A Soul of Discretion

Julie Christie stars in Alan Rudolph’s new film “Afterglow,” in which she plays a retired B-movie star who lives in Montreal with her husband (Nick Nolte), a handyman especially handy with his female clientele. His wife spends her days watching her old films, which were obviously awful black-and-white costume dramas (glimpsed in wonderful re-creations for the movie).

The very unretired Julie Christie and I met for iced tea and mineral water in the garden of the Chateau Marmont, with the roaring flow of Sunset Boulevard traffic as a soundtrack. It astonished us both to remember that we had our first conversation in Birmingham, England, more than 30 years ago.

She was then 22, working with the Birmingham Repertory Company for about $48 a week, living in a boardinghouse in suburban Edgbaston in a room papered with posters of film stars and with a kitten for company. She was playing an old farce, “Thark,” at night and rehearsing Brecht by day.

She had already made three films: a silly action comedy called “Crooks Anonymous”; “The Fast Lady,” an attempt to duplicate the success of “Genevieve” with an antique locomotive instead of a classic automobile; and “Billy Liar,” which was about to be released and which, it was entirely clear, would make her a star.

Christie in that John Schlesinger film is, much like she was at that time in life, a free-spirited and enchanting young woman, a hippie with, one suspects, all her worldly goods in a handbag still light enough to swing. Returning home for a visit, she saunters down the main drag of the fictional provincial city of Stradhoughton, swinging that handbag, stopping traffic and the audience’s breath. It was a dazzling entrance, and although she is on screen hardly a quarter of the film, her presence is felt throughout.

Christie was not long for Birmingham, because “Billy Liar” became an international success. Then came Schlesinger’s “Darling,” for which she won an Academy Award, David Lean’s “Dr. Zhivago,” Francois Truffaut’s “Fahrenheit 451” and “Far From the Madding Crowd,” again with Schlesinger directing.

Yet her biography is, by her own firm choices, anything but an eager upward thrust toward fame, fortune, an entourage and all the trappings of celebrity. From the beginning, it has been refreshingly clear that insofar as her art would allow it, Christie, now 56, was going to remain a private person, making choices not because of the salary (she must be the despair of agents) but on the basis of the material and, even more, of the director.

“I never thought I had a career,” she said the other afternoon, “never thought of it as a career. There was never any plan; there was no ambition. It was just a question of me defending myself against stuff which I thought was basically dishonest. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this back then; it’s just that I’ve obviously had time to think about it. If I just boiled everything down to the minimum, it would be, ‘I will work if I admire the director’s work. I can’t go wrong there.’

“I can make bad films,” she says. “Good directors can make bad films--that’s easy. But there would be an integrity or honesty somewhere in the film.”

Her other credo has been not to do interviews for a film unless it is one she really admires.

“I like Alan Rudolph very much, and I think it’s an interesting film,” she says of “Afterglow,” which opens Dec. 26. “I think good film work, original film work with integrity, is a very rare thing indeed amongst Americans, excuse me. And therefore I think it is to be cherished, and this is my way of cherishing Alan’s work.”

Christie, who was born on a tea plantation in India, went to England for boarding school (hated it), then to the tough Central School of Drama in London. She had been living much as you imagined the life of her bohemian character in “Billy Liar,” fetching along an air mattress and crashing in the pads of her friends. For a time to make ends meet, she washed bottles at Schweppes, and the aroma of decaying bitter lemon residues put her off the stuff for years. But three films had begun to look like a career.

“Obviously, if you’re an actress--and I’d always wanted to be an actress--you have to want to be well-known in order that your work succeeds,” she says. “What we do has to be seen and appreciated. So you’ve got to want to be famous but not famous as a celebrity. Certainly I didn’t want that, because the celebrity business is incredibly dishonest; it’s just got to do with advertising. It’s a non-human status.”

The worst of it is the death of privacy, a subject to which she has given long thought, and about which she had a couple of clippings in hand.

“I think I was lucky,” she says. “God, I’d hate to be really famous now. The beastly people with their horrible long-distance lenses, making dirt of your normal, developing, evolving life. They seem to be only interested in who’s doing what sexually to whom. That’s the most private thing on Earth, and it’s got nothing to do with anybody else at all.”

She pulled out a yellowing clipping of an article by the exiled Czech novelist Milan Kundera from the London Review of Books of Sept. 21, 1995. “He’s writing about a terrible thing that happened to him under communism in Czechoslovakia.” A private conversation, expressing concern about an emotionally troubled friend, was secretly taped by the police, the information leaked to a newspaper and used as grounds for dismissing the man from his post, as the police wished.

Christie, quoting Kundera, read: “Taking away a person’s privacy is denying that person’s freedom. The respect for the difference between public and private is the indispensable condition for a man to live free. When it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person’s private life, we are entering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual as such.”

The death of Princess Diana was still very much in Christie’s mind.

“I’m in the camp that thinks she was basically hounded to death; it boils down to that,” she says. “I don’t think people are aware how dangerous the situation is.”

Christie drew out another clipping, from a Russian who lived in Moscow under the KGB and was commenting on Diana’s death. Pointing to some underlined phrases, Christie read again: “ ‘In a way a bunch of computer-armed journalists and powerfully lensed paparazzi is more dangerous than the KGB, with its notoriously outdated and poorly functioning equipment. There’s no escape, even in the bedroom, or in Diana’s case, on a lonely ship in the Mediterranean.’

“It’s not going to change,” she says. “There’s too much money to be made. But to me the real people who are responsible are not the press but everybody who pays to read their stuff.”

Her selectivity in choosing films has meant that there are long stretches between them, she says. But she keeps almost continually busy. Christie, who has never married, splits her time between a quiet farm in Wales and a flat in London, the latter her home base when she is working in theater. She recently toured the south of England in “Suzanna Andler,” a play by Marguerite Duras (“Hiroshima, Mon Amour”).

“It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Christie says. “She’s a very, very, very, very extraordinarily strange writer. ‘Strange’ is the right word.”

She has also recently done a Pinter play, and she records many audio books.

“That’s what I like doing best,” she says. “Of course, it’s hard work, but you have the opportunity to go on a search for the author’s voice. Every author has a different voice, and when you’ve got it, the book becomes more alive than it ever does when you’re reading it to yourself.”

But the film work goes on too, and a look at the Christie filmography is not least a mini-anthology of the most individual (if sometimes relatively little-known) filmmakers of these days.

In addition to Schlesinger, Truffaut and Rudolph, she has worked with Richard Lester (“Petulia”), Robert Altman (“McCabe and Mrs. Miller”), Hal Ashby (“Shampoo”), Donald Cammell (“Demon Seed”), Alan Bridges (“The Return of the Soldier”), James Ivory (“Heat and Dust”), Pat O’Connor (“Fools of Fortune”) and Sidney Lumet (“Power”).

Doing “Heat and Dust” in 1982 was a doubly moving experience. It was the first time that she had been back to India since she left to go to school in England, and while she was there, her mother died.

“I’d tried to persuade her to come with me, but she said no, she didn’t want to go back,” Christie says. “It was sort of a strange fateful coincidence, losing my mother in that place where I was born. But I grew very fond of India, to being in that country that seems so strange to a Westerner.”

Among the directors she admires is Kenneth Branagh, for whom she played Queen Gertrude in last year’s “Hamlet.”

“I was terrified,” she says. “At first I was going to say no, because I’d never done Shakespeare. How do I make those lines sound like somebody really meant them? But it came off, and working with Kenneth is heaven. The film is like Errol Flynn. What’s the word? Swashbuckling! He’s made it so entertaining.”

The other admired directors include Maria Luisa Bemberg, an Argentine filmmaker who did not make her first film until she was in her 50s and for whom Christie starred in “Miss Mary,” playing a stern English governess come to work for a rich and powerful Argentine family. It is one of Christie’s favorite roles. Bemberg, she notes sadly, recently died.

Christie says she is a cinephile, and she laments the lack of choice that filmgoers have, with the swollen blockbusters dominating the screens. She remembers her own young days when she and her mates read reviews intensely, then searched the listings to discover where in town a film was playing.

“The selection was bigger, not because there were necessarily more films, but because you took time to research what films there were,” she recalls. “Kids now go to the nearest complex, take a look at what’s playing and make a choice based on adverts and maybe a couple of sound bites.”

As she did in those younger days, Christie adventurously seeks out the off-trail films. During her quick visit to Los Angeles, she saw “Happy Together,” “a Hong Kong film, fantastic, and the chap who made it is [she consults a note] Wong Kar-Wai.” She also enjoyed “Chronicle of a Disappearance,” by Elia Suleiman. “It’s about Palestine and Israel and it’s terribly funny; a diary, funny and observant about human idiosyncrasies.”

Before she left England, she says, she saw “Cheb,” a film by the French-Algerian filmmaker Rashid Boushareb: “Good story, good film, and fascinating because the colonial situation in France is so incredibly complex. Alas, there aren’t very big crowds in any of these cinemas, and you think, ‘What a shame!’ There are other ways of making films, and you learn such a lot. But audiences take no real responsibility for their choice of entertainment, so they keep seeing the same thing over and over again.”

As we talked, what seemed so remarkable and pleasing was that these three decades later, Christie is so little changed from the ebullient, restlessly energetic, enthusiastic, free-spirited and untethered young woman she was when I tracked her whirlwind life in Birmingham. There are hardly discernible lines of wisdom at the marvelous blue eyes. Her flawless complexion is unchanged from the days when the studio publicists were calling a new generation of actresses “English roses”--of whom only she has continued to bloom.

“I like the films I’ve made recently,” she says, “because I’m much better now. I’m more secure in myself as an actress, so I like the films. I was frightened in all that early stuff. I didn’t know what I was doing. Now, of course, I may never do anything again.” She laughs cheerfully. “You never know.”

This seems highly unlikely, but it would be the work she would miss, not the star status she has never sought.