Argo Online

Mayukh Sen

Over the decades, Julie Christie has gone from being a star in the film world to a mere has-been in cycles, just another name on a list of British actresses – somehow, though, she’s managed to leave a mark each time she’s appeared, managed to remind filmgoers of the face that defined an era. She’s ranged from being a symbol of Swinging London to becoming one of Hollywood’s most enigmatic figures, a recluse. Yet few film actresses have been so loved as her, an India-born, British actress most well-known for her role as Lara in 1965’s epic “Doctor Zhivago” – and, more recently, as a wife plagued by Alzheimer’s in 2007’s “Away From Her”, marking her Oscar-nominated career comeback. Nearly forty-two years before this brilliant return to film, however, Miss Christie won another Best Actress Oscar for her performance in John Schlesinger’s satirical 1965 view of the British fashion industry, “Darling”. In “Darling”, Christie plays Diana Scott, a polarized young model – who, at times, is raw and youthful, while, at others, most vengeful and jealous. The movie cradles us through Diana’s career, her gradual rise to fame, and her graceful, quiet fall, her fade back into the world of obscurity.

Christie commands her character, taking the viewer up and down Diana Scott’s carousel-like moodiness. She’s the main power behind the film. Yet even the most skilled of performers requires an intelligent, witty script to support her, something Christie clearly has in her tow – Frederic Raphael’s Oscar-winning script is perfectly satirical. Each character is layered – each one is, to a certain degree, intelligent, manipulative in his or her own right. And at the same time, each character’s also been victimized, been manipulated by the industry. Raphael shows us how easy, how simple it was for even the smartest of people to come out of the industry feeling as if they’d been cheated, tricked by materialism they devote their lives to.

Quite obviously, though, Christie’s character is the most complex, carefully-crafted one. Raphael paints her as a child – at times, she’s naïve and amoral to the point that she’s clueless, almost blind in her love for attention. At other times, though, she embodies this other side of a child – she’s too smart for her own good, too cunning and too sly. Christie’s highly nuanced performance brings a new level of sophistication to the “sleaze who sleeps her way to the top” archetype that Hollywood was all too used to by the sixties.

Yet what makes this performance so lasting, so surprising even forty years later, is that Julie Christie’s turned out to be the exact opposite of Diana Scott. Christie has rarely ever basked in her fame. After a few successful films in the 1970’s, namely Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (for which she was, again, nominated for an Oscar) and lover Warren Beatty’s “Shampoo”, Christie became a recluse, withdrawing herself from Hollywood. Though she returned to films in 1997, scoring another Oscar nod for her turn in “Afterglow”, Christie has remained selective about what films she acts in, stating her contempt for Hollywood’s obsession with glamour. She agreed to act in “Away from Her” only after repeated persuasion from director Sarah Polley; initially, Christie refused. Perhaps it’s Diana Scott, the very character she played so masterfully in 1965, who taught and showed Miss Julie Christie the downsides of such an industry.

“Darling” can be rented on Netflix or any similar site. In 1965, it was awarded three Oscars – Best Actress (Julie Christie), Best Costume Design (Julie Harris), and Best Original Screenplay (Frederic Raphael). It was nominated for two more – Best Director (John Schlesinger) and Best Picture – yet lost out to “The Sound of Music”.