Julie Christie at 85: her 20 best films – ranked!

The Guardian

17-04-2025

There are many things wrong with Kenneth Branagh's galumphing slab of actor-manager Shakespeare, but Christie as Gertrude is not one of them. Her casting might have been conducive to the Oedipal side of the Danish prince's feelings towards his mother – if only the director's bombastic performance had allowed room for it.
A mostly non-Irish cast goes full begorra in this Sean O'Casey biopic, with Christie in a brief but eye-catching turn as a sex worker called Daisy Battles. Jack Cardiff took over directing duties when John Ford fell ill; the results are rambling, but the anti-British riot scenes are ace.
Irish accents again, as Christie reunites with her Don't Look Now co-star Donald Sutherland in 1980s Donegal, playing the widow Helen Cuffe, whose husband was accidentally murdered by the IRA. The pair's old chemistry is still there, and the landscape is splendid. But, alas, when it comes to the men in her life, this unfortunate woman has the worst luck ever.
Three nicely calibrated female performances keep this tasteful adaptation of Rebecca West's 1918 novel afloat. Christie plays a narrow-minded snob who is outraged when her husband (Alan Bates) returns traumatised from the first world war and fails to recognise her, but reconnects instead with a working-class sweetheart (Glenda Jackson) from his youth; Ann-Margret is wonderful as a compassionate cousin.
This is must for anyone studying English literature, though Christie's wilful heroine, all fringe and mascara, smacks more of swinging 60s London than of Thomas Hardy's Wessex; Terence Stamp, Christie's former off-screen boyfriend, sports a Sgt Pepper moustache as Sgt Troy. The best bit is when Alan Bates's sheep fall off a cliff.
John Schlesinger's film about the rise of a good-looking but shallow playgirl epitomises all that was good-looking but shallow about the British new wave. Christie won an Oscar for looking fabulous; Frederic Raphael's misogynistic screenplay also won an Oscar, but now feels suspiciously like a petty act of revenge on some unknown woman who was once mean to him.
The romance between Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Christie as Lara is the least convincing thing about David Lean's spectacular epic, set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution, but shot in sunny Spain. Once again, anachronistic hair and makeup make Christie look more like a Chelsea socialite than a Slavic muse, but it was the box office double whammy of this and Darling, in the same year, that cemented her status as an international star.
The third of Christie's collaborations with Warren Beatty is a breezy remake of Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), with Beatty co-directing himself as a Los Angeles quarterback temporarily returned to Earth in the body of a murdered industrialist. Christie plays the earnest eco-activist who wins his heart.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapted her own Booker-winning novel for the Merchant Ivory team's first big success, part of a 1980s British fad for all things Raj. Christie (born in Assam, north-eastern India) plays an English woman visiting India, but her exploits in the present day are less compelling than the flashbacks to her great-aunt (Greta Scacchi) in the 1920s.
Critics were aghast at the idea of an A-list actor playing a woman forcibly impregnated by a computer in a genre film they considered 'silly'. But Donald Cammell's sci-fi thriller couldn't be more pertinent to 2025, with its themes of domestic abuse and overreaching AI. Christie – rightly – gives it her all.
Christie plays the disapproving mother of widowed Kate Winslet, whose sons inspire JM Barrie (Johnny Depp) to write Peter Pan in this weepie biopic. It's not mentioned here, of course, but Christie's character, who mellows as the film goes on, will soon be grandmother to Daphne du Maurier, who wrote Don't Look Now.
Two couples in Montreal swap partners in Alan Rudolph's stilted sex comedy. Whenever Christie is working her magic on screen as the unhappy wife of handyman Nick Nolte, she makes you forget the contrived situations and clunky dialogue, and sweeps you up into a sublime, deservedly Oscar-nominated performance.
A 12-year-old boy, spending the summer at a school friend's country house, is cajoled into carrying secret messages between his chum's older sister (Christie) and a tenant farmer (Alan Bates). After looking distractingly modern in other lit-flicks such as Doctor Zhivago, Christie is perfectly credible as an Edwardian aristocrat in Joseph Losey's quietly devastating film adaptation of LP Hartley's novel, scripted by Harold Pinter.
Sarah Polley's directing debut, adapted from a story by Alice Munro, gives Christie the best late role of her career, as a married woman showing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. She checks into a nursing home, but her husband wonders if she's exaggerating her memory loss as revenge for his past infidelities. Ambiguous to the end, Christie makes it about more than just dementia, and earned a fourth Oscar nomination.
In the real-life ex-couple's second film together, Beatty plays a philandering Beverly Hills hairdresser who still carries a torch for his former girlfriend. Hal Ashby's satire, set on the eve of Nixon's 1968 election victory, now seems more sad than funny, but Christie, rocking a backless black sequined Jean Varon gown, is a hoot as she drunkenly tries to fellate her ex at a posh dinner party.
The current American trend of banning books makes François Truffaut's charmingly retro-futurist film of Ray Bradbury's novel feel like a wake-up call. Oskar Werner is a colourless leading man, but Christie makes up for it in her dual roles as his hilariously conformist wife and a rebellious neighbour who asks: 'Do you ever read the books you burn?'
John Schlesinger's film of Keith Waterhouse's novel leavens its social realism (shot on the streets of Bradford!) with the fantasies of Billy (Tom Courtenay). In her breakthrough performance, Christie radiates liberation and natural glamour, but miraculously makes Liz not just a dream girl but a fully realised character. She's the girl next door – if the girl next door were a stunner.
Christie dials up the kooky as an unhappily married woman who attaches herself to a San Francisco surgeon played by George C Scott. The drama starts off frothy but becomes progressively downbeat, until you belatedly realise you're watching a tragedy, nudged along by nonlinear inserts now considered more typical of the film's cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg (and editor Antony Gibbs), than its director, Richard Lester.
Nonlinear inserts abound in Roeg's haunting kaleidoscope of a chiller that is also a heartbreaking portrait of a marriage under stress. Christie and Sutherland play bereaved parents who relocate to Venice, where a blind clairvoyant claims to be in contact with their dead daughter. The wife accepts what she can't see, while the husband's scepticism blinds him to the truth until it's too late.
Christie came up with most of her own dialogue as the cockney brothel-keeper in Robert Altman's melancholy revisionist western, set in a muddy mining town. Whether she's tucking into fried eggs, striving to keep her relationship with McCabe (Beatty) on a business footing, or drifting away in an opium daze, this is peak Christie, and one of the funniest, saddest love stories ever filmed.