Happy Birthday Julie Christie

I've had the good fortune to interview Julie Christie twice. Once for Premiere, to coincide with the release of Afterglow, and once for a documentary. For the former I drove to Oxford where she was starring in a play and spent a very lovely couple of hours with her. Back then, she didn't give very many interviews (not that she's Mrs Ubiquitous now), and I had spent the previous week watching every film of hers I could get my hands on — Darling, Billy Liar, Dr Zhivago, Shampoo etc — as part of my research, as well as the best part of a day at the BFI library reading every article I could find on her dating back to the 1960s, virtually every one of which talked about her not having married (although she is now) or having children. And so when I met her, the first thing I told her was I wasn't going to ask her about either subject and that seemed to break the ice. I remember asking her about the aging process and how she felt about it, and she offered up that she'd had a little surgery, on her chin. (I hadn't been fishing, I assumed she'd had nothing done.) For years after, every time there was a piece of plastic surgery in a British newspaper, that Christie quote would be trotted out.