DIRECTOR ALAN RUDOLPH FIRST met Julie Christie almost 25 years ago, but when they sat down together last year to discuss her taking the lead rule in a movie called Afterglow, he was struck all over again by the 56-year-old actress's incandescence: "I said to myself, 'My God, that's Julie Christie!' Anybody working in films has a crush on her." If so, it's one of the great unrequited loves in Hollywood history.
At the height of her career, from the late '60s through the late '70s, the British actress was, according to movie critic Pauline Kael, " 'the sexiest woman in movies"—a unique beauty with an aristocratic profile, sensually pouting lips and blue eyes shaded with a hint of melancholy. After winning an Oscar for Best Actress as a downcast fashion model in 1965's Darling, she became an international symbol of mod chic. That same year she also played Lara, the elusive love object who made Omar Sharif shiver with desire in the snowy epic Doctor Zhivago. She had the same effect on Warren Beatty, both onscreen (Heaven Can Wait, Shampoo) and off.
Now, Christie has returned in Afterglow, and young viewers who consider Gwyneth Paltrow the ultimate in blonde mystery will see what they've been missing. In the offbeat, low-budget comedy-drama, Christie, still gorgeous (helped, she admits, by a facelift), plays a has-been horror-film star living in morose retirement in Montreal. She strikes up a flirtation with a young executive after she learns that her husband (Nick Nolte) is having an affair with the executive's wife. Having already won two critics' awards for a soulful performance that some have called the finest of her career, Christie—who first resurfaced briefly in 1996, playing supporting roles in Dragonheart and Hamlet—may well get an Oscar nomination, her third.
Call it a comeback, then, but who knows if Christie plans on staying? This revival "will change nothing about her," says Robert Altman, who directed Christie and Beatty in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). "She doesn't have the conventional ambitions of movie actresses, wanting publicity, prizes and money." Christie, says costar Nolte, who spent off-hours bicycling around Montreal with her, "has known for years all that stuff is poppycock." She seldom discusses her old movies, claims she doesn't actively seek out scripts and says her favorite form of acting is narrating audio books.
But when reporters at the San Sebastian film festival in Spain last fall asked why she has made herself so scarce, Christie answered, "I've been too busy." And she wasn't joking: She has campaigned against nuclear power, taken courses in politics and history and traveled the world from Nicaragua to Russia. "I have 85 numbers for her in my phone book," says Rudolph, "and 84 are crossed out." (Her Welsh farm is currently rented out.) Nor has she ever settled down with a husband, although her companion for the past 20 years has been British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell. "She doesn't seem to need anyone," says theater director Helena Kaut-Howson, who several years ago coaxed Christie into making a rare stage appearance in Harold Pinter's Old Times in North Wales.
The moviegoing public swiftly agreed. Within two years of graduating from London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Christie became famous as a free-spirited small-town girl in Billy Liar (1963). Moving to L.A. in 1967 sealed her star status, but her chief interest in Hollywood, she always maintained, was romantic. "I was there because of a lot of American boyfriends," Christie once said.
The most famous, certainly, was Warren Beatty, at the time Hollywood's swingingest bachelor. They met in 1967, says Towne, while Christie, who kept a home in Malibu, was shooting Petulia. "Warren was crazy about her," says Towne. But by the time they played ex-lovers in 1975's Shampoo, she and Beatty—whose high-profile affairs with actresses went on to include Michelle Phillips and Diane Keaton—had split.
Christie began to raise her consciousness along with her farm animals. She championed environmental issues, narrated documentaries about Agent Orange and animal rights, and refused to install central heating, the better to fend off the cold naturally with sheep pelts. She also tailored her career to her convictions, starring in the '80s in such uncommercial movies as The Gold Diggers, a film produced entirely by a crew of women.