The great frustration of Julie Christie's life is that her face has often got in the way of things she knows to be more important. Today is no exception. She is in Belfast, where her new film is being shown at the city's film festival, and typically embarrassed that a picture of her has pushed Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley's historic meeting off the front pages of the morning paper. No Oscar-winning film star has ever been more sceptical about limelight. Warren Beatty, who met her in 1965, and with whom she formed Hollywood's most glamorous couple for seven on and off years described her as 'the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person I had ever known'. Four decades later, indelible traces of both attributes persist.
It is the combination of those qualities, and her effort to overcome each of them, that also make Christie the most mesmerising of screen presences. Her new film, Away From Her, beautifully directed by her 27-year-old friend, the actress Sarah Polley, tells the story of a woman observing her life disappear, as Alzheimer's removes her past. It seems a perfect vehicle, among other things, for Christie's ambivalence toward her own magnetism. She has always wanted to be there and not there.
Polley adapted the film from a story by the Canadian writer Alice Munro, 'The Bear Came over the Mountain'. She first read it in the New Yorker on a plane back from Iceland, where she had been filming with Christie in 2001. She thought the story helped her to make sense of the actress; saw Christie's face in it. That stayed with her, and once Polley had written the script, she spent a year tying to persuade Christie to take the role. In the end, Christie agreed, she says, 'because Sarah is this extraordinary talent, and I did not want anyone else to have the experience of working with her on her first movie'.
There are a couple of lines in Munro's story that Away From Her seems to grow out of. They are spoken of Christie's character, Fiona, by her husband whose fate is to watch his wife move into a care home, forget their 40-year marriage and fall in love with a fellow patient. He looks for signs of the woman he loves in her face: 'Very few women kept their beauty whole, though shadowy, as Fiona had done. And perhaps that wasn't even true. Perhaps to get that impression you had to have known a woman when she was young.'
The thing about Christie's face, as Polley's camera dwells on it, is that everyone has known it young, as Lara in Dr Zhivago and Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd and Liz in Billy Liar. She dislikes being interviewed, she tells me, in part because she has noticed how 'people are cross somehow, underneath, that I am not the person that I was. They feel like I am letting them down in some way. I sometimes feel they dislike me for appearing with all my lines and wrinkles. As a culture we seem unable to embrace change in people without being harsh about it...'
We meet at the appointed hour in the bar of Malmaison, near Belfast's new waterfront. The hotel is decorated in what might be called infernal chic - our lunch is in a pitch-black dining room in front of a wide, eye-level fireplace with licking flames - which, given that interviews are Christie's idea of hell, seems appropriate. She makes a last request before I turn on my tape recorder: 'I hope this isn't going to be another interview in which under instruction from your editor you interrogate me for an hour about whether I have had a facelift.' (She once admitted to minor work on her famous jawline.)
You see straight away why she finds interviews a trial. Unlike almost every other actor I have met, Christie seems to find it almost impossible to dissemble on cue, and so she is happiest talking about almost anything but herself. At every opportunity she diverts our conversation towards extraordinary rendition, or the situation in Iran, or the rise of China, with an enthusiasm and curiosity that seems not so much a tactic as a temperamental necessity.
I wonder why she was reluctant to take the role in Polley's film, and she suggests that generally speaking she is happier doing almost anything but making films these days. It is not the work itself, but the way the project takes over her life after it is finished. 'I think celebrity is the curse of modern life, or at least advertising, which it is a branch of. And I don't like being part of something dirty. I know that sounds prissy. But I talk to some young stars and say: why do you do all these publicity things? They say they have signed up to it. I suppose I have never wanted to sign up.'
She talks of the shadow life that exists in her cuttings file, as something 'disgusting' to her, 'like having chewing gum in your hair always'. It struck her first when she made Far From the Madding Crowd. 'I was staying with a friend, and this journalist came to see me, and my friend kindly made a plate of sandwiches for us, and the journalist wrote: "Christie's maid came in with sandwiches" in an attempt to show I was being pampered. I just thought: how very cruel.' A lot of her life since then, and certainly since she left Hollywood at the end of the Seventies has been a pretty successful attempt at what she calls 'de-celebritisation'.
I suggest that she perhaps got more intrusiveness because she always seemed so exposed on film. She cemented this reputation most famously, of course, in her great love scene with Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now. 'Well,' she suggests, 'I wanted always to get to that place as an actress where there are no borders or boundaries.' People have sometimes expected comparable candour in real life, where boundaries are crucial to her.
In 1967 Time magazine declared that 'what Julie Christie wears has more real impact on fashion than all the clothes of the 10 Best-Dressed women combined'; hers was routinely known as the face of the decade, but it never felt quite like that from inside.
'Even in the Sixties, especially then, I was always deeply anxious,' she says. 'I never felt that I was cool enough, or that I was dressed right. Silly things. I was fearful. I did all the things you do, it wasn't that I didn't try lots of things. But I could never quite get away from this anxiety all the time.'
Did drugs help, or make things worse?
'Well they made me more anxious when I had a bad trip ... The thing about all that hedonism was you could be so beautifully committed to non-materialism, and if you took lots of drugs and had a great time as well then so be it.'
The anxiety and the desire to escape it were partly, she suggests, rooted in her childhood. Christie grew up during the war in India, in Assam, on a tea plantation that her father ran. This life was cut short at the age of six when her parents sent her back to England to go to a convent school and to live with a foster mother. The shock of that transition has never quite left her. She hated the school, hated being away from her mother. She was eventually expelled from her Catholic secondary school for telling a rude joke. When she won her Oscar at the age of 24 for her role in John Schlesinger's Sixties morality film Darling, in which she played a model, the bed-hopping barefoot 'Happiness girl', she described going up to collect the award as like being once again called up in front of the whole school to explain herself.
She did not see her father much after she left India, her parents separated, he died relatively young, and her mother came home to Britain to live in rural Wales when Christie was in her early teens. Her childhood had made her a compulsive letter writer and she has recently been going through their correspondence. It takes in Christie's first visits to America, initially with the Royal Shakespeare Company, subsequently as a film star. 'In one letter I wrote to my mother saying America was like being in a garden of very little sweet children who don't know anything at all but are very nice to you,' she says, laughing.
Her mother didn't quite approve, felt that her daughter being an actress was embarrassing. 'And she was right,' she says, 'it is.' But it was also her education ('though of course most people just thought I was a bit of fluff'). She wanted to make films in Europe (she worked on Fahrenheit 451 with Truffaut) but 'love, a succession of men, boyfriends' kept her in America. Apart from Beatty these men included Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland, among others.
Each of the men changed her in different ways, she suggests, but Beatty (her co-star in Shampoo, and McCabe & Mrs Miller) affected her the most. 'He gave me a political perspective, which I am very grateful for. I loved the way, say, that he would go to baseball matches and stand up in the interval and talk about getting rid of guns. He would be this little tiny figure in this big baseball stadium, and I would be looking down at him, I thought he was wonderfully courageous for doing that.' (Beatty returned this compliment by dedicating his political labour of love, Reds, 'To Jules'.)
By the end, though, the late Seventies, she had to escape. 'I thought I was going mad there. You do fall into LA, you slip into it.' The closest thing she had to home lay in the remembered magic of the few summers she had shared with her mother in Wales when she first returned from India. So she bought a basic farm near Montgomery in north Wales, and invited some friends to stay with her, which is how she has lived most of her life since.
A lot of her sense of purpose has come from a desire 'to keep faith in protesting what you believe to be wrong'; the causes to which she has devoted a good deal of her life since have included campaigns against nuclear waste and for animal rights. She is currently most involved working with the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture. Helen Bamber, its founder, is her inspiration. 'If people do nothing else they should read Helen's book.'
Her political work - 'conferences, demonstrations, fund-raising, whatever' - brings her to London, where she has a house she also shares with friends in the East End. Otherwise she likes to be in Wales. 'I have always lived in group situations that are not quite communal,' she says. 'I think it is important to cook on your own, for example, but I have always shared the place with friends. People who have come and gone and had children and so on. I have a family with three children there at the moment,' she won't name names - 'You have to have that in the country, you have to share responsibility for animals and houses and kids.'
These surrogate families, mostly writers and artists and film-makers, have compensated any desire that Christie might have had for a family of her own. She was always too independent for that, she suggests, or in any case never wanted to be part of a conventional relationship (just as she had never really been part of one as a child). Likewise, she says, perhaps scarred by her experiences with Beatty, she has 'never been keen on the idea of living with one person all the time, though,' and she smiles, 'there are times these days when I think it would be rather delightful.'
The fixed point in her life since she returned from the States for good has been the Guardian investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who is with her in Belfast; they were friends to start with and have never lived together properly, she says, but it has been 'a wonderful relationship. We have got closer and closer over the years, it's a bit like in the film [Away From Her]; now we just have to hope that neither of us goes bananas.'
I have half a sense that she worries about this latter prospect. She won't talk about it, for her usual reason: it will become a 'fact' about her. She spoke once on American public radio about the comedy of getting older and not being able to retain your lines, which the Sunday Times spun into a story in which a neurologist was wheeled out to suggest that Christie suffered from a rare memory disorder. The same article also gave Christie a son called Luke, who played in a rock band. She wrote a sharp letter in reply which suggested that her condition must be worse than she thought, since she had completely forgotten that she had a child.
The film has inevitably made her focus on ageing, as if she is ever allowed to forget it. It must be weird, I suggest, to see the famous faces of friends now old, as weird as it is to look in the mirror?
She smiles. 'In the Sixties you did not know you were going to get older. But you do and you are. People become much dearer. When I see someone like Warren, with his four kids, there is that wonderful recognition of the life we have led. And a terrific sense of mortality, which is like a blessing almost: you suddenly realise what life is about.' She quotes something that her director, Sarah Polley, has said: 'Memory is the way you make sense of love.'
I wonder which particular moments her own memory clings most readily to?
'Well, they nearly always involve a chap and nature,' she says briskly. 'I'm not going into detail but there is a strong sense of sexuality, always, because that is the life force, the thing that memory retains. There are quite a few of those moments in my head, anyway...' I fear just for an instant Christie might start to cry when she says this, but she laughs loudly instead.
I ask if she can see herself working as long as she possibly can, but she doubts that the scripts or the directors will be there for her: 'It is still a very male world.' Occasionally she comes across something she would like to play; there was a character in a Marguerite Duras novel she was reading recently. 'Mostly, these days,' she says, 'I'm interested only in playing people who have lost their marbles. I did a film, based on a book by William Trevor [Fools of Fortune], in which I went crazy. I really enjoyed that. It is so nice to be irrational and to act irrationally and really not to do what is expected of you at all.'
I start to venture a clunky theory that all her life might be explained by this kind of impulse...
'Oh fuck, probably,' she says, grinning, and pulls on her red boots, which she has taken off under the table, old habits die hard, and suggests she desperately needs a smoke outside: 'I think we have been staring at these flames long enough, don't you?'
Life story
Born Julie Frances Christie on 14 April 1941 in Assam, India, to English parents who ran a tea plantation.
Education Sent to convent in England but was expelled for telling a rude joke. Studied in Paris and at London's Central School of Speech and Drama.
Career Debuted in BBC sci-fi series A for Andromeda. After a couple of comedy roles she made an impact as Liz in John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963), and another Schlesinger film, Darling (1965), won her an Oscar for best actress (and a Bafta). Was Oscar-nominated for McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) and Afterglow (1997).
On marriage 'I don't see any reason for getting married unless you're religious, which I'm not.'
Philip French's favourite Julie Christie films
Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963) The point at which the grittily realistic British New Wave started to flow south arrived the moment Julie Christie's Liz swept through a Yorkshire town as a harbinger of Swinging London.
The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1970) The concluding film in Losey's trilogy of literary adaptations with Harold Pinter. Christie rose to the challenge of playing the upper-middle-class Edwardian woman poisoning the life of the innocent boy who carries love letters between her and her lower-class lover.
McCabe and Mrs Miller (Robert Altman, 1971) In this classic revisionist western, the first of three films in which she co-starred with Warren Beatty, Christie gives her most self-abnegatory performance as a tough, vulnerable cockney madame.
Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973) Roeg photographed Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd and Petulia, then directed her in this dazzling occult thriller set in a wintry Venice and featuring a crucial erotic scene unsurpassed in movie history.
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996) In this much underrated film, Christie more than holds her own in an all-star cast, playing Gertrude as a loving mother in awe of her son, opposite Derek Jacobi's Claudius.
· Away From Her is released on 27 April
