My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Julie Christie (1941): The Cocteau Girl

152 Julie Christie The Cocteau Girl Cyrus Cassells The super-astute film critic Pauline Kael once described Julie Christie as having “the profile of a Cocteau drawing—tawdryclassical .” Bull’s-eye! As a Francophile teen in love with Cocteau’s sleight-of-hand films and sensuous drawings, Kael’s savvy description deepened my fascination with Christie, the androgynous, sunny beauty who seemed to embody the freewheeling, never-bebored spirit of the ’60s. My first Oscar broadcast was in 1966, and, as an eight-year-old, I was definitely rooting for Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music, which I thought was the coolest movie I’d ever seen (singing and 153 cavorting kids, gorgeous Austria, edelweiss, a dimpled Nazi!). My adored musical won Best Picture, but my nun-fresh, puppetslinging Julie lost, and was supplanted by another more intriguing Julie: Who was that “smashing” girl in the gold miniskirt kissing her Oscar? In my hometown, we had twin drive-in theaters that opposed each other. My family’s bulky blue station wagon featured a plump seat that faced backwards; I recall, on more than one occasion, being hauled off to see innocuous family fare, and sneaking backward glances at the shamelessly grand Doctor Zhivago, which was ablaze on the screen behind me: Look! There’s that beautiful blonde again—amid the snow and show-stopping daffodils! The trio of films that garnered Christie fame—Darling, Billy Liar, and Zhivago—weren’t considered kiddie-friendly at all, so it took close to a decade for me to catch up with Christie the actress. I first became enthralled with her as the frizzy-haired, opiumsmoking Cockney madam in Robert Altman’s innovative Western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, where Christie proved amazingly adept at turning her beauty off and on at will; then as the tuba-blowing “kook” in Petulia; as the sometimes coarse, sometimes rueful, dazzlingly sexy Jackie Shawn in the libidinous romp Shampoo; as the grieving mother of a drowned child in the splintered, unnerving, coolly erotic gothic thriller Don’t Look Now; and then finally as the petulant, conniving, upwardly mobile model Diana Scott in her Oscar-winning role in Darling (which now feels, in an eerie way, like a jazzy, premonitory variation on the life of Princess Diana!) If you relish Christie’s films, you can’t help but notice how often her directors luxuriate in close-ups of Christie’s compelling, Cocteau-drawn mask; Tom Courtenay, her stalwart costar in Zhivago and Billy Liar, remembers being “god-smacked” by that “extraordinary face” the first time Christie came in to audition. It’s all too easy to trance out on Julie’s legendary good looks and ignore her artist’s supple wizardry at conveying moods. Julie Christie has grown into much more than the ’60s life-force girl who burst onto the screen, skipping and swinging her purse, as she breezed Julie Christie 154 past city storefronts in Billy Liar. She’s evolved into a great actress—nuanced, delicately fearless, spontaneous, on the mark. I was surprised at the emotional surge I felt recently as I watched her accept the Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance in Away from Her: Christie’s kudos from her acting peers, as well her recent lion’s share of critical awards, affirmed my longtime faith in her gifts as an actress, not just an iconic It-Girl. Her immensely moving work in Away from Her, as a gallant, sophisticated Canadian woman succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease—a role comparable to that of Mary Tyrone in O’Neill’s masterly Long Day’s Journey into Night—is the crowning achievement of a fascinating career. Julie Christie makes for a curious, maverick diva in that the essence of her style is unfettered naturalism and empathy. In the commentary on Billy Liar, she’s proud that her ebullient, tousledhair Liz was perhaps the first young woman to appear in mainstream movies without the teased and coiffed, heavily made-up look that made starlets appear immaculate even when “they emerged from the Amazon jungle!” The down-to-earth Christie eschews conventional notions of glamour, but nevertheless remains mysteriously charismatic, stunning. There’s a small moment I’ve always loved in Doctor Zhivago, when Christie as Lara wakes and finds a poem with her name above the title; as she reads, her poet-lover Zhivago starts to interrupt , but she suspends her right hand...