MOVIE STAR'S MALAISE: Wary of celebrity since her first brush with it in the 1960s, actress and reluctant icon Julie Christie was surprised when she recently hit the headlines allegedly suffering from a phantom 'medical syndrome'
In the mid-1960s, I was working on the film Darling. It was my good fortune as an actress to be directed by such an innovative film-maker as John Schlesinger at a time when British film was at its best. Darling, my second film with Schlesinger after Billy Liar, portrayed, perhaps for the first time in British cinema, the modern woman in pursuit of power.
Early in the film, where the heroine, Diana Scott, has begun to be famous as a fashion model, she is shown striding down a London street, past walls draped with large posters of her. Did I know then that I was also at the beginning of my own experience of fame? A random combination of the good luck to work with a director like John Schlesinger and being considered very pretty had suddenly made me famous.
I can't complain - not much, anyway. I certainly enjoyed many of the benefits of fame in terms of a lot of money, chances to go wherever I wanted, and to meet people I would never have known otherwise. I loved film and it opened up the possibility of working with other directors I admired.
I soon discovered some of fame's side effects. I remember going on a holiday to a Greek island with my then boyfriend. We liked hitchhiking between villages but first we had to disembark at a big town. To our dismay, we were met by an army of photographers and the local mayor. So much for anonymous backpacking. I still had to learn that celebrity not only opened up possibilities but also closed some of them. When we finally reached the island where our friend was the schoolmaster, we were followed by troupes of black-clad women and little children down every winding alley. They kept shouting, "Julie Christie! Julie Christie! Julie Christie!" as they pointed at me. How could they have known who I was?
I felt the same sense of unreality when I first saw photos of myself all over the place. The face that stared out at me from newsstands didn't seem like my own. I often did not recognise the words attributed to me in profiles and interviews. The stories in the press grew. In general, I've been very lucky and if the stories were often inaccurate they were usually affectionate and harmless.
Sometimes, I would be having an affair with someone I had never met. Or, bizarrely, playing a charity tennis match with Farrah Fawcett, whom I had also never met - I'm sure she would have beaten me. I never read the articles that supposedly dealt with my relationships but some kind soul would usually let me know about them. Photographers appeared outside the house, and in more unexpected places, and I learned to recognise the patter of running feet, which indicated that someone was about to take a picture as I walked along the street. This, I suppose, was celebrity. Unlike fame, it seemed to have little to do with who you were or what you did. It wasn't under your control. There existed images of you out there, with features added to and subtracted from them randomly. It did not matter that the images were inconsistent. People seemed to accept them unquestioningly.
I went along with some of it, doing an interview here and there, for the small-budget independent films I mostly worked in. Most of the people I worked with did not have at their disposal the millions of dollars spent on publicity by big studios, which now produce the overwhelming majority of the films we hear about and watch. They could just about manage to draw some attention with the "celebrity interview". The actors, wanting to be helpful, inevitably become collaborators with the machinery of publicity that can at any time turn against them.
At the same time, I sometimes hoped to use the interviews to my advantage. I was keen to get in things that interested me and had, I felt, some relevance to the bigger world outside films and my life. But they were rarely included, and more often earned me the description of, as one interview put it, a "wanna-be intellectual". Well, I more or less gave up on interviews and anyway, along with most actresses of my age, I was making fewer films. Certainly, I felt far happier and safer as a middle-aged woman settling into my own life, occasionally venturing out to do the film or play that tempted me.
But it wasn't easy to de-celebritise myself. The myth-making went on. I was a celebrity "recluse" now. I was asked to collaborate on a couple of biographies. I didn't like the idea and asked the writers not to go ahead. But the biographies appeared nevertheless, based largely on press cuttings.
For some years now, I have managed to feel more distant from all that. So it was an old and familiar shock I felt when I recently returned to England after a short stint in America and was bewildered to learn that a photo of me that appeared in Vanity Fair - and caused no comment in America - had become a story in the British press: Actress Has Flattering Picture Taken Shock. Now, most British and American film actors have been featured by leading celebrity photographers in Vanity Fair. I initially resisted the offer to join them. But it comes with the job and I wondered if I was being precious. So I agreed and enjoyed the photo-session with a photographer I like, not knowing I was transgressing some new, unwritten law that women over 60 should not wear low v-necks and should keep their legs covered. Looking at all the other older actresses in that issue of Vanity Fair, I was surprised to see that we had all been made 20 years younger, while the older men were allowed to look like ageing lions. The time and space given to all this in the British press surprised me also because I thought that everyone in the media would know how photos are touched up and retouched.
But there were more surprises in store. In America, I had agreed to do an interview for National Public Radio - reluctantly, as I know how inept I am with radio interviews. I wanted to do something to publicise Hal Hartley's new film, No Such Thing, in which I played a small part and which I am very fond of. As always, I hoped I would be given the chance to talk about something other than myself: the so-called "war on terrorism", for instance. This was clearly naivety on my part, because the interviewer wanted to talk about my bad memory, to which I have often referred over the years in interviews and which I have had all my conscious life.
Still, memory is an interesting business. I have dealt with my bad memory as efficiently as any actor with the same disadvantage does. In fact, I now feel lucky to be one of the few of my generation whose memory is not deteriorating! But it had been so long since I had done an interview that I had forgotten how each word I uttered could have an unexpected spin put upon it, and how once a story, however inaccurate, appears in one newspaper it would appear in dozens of others around the world, unchecked and unchanged, and then swiftly become part of my "fact-file", to be brought up on all future occasions.
This became once more apparent when I saw my alternately comic and frustrating, but always mundane, habits of memory suddenly described in the British newspapers as a "medical condition". A doctor consulted by the press concluded that I had suffered a "trauma to the hippocampus", which sounds like a good name for a heavy-metal band, but I had never heard of it before.
My friends and relatives rang, worried not about my memory that they have always teased me about, but about the weirdly alarmist headlines: "Julie Christie suffers cruel memory loss" and "'I am losing my memory,' says Julie Christie". I didn't say that, of course.
But I could only watch as a few light-hearted remarks on the radio about a bad memory, which I have had all my life and which has grown no better or worse, were turned into some strange illness which I do not have, diagnosed by a doctor I had never met, and transformed by a reporter I have never spoken to into a shock-horror tale.
Intriguingly, the stories which, thanks to the Internet, spread faster than usual, also suggested that I was now staying with my son "Luke, a musician". Only a really bad memory would have made me forget that I had a son. How "Luke" arrived on the scene remains as much of a mystery as my phantom "medical syndrome".
What's much more mysterious of course is how trivial details about unimportant people like myself manage to clog the airwaves. But the culture of celebrity has grown all-pervasive, so that even simply asking why may seem frivolous.
Anyway, London, however wet, looks terrific in the spring. I have a film to do in September in America and doubtless Luke will be working on his new CD. I'll ask him if he can include Memories Are Made Of This on it. Now, where was I?