A new movie has put Julie Christie back in the spotlight she loathes. She tells Ian Hamilton about her amnesia
In her latest film, Afterglow, which was released in South Africa this week, Julie Christie plays a character called Phyllis Mann, a one-time Hollywood film actress. Middle-aged and locked into a dire marriage to the gregariously lustful Lucky (played by a half-asleep Nick Nolte), Phyllis spends lonely evenings, drink in hand, staring at videos of her old movies: black-and-white horror flicks that she has taped from The Late, Late Show. Is there no end to your horrors? Phyllis cries in one of these. None whatsoever, says Count Falco, her merciless co-star. Phylliss facial expression as she watches her young on-screen self is anything but friendly.
Afterglow, directed by Alan Rudolph, is a slickly made, somewhat pretentious tragi- comedy of marital bad manners. There are witty moments but the film is fatally undone by its uncertainty of tone. The whole thing does come alive, though, whenever Phyllis is at centre-screen. And this is not just because the role has more subtlety and depth and is performed more persuasively than all the others. What really seizes the attention is the idea of a 57-year-old Julie Christie impersonating an over-the-hill movie star. Are we in on something autobiographical here? Is horny handyman Lucky meant to remind us of the stud-crimper in Shampoo? Is the Manns runaway daughter meant to be an echo of the dead child in Dont Look Now? And if so does Christie sit at home at night watching tapes of her old movies?
Try putting such a question to the real- life Christie and you will get stared at rather in the way that Phyllis stares at the reruns. How can anyone, the stare says, be dumb enough to ask that? Christies movie stardom was much starrier than Phylliss but, in interviews at any rate, she takes as much pride in her screen- acting backlist as Phyllis. The difference is that Christie has erased the tapes. Or, rather, she would erase them if she could.
I met her in London and again at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where Afterglow was premiered. I made an effort to get her talking on topics like: How did it feel to win an Oscar (for Darling) at the age of 24? and Which of your films do you look back on with most satisfaction? The blanks I drew seemed practised but authentic if bored and impatient adds up to authentic.
Christie is tinier, frownier, more fidgety than I expected from an actress whose most haunting screen appearances have been abstractedly reposeful (see The Go-Between, Return of the Soldier, Doctor Zhivago, and even when the opium gets to her McCabe and Mrs Miller). The famously alluring lower lip juts forward in determined style. She was, she said, quite pleased with her own contribution to Afterglow.
Christie was extra-fidgety today, she said, because she had just completed eight weeks in a Marguerite Duras play called Susannah Andler. The part had required her to occupy the boards for two hours every night, and she was drained: On stage you really do go into disturbing places youd rather not go into and that has to have an effect on your real self. This was a character who was suicidal from beginning to end. You cant just pretend to be suicidal. You have to find those parts of you, that we all have, that are suicidal.
For Christie, stage fright has a special edge. She is, she says, almost amnesiac. She cant remember lines. I forget them all the time. In this last play I had too much to learn. Its always too much, but this was quite clearly too much, two hours of Marguerite Duras, its just too much to hold in your head. So it sort of slips away.
When I continued to press her on the matter of her early films, Christies hands did not go to her face. Just as she could not remember lines, so she could recall almost nothing of her youth. And she was fed up with being asked to try. Her big-star phase from the mid-Sixties to the late Seventies she now thinks of as a pre-adult folly, something her beautiful young face did, years ago.
But does she not like to be remembered by her fans, those who drooled over that walk in Billy Liar, that bed-scene with Donald Sutherland in Dont Look Now, that dinner- party indiscretion in Shampoo? Because I havent got any memory, when people connect me with something I did in the past I cant find it particularly pleasant because I dont know who theyre talking about or what theyre talking about. There is no connection whatsoever. It is absolutely void. So who is this person?
We were having lunch and, after much intense study of the menu, Christie had settled for lentil soup and vegetable lasagne. She was not a pure vegetarian, she explained, although she greatly respected those who were. From time to time, then, she ate meat? I would rather avoid it, but I might take on some free- range meat because I think its so wonderful that farmers are actually even trying to do it
She went on to describe the horrors of factory farming, the dangers of organophosphates, the need for constant gastronomic vigilance. And I began to see her strategy for dealing with irksome interviewers. Her film-star celebrity was of no interest but it did give her access to the media. Her clear duty, therefore, was to use it as an outlet for issues that otherwise might not get aired.
Looking back over interviews from the last 20 years, it was not difficult to identify a pattern. Nuclear waste, animal rights, Nicaragua, Palestine, East Timor, Cambodia now organophosphates. Time and again, hapless interrogators had tried to nudge her back into her glitzy past; time and again, they had been forced to lend an ear to one or another of her global indignations. And I was to be no exception.
For a few years, after Darling and Doctor Zhivago, she found herself drawn to the Hollywood big-time. In 1967, she met Warren Beatty and moved to California. The Beatty relationship Christie absolutely refuses to discuss. Fiona Walker, a fellow student at Londons Central School of Speech and Drama, recalls that once Julie became famous she helped herself to all the beautiful things in life that she wanted. But lots of the things that Warren liked appalled her. He lived in hotels. He went in for the full American film-star bit, which she never espoused, to her credit.
Instead, she bought a house in London, and a farm in Wales and shopped extensively for clothes, paintings and antiques possessions which, some years later, she would give away to her needy artist friends.
On her return to England, she was now a left- wing film-star activist, Britains answer to Jane Fonda, and she ridiculed accordingly. Her response was to try to dismantle her celebrity, to tbecome an anti-star. It was not easy. Celebrity, she said, was like a nasty dog following me around. But how do I get rid of it?
The questions she now had to field were more often to do with children than marriage. Her answer was simple: she didnt want to be a mother. I like to pick and choose what I want to do, she said. The prospect of being a spinster without any family doesnt bother me at all. I think the ideal way for humans to live is with a group of people instead of in a tiny, closed-off nucleus like a family.
And maybe there are echoes here of her pre- stardom life. When Christie became a star, there was a semi-rejection of her arty mates, a separation for which she still tries to make amends. They and I were one, she told me. And then suddenly I was made into something that put me in another camp. I had the dosh.
Even today, she speaks of her success in films as if it were some terrible betrayal of the intellect. Most people who meet Christie remark on her low self-esteem. She is not, she will insist, a proper actress even though, in the Nineties, she has re-emerged as a stage actress. Nor is she a proper intellectual in spite of the Open University degree course she is currently engaged in.
In San Sebastian, playing the film star once again, her memory or some unpleasant strand of it appeared to flicker into life: those days in the spotlight had been a nightmare. She knew how Princess Diana must have felt. I knew she was going to die. It was like watching a movie made for perverts, where people paid, and watched, and continued to watch even though it was quite clear she had to die. Diana had been bullied to death. Bullied by whom? The press, the presss readers, the whole machine that we call a democracy. Had I read Milan Kundera she had the cutting somewhere where he said that privacy was the value we must defend above all others?
As she talked, she hunted in the knapsack she always carries a knapsack full of pamphlets, books and newspaper cuttings. She found the Kundera. Famous people, he had written, have become like a public resource like sewer systems. She read it out to me and when shed done she sat back and half closed her eyes: another tiring job well done.
Stage acting was for her a nightly terror, rather like going into battle: Terror and overcoming terror. You actually feel this terror which you hope not to feel in your life, and then you overcome it: that its possible to overcome that terror.
In her hotel suite at San Sebastian, Christie was surrounded by attendants – a hairdresser, a PR person, a festival red jacket – and each was there to serve and soothe. Downstairs in the lobby lurked the enemy: photographers, journalists and television crews. Yet Christie seemed more relaxed than she had been in London. She had, she said, recovered from Susannah Andler.
She wanted to talk to me, she said, about celebrity, journalists, the death of Di. She had forgotten to bring the Janet Malcolm book and in any case she was now researching the Basque separatist movement: after all, we were(italics) in Spain.
In San Sebastian, playing the film star once again, her memory – or some unpleasant strand of it – appeared to flicker into life: those days in the spotlight had been a nightmare. She knew how Princess Diana must have felt. I knew she was going to die. Thats been clear for years. It was like watching a movie made for perverts, where people paid, and watched, and continued to watch even though it was quite clear she had to die. Diana had been bullied to death. Bullied by whom? The press, the presss readers, the whole totalitarian machine that we call a democracy. Had I read Milan Kundera? – she had the cutting somewhere – where he said that privacy was the value we must defend above all others. The daily life of a celebrity in the West was like the daily lives of everyone in what was the East, (the Iron Curtain countries). Hence her use of the word totalitarian.
As she talked, she hunted in the knapsack she always carries – a knapsack full of pamphlets, books and newspaper cuttings. She found the Kundera. Famous people, he had written, have become like a public resource like sewer systems. She read it out to me and when shed done she sat back and half-closed her eyes: another tiring job well done.