graeme MacDonald, UK, 1963) [television series] Betty (1 episode) BILLY LIAR (John Schlesinger, UK, 1963) Liz THE SAINT (Robert Lynn, UK, 1963) [television series] Judith (1 episode) YOUNG CASSIDY (Jack Cardiff, UK, 1965) Daisy Battles DARLING (John Schlesinger, UK, 1965) Diana Scott DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (David Lean, UK/USA/Italy, 1965) Lara FAHRENHEIT 451 (François Truffaut, UK, 1966) FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (John Schlesinger, UK, 1967) Bathsheba PETULIA (Richard Lester, USA/UK 1968) Petulia IN SEARCH OF GREGORY (Peter Wood, UK/Italy, 1969) Catherine Morelli THE GO-BETWEEN (Joseph Losey, UK, 1970) Marian MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (Robert Altman, USA, 1971) Mrs Miller

FILMOGRAPHY

157

DON’T LOOK NOW (Nicolas Roeg, UK/Italy, 1973) Laura Baxter SHAMPOO (Hal Ashby, USA, 1975) Jackie DEMON SEED (Donald Cammell, USA, 1977) Susan HEAVEN CAN WAIT (Warren Beatty/Buck Henry, USA, 1978) Betty Logan MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (David Gladwell, UK, 1981) ‘D’ LES QUARANTIÈMES RUGISSANTS (Christian de Chalonge, France, 1981) Catherine Dantec THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER (Alan Bridges, UK, 1982) Kitty Baldry THE GOLD DIGGERS (Sally Potter, UK, 1983) Ruby HEAT AND DUST (James Ivory, UK, 1983) Anne SEPARATE TABLES (John Schlesinger, UK, 1983) [television movie] Mrs Shankland/Miss Railton-Bell POWER (Sidney Lumet, USA, 1986) Ellen Freeman CHAMPAGNE AMER (Ridha Béhi, France/Tunisia, 1986) Betty Rivière MISS MARY (Maria Luisa Bemberg, Argentina/USA, 1986) Mary Mulligan VÄTER UND SÖHNE (Bernhard Sinkel, Germany, 1986) [television series] Charlotte (4 episodes) DADAH IS DEATH (Jerry London, Australia/USA, 1988) Barbara Barlow FOOLS OF FORTUNE (Pat O’Connor, UK, 1990) Mrs Quinton THE RAILWAY STATION MAN (Michael Whyte, UK, 1992) [television movie] Helen Cuffe KARAOKE (Renny Rye, UK, 1996) [television series] Ruth (2 episodes) DRAGONHEART (Rob Cohen, USA, 1996) Queen Aislinn HAMLET (Kenneth Branagh, UK/USA, 1996) Gertrude AFTERGLOW (Alan Rudolph, USA, 1997) Phyllis Mann ˆ ME DU LOUVRE (Jean-Paul Salomé, France, BELPHÉGOR – LE FANTO 2001) Glenda Spender NO SUCH THING (Hal Hartley, USA/ICELAND, 2001) Dr Anna SNAPSHOTS (Rudolf van den Berg, Netherlands/USA/UK, 2002) Narma I’M WITH LUCY (Jon Sherman, USA/France, 2002) Dori TROY (Wolfgang Petersen, USA/UK, 2004) Thetis

158

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HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (Alfonso Cuarón, UK/USA, 2004) Madame Rosmerta FINDING NEVERLAND (Marc Forster, UK/USA, 2004) Emma du Maurier THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS (Isabel Coixet, Spain/Ireland, 2005) Inge AWAY FROM HER (Sarah Polley, Canada/UK,USA, 2006) Fiona Anderson NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU (Shekhar Kapur, USA, 2009) Isabelle GLORIOUS 39 (Stephen Poliakoff, UK, 2009) Aunt Elizabeth RED RIDING HOOD (Catherine Hardwicke, USA/Canada, 2011) Grandmother THE COMPANY YOU KEEP (Robert Redford, USA/Canada, 2012) Mimi Lurie

FILMOGRAPHY

159

INDEX Page numbers in italic denote illustrations; those in bold indicate detailed analysis. n = endnote.

A A for Andromeda (TV) 6, 14–15 Accident (1967) 56 actors ‘flat effect’ and audience projection 76–80 political activism 85–6 as social subject 5, 131n8 as workers 5 actresses see female performers Adams, Gerry 128 The Afectados (2015) 129 Afterglow (1997) 1, 6–7, 82, 121, 122, 123–5, 124 topicality 2 Aitken, Maria 106 Akerman, Chantal 96, 105 Altman, Robert 4, 43, 47, 51, 62, 113, 123–4, 138n11 method 63–7

160

JULIE CHRISTIE

Altman, Robert cont. style 124 technique 55 American Cinema see Hollywood The Animals Film (1982) 87, 89, 97, 100–1, 102 Ann-Margret 107 Annakin, Ken 16 Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) 43 Antonioni, Michelangelo 53 Arnold, Gary 99, 147n53 Arrighi, Luciana 108 Ashby, Hal 43 auteur theory 46, 138n11 Avedon, Richard 9 Away from Her (2006) 1, 6–7, 122, 125–9, 127 topicality 2

B Bailey, David 9, 19, 22, 33

Bardot, Brigitte 15, 134n31 activism 91 Baron, Cynthia 5, 23, 26, 134n31, 135n48 Bates, Alan 40, 56, 106 Baye, Nathalie 96 The Beatles 24, 33, 41 Beatty, Warren 2, 9, 42, 63 clash with Robert Altman 64, 67 as director 82 politics 44 scriptwriting 65–6 Belfast Film Festival 128 Bemberg, Maria Luisa 121 Benge, Alfreda 66–7, 142n68 Berlin, Marcel 146n40 Bessant, Don 36–7 Biba (fashion boutique) 66–7 Billy Liar (1963) 8, 17, 20, 23, 28 casting 133n23

Billy Liar cont. production 18–21 reception 21–2 success 11–12, 24 Birmingham Repertory 8 Blow-Up (1966) 37, 53, 139n28 Bogarde, Dirk 3, 9, 27–8, 55 Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 42 The Bostonians (1984) 116 Bradbury, Ray 30 Branagh, Kenneth 121 Brando, Marlon 138n5 Brief Encounter (1945) 48 British cinema compared to Hollywood 12, 25 and feminist praxis 102–21 gender roles 146n48 new wave 17 and sexual liberation 12–13 British Film Institute, as funding source 88, 111–12 ‘British invasion’ 10, 32–3, 134n32 Bruzzi, Stella 144n17 Byrne, David 89

C Cammell, Donald 43, 82, 97, 99, 147n53 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 44, 86

Campbell, Elizabeth 118 Cannes Film Festival 62, 116 Cardiff, Jack 25 career of Christie in America 31–2 artistic prestige 108 awards 8, 17, 32, 40, 44, 122, 125, 128 diverging career pathways 26–7 diversity 130n5 early career 8, 14–17 importance of control 101, 102 increased leverage as performer 44–5, 83 Janni contract 24–6, 42 later career 121 nouvelle vague aspirations 11, 26, 40 retreat from mainstream 11, 44, 82–3, 134n39 return to the UK 82 salary 134n35 stage work 121 voiceover work 144n17 Carnicke, Sharon 46–7, 138n11 Cazenove, Christopher 116 Central School of Speech and Drama 8, 11, 45 Channel 4 112

Chaplin, Geraldine 31, 39, 137n82 Christie, Julie on ageing 82 American popularity 23–4, 32 biographies of 4 on cinema vs theatre 131n1 directors 4, 7, 83, 100 early life 11–12 education 8, 87 French influence 11 lack of scholarship on career 4, 129 legacy 129 marginalisation 6 on marriage 36–7 performance styles 6, 10, 45–7, 71; method 138n5; modernism 138n4 personal life 2, 9, 36–7 physical appearance 1, 21–2, 67; cosmetic surgery 121–2, 150n3 position in film history 4 rehearsal methods 6, 45–7, 121 role models 96 and sexual liberation 12 see also career of Christie; iconic status of Christie; media portrayals of Christie; political views of Christie

INDEX

161

Clark, Danae 5 Cohen, Leonard 63 Collins, Joan 59 Cooper, Lindsay 103 Courtenay, Tom 9, 30 Crooks Anonymous (1962) 15–16, 16

D Dadah Is Death (1988) 121 Danner, Blythe 138n5 Darling (1965) 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 17, 23, 24, 26, 27–31, 33–4, 36, 37, 60, 99, 137n82 impact on young female audience 38 success 2 Davies, Lindy 121, 150n6 De Niro, Robert 138n5 Dean, Deborah 5, 131n8 Demon Seed (1983) 7, 43, 82, 87, 97–100, 98, 102 cult status 147n53 Depp, Johnny 125 Doctor Zhivago (1965) 6, 8, 25, 26, 33, 41, 49, 68, 113, 134n32 box office 39 budget 30, 39, 47 Christie’s performance 47–51 as cinematic landmark 4 and female empowerment 38–40 filming 29–30

162

JULIE CHRISTIE

Doctor Zhivago cont. premiere 31 promotional strategy 39 publicity 137n82 success 2, 39–40 La Dolce Vita (1960) 134n31 Donovan, Terence 133n23 Don’t Look Now (1973) 6, 7, 43, 60, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 124–5, 138n7, 142n81 Christie’s performance 70–80; criticisms 76–7 Dorléac, Françoise 31 Dors, Diana 132n11 Dr No (1962) 23 Dragonheart (1996) 150n6 du Maurier, Daphne 76, 142n81 Dunn, Nell, Steaming 96 Dyer, Richard 13

E Eastwood, Clint 78 EMI 61 English, Rose 103

F Fahrenheit 451 (1966) 9, 30–1 Fairchild, John 40 Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) 9, 26, 40–1, 43

fashion 66–7 1960s 12–13, 33–6 photographic influence on cinema 19 The Fast Lady (1963) 16–17 Faulkner, William, Wild Palms 61 female performers as activists 85–6 ageing 82, 128 agency 29, 67 career development paths in Hollywood 132n11 as Galatea figures 4–5, 29 sexual objectification 12, 95–6 feminism in cinema 2, 38, 81, 102–21, 144n18, 149–50n102 ecofeminism 101, 147n57 feminist authors 103 film scholarship 5–6 irony and protofeminism 59–61 negative press 86, 91–2 in the 1960s 10 in the 1980s 85 politics of ageing 82, 128 in the press 145n30 theory 94–7 Films in Review (magazine) 39 Finch, Peter 9, 40

Finding Neverland (2004) 125 Finney, Albert 29 Fonda, Jane 95, 138n5 activism 85–6, 91–2 Fools of Fortune (1990) 87, 121, 150n6 Ford, John 9, 25 Fox, Edward 56

G Garbo, Greta 78, 83–4, 90, 143n85 genre revisionism 62–3 Georgy Girl (1966) 38 Gish, Lillian 139n15 Gladwell, David 83, 104–5 The Go-Between (1970) 43, 53, 58, 106, 126 Christie’s performance 55–62; criticisms 57 The Gold Diggers (1983) 7, 67, 87, 88, 109, 111–16, 115, 122, 125 as cinematic landmark 4 gender politics 2, 103, 117, 118 Gone with the Wind (1939) 41 Goodman, Joan 84, 138n5 Greenham Women’s Peace Camp 86 Greer, Germaine, The Female Eunuch 60, 94 Guard, Dominic 55, 58

Guevara, Che 89 Guinness, Alec 39

H Hamlet (1996) 121 A Hard Day’s Night (1964) 41, 51 Hardy, Thomas 40 Harper, Sue 12, 13, 59–60, 71, 76 Harrington, Curtis 96, 99 Harris, Julie 34 Hartley, L. P. 56, 61 Heat and Dust (1983) 7, 84, 87, 116–20, 119 awards 149n97 gender politics 149–50n102 Heaven Can Wait (1978) 43, 82, 87, 134n39 Help! (1965) 51 Hemmings, David 37, 139n28 Hepburn, Audrey 22 Hoffman, Dustin 37 Hollinger, Karen 29 The Actress 135n48 Hollywood diversifying audience 32–3 European influence 23, 134n31 ‘new Hollywood’ 37, 41–2 patriarchal nature 120, 131n2, 136n76 studio system 12, 25 traditional portrayal of women 80, 103

I iconic status of Christie as fashion icon 9–10, 33–6 popularity 26 relationship with audience 2–3 as role model 6, 37–8, 93–4 as sex symbol 1–2 star persona 10, 19–20, 21, 27–31, 139n24 In Search of Gregory (1969) 8, 9, 25, 26, 41–2, 43 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 89 Ivory, James 116, 149n97

J Jackson, Glenda 59, 107–8 politics 85 Jane, Topsy 133n23 Janni, Joe 10, 17, 29, 30–1, 40, 43, 61 background 134n36 Christie’s contract with 24–6, 42 Jeanne Dielman (1976) 96 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer 149–50n102 Heat and Dust 103, 116 Johnson, Betsey 35 Jones, Campbell 5, 131n8 Jules et Jim (1962) 30

INDEX

163

K

164

Kael, Pauline 69–70 on Don’t Look Now 143n85 on The Return of the Soldier 108–9 Kapoor, Shashi 116 A Kind of Loving (1962) 18 Kine Weekly (journal) 27 King, Barry 68 The Knack (1965) 51 Koontz, Dean 97, 99 Kurita, Toyomichi 123

Life (magazine) 39 on Christie 25 London Film Festival 89 Look (magazine) 62 Christie shoot, 1964 23–4 Losey, Joseph 43, 47, 51, 53, 96, 138n11 demands on actors 56–7 style 63 working method 55 working with Christie 61–2 Lumet, Sidney 121

L

M

LaBeouf, Shia 125 Laffont, Colette 112 Landeta, Matilde 144n18 Lane, Barbara 149n97 Lassally, Walter 149n97 Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 134n32 Lean, David 4, 9, 43, 68, 134n32 method 47–8 silent movie influence 48 style 50 Lessing, Doris 105 The Golden Notebook 103 The Memoirs of a Survivor 103 Lester, Richard 9, 26, 41, 60 background 51 on Christie 10, 52

Mason, Hilary 138n7 McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) 1, 43, 51, 62–70, 69, 70, 123–4, 125 Christie’s opinion of 141n57 Christie’s performance 67–70; criticisms 69–70 as cinematic landmark 4 McDonald, Paul 44, 68, 84–5 McDowell, Malcolm 104 McFarlane, Brian 143n86 McKay, Brian 65 media portrayals of Christie 82 ‘Battling Julie’ 87, 88–94, 90, 117

JULIE CHRISTIE

media portrayals of Christie cont. interviews 7, 10, 32, 85, 92, 94–5, 96, 99, 100–1, 144n11, 146n40 lifestyle 144n8 reviews 27–8, 31, 44, 106, 108–9, 121 Mellinger, Leonie 105 Memoirs of a Survivor (1981) 1, 70, 87, 100, 104–6, 125 Merchant, Ismail 117 Merchant–Ivory Productions 116 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) 25, 29–30, 40, 48, 50, 99 publicity 31–2, 39, 137n82 Miles, Sarah 13 Miss Mary (1986) 87, 121 modernism 55, 138n4, 139n28 Munro, Alice 126 The Bear Came over the Mountain 125 Murdoch, Iris The Unicorn 96

N Naremore, James 48, 49, 139n15 naturalism 46 Naughton, Edmund, McCabe and Mrs. Miller 65 Neruda, Pablo 128–9

‘New Wave’ cinema 9, 11 British 17, 48 European 41–2 French 30 New York Herald Tribune (newspaper) 31 New York, I Love You (2009) 125 New York Museum of Modern Art 33 Newsweek (magazine) 31, 39 Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) 43 No Such Thing (2001) 125 Nolte, Nick 123, 124 Northern Animal Liberation League 89, 144n21

O O Lucky Man! (1973) 104 Oxfam 86

P Paglia, Camille 38 Paisley, Ian 128 Paris Match (magazine) 62 Performance (1970) 97 Perkins, Tessa 91 Petticoat (magazine) 34 Petulia (1968) 6, 9, 41, 47, 54, 128 Christie’s performance 51–5; criticisms 52–3

Pinter, Howard 56, 59, 61, 126–7 Old Times (stage play) 121–2 Pitt, Brad 125, 129 political views of Christie 44, 83–5, 86–8, 143n86 activism 84 animal rights 86–7, 89, 100–1 anti-imperialism 86 effect on career choices 121, 144n18 feminist beliefs 2, 59–60, 81, 94–5 Polley, Sarah 125–9 Potter, Sally 4, 67, 83, 93, 103, 111–12 on Christie 83, 112–13 Powell, Dilys 53 Power (1986) 87, 121 Profumo, John 13

The Return of the Soldier (1982) 84, 87, 88, 106–11, 110 Rich, B. Ruby 93–4 on The Gold Diggers 149n96 Riley, Bridget 33 Robertson Justice, James 9 Roeg, Nicholas 43, 47, 51, 76, 97 Christie’s opinion of 70 working method 55 Rome Film School 134n36 Room with a View (1986) 116 Rosen, Marjorie 38 Rowbotham, Sheila 95 Royal Shakespeare Company 8 Rudolph, Alan 124 Russell, Shirley 108 Russian Revolution 38

Q Queen Christina (1933) 78

R The Railway Station Man (1992) 87, 121, 150n6 Rank Organisation 14, 134n36 Raphael, Frederic 29 Redgrave, Vanessa 85, 138n5 activism 91 Reid, Beryl 59 Renoir, Jean 140n32

S Sarrazin, Michael 9 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) 29 Scacchi, Greta 116 Schlesinger, John 3, 9, 17, 18, 33–4, 40–1, 48, 133n23 background 19 Christie’s letters to 30 on Christie’s looks 21 influence on Christie’s career 10, 29 Schonfeld, Victor 89

INDEX

165

Schygulla, Hanna 96 Scott, George C. 9, 51–2 Secret Life of Words (2005) 125 Self, Robert T. 63 Separate Tables (1983) 84 The Servant (1963) 36, 56 Sex and the Single Girl (book) 13 Seyrig, Delphine 96, 144n18 Shampoo (1975) 2, 43, 134n39 Sharif, Omar 32, 39, 48 Shrimpton, Jean 15, 19, 22, 33 Sillitoe, Alan, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 134n36 sixties (decade) in Britain 9, 12–13 as period of change 1–2 permissiveness 51 women’s liberation 10 Stacey, Jackie 78 Stamp, Terence 40 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 45 Star Wars (1977) 147n53 stardom and gender 7 loss of career control 101–2 and politics 85 scholarship on / theories of 4–5

166

JULIE CHRISTIE

Steiger, Rod 9, 39 Stuart, Amanda Mackenzie, Diana Vreeland, Empress of Fashion 133n27 Sutherland, Donald 55, 70, 71, 124–5, 143n85 Swinton, Tilda 78, 143n85

T Taylor, Rod 25 Tewkesbury, Joan 64–7 Thatcher, Margaret 146n48 Time (magazine) on ‘British invasion’ 33 on Christie and fashion 9 Tom Jones (1963) 36, 134n32 Tomasulo, Frank 139n28 Town (magazine) 133n23 A Town Like Alice (1956) 134n36 Troy (2004) 125 True Heart Susie (1919) 48 Truffaut, François 4, 9, 26, 44 on Christie 50–1 Tuffin and Foale (designers) 34, 35

U Upstairs, Downstairs (TV) 111

V Vanity Fair (magazine) 1 Vidor, King 48 Vincendeau, Ginette 123 Vineberg, Steve 109, 138n5 Vogue (magazine) 1, 9, 23, 26 American 31 British fashion 34–5 readership 34 Voight, Jon 37 Vreeland, Diana 22, 33, 133n27

W Walker, Alexander 1 on Billy Liar 22 on ‘British invasion’ 23 on Christie 12, 83, 114 on McCabe and Mrs. Miller 69 on ‘new Hollywood’ 37 Warwick Arts Centre Cinema 128 Waterhouse, Keith, Billy Liar 8 Wayne, John 26 Werner, Oskar 9, 30 West, Rebecca, The Return of the Soldier 103 Williams, Sharon 70 Windsor, Barbara 13 Winslet, Kate 125

womanhood, traditional values 13 Women in Film and Video 93 Women’s Wear Daily (magazine) 31, 36, 40

work, and organisational theory 5 Workers’ Revolutionary Party 85 World War I 38 Wyatt, Robert 66, 89, 142n67

Y York, Susannah 13, 36 Young Cassidy (1965) 25 Young, Freddie 48–9

Z Zsigmond, Vilmos 51

List of Illustrations While considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the copyright holders, this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in any future editions. Darling, © Appia Films; Crooks Anonymous, © Anglo Amalgamated Film Distributors Limited; Billy Liar, © Anglo Amalgamated Film Distributors Limited; Doctor Zhivago, © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Petulia, © Warner Bros.Seven Arts/Petersham Films Limited; The Go-Between, © EMI Film Productions; McCabe & Mrs. Miller, © Warner Bros.; Don’t Look Now, © D.L.N. Ventures Partnership; Demon Seed, © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; The Return of the Soldier, Brent Walker Film Productions/Barry R. Cooper Productions/Skreba Films; The Gold Diggers, © Sally Potter/Rose English/Lindsay Cooper; Heat and Dust, Merchant Ivory Productions Limited; Afterglow, © Afterglow; Away from Her, © Film Farm/Foundry Films Inc./Pulling Focus Pictures Inc.

INDEX

167

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