Julie Christie is one of the shining lights of the silver screen – so why is she so overlooked?

Ahead of the rerelease of 1983 drama ‘Heat and Dust’, Geoffrey Macnab looks at how the Oscar-winning actor slipped through the cracks of Hollywood appreciation

Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in David Lean's classic 'Dr Zhivago'

It’s strange that the 80th birthday of Julie Christie last month passed with so little fanfare. While her contemporaries like Judi Dench, Charlotte Rampling, and Maggie Smith still appear on magazine covers and are written about regularly in the press, nobody pays much attention to Christie. If Michael Caine narrates documentaries about the Swinging Sixties or tributes are paid to directors Christie has worked with like David Lean, Joseph Losey, Sally Potter or Robert Altman, she is either left out altogether or mentioned in the most cursory fashion. It somehow seems to have been overlooked that she is one of the biggest stars that British cinema has produced in the past 50 years.

There are plenty of anecdotes about passers-by in Manhattan suddenly catching a glimpse of Greta Garbo crossing the road, walking in Central Park or shopping for groceries after the legendary Swede retired from the screen. Garbo was living anonymously in New York. She had the same aversion to publicity as Christie but she was still spotted regularly.

Unlike Garbo, Christie hasn’t retired. Her screen career had already slowed down by the 1990s when that of Dench took off. Since then, she hasn’t appeared in Bond films, done comedies set in far-flung hotels, or played dotty dowager duchesses in country house dramas. She may now be what The New York Times described as “a reluctant actress”, but she is still working and won multiple awards for her performance as the wife with Alzheimer’s, losing her memory and her identity, in Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (2007). She also recently narrated Isabel Coixet’s satirical drama The Bookshop (2018).