Career Is a Travelogue to Actress Julie Christie

Julie Christie doesn’t make many films these days and rarely sees her old movies.

She was thrilled to work with such directors as John Schlesinger and Sir David Lean and amazed she had the courage to arrive on the set each day. But don’t expect her to recite dialogue from those movies.

Now 49, and feeling much calmer, the Academy Award winner and icon of 1960s “Swinging London” prefers to think of the locations where she made the films. There’s India, the setting for “Heat and Dust.” Canada, where she made “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” Ireland, which provided Christie with happy memories of the recent “Fools of Fortune.”

“The Irish are the most generous people, the most wonderful people,” she said. A children’s birthday celebration goes on in another room of a friend’s Manhattan apartment where Christie stays when she’s in town.

“It makes you happy, the touches of kindness that you get every single day. It makes you happy to be there because people are so extraordinarily nice. It sounds patronizing, doesn’t it? The Irish have an incredibly nice nature, and they haven’t got an anti-English bias, though they have every right to.”

She lived for a year in Paris and established herself in films in 1963 with a brief appearance in Schlesinger’s “Billy Liar.” Christie topped it two years later by winning a best actress Oscar for “Darling,” playing the shallow, free-spirited London model who tells her life story to a reporter for a woman’s magazine.

“You just think they made a terrible mistake,” she said of the Academy Award. “You feel terrible because you can’t believe it’s happening. You’re just thinking, ‘What am I doing there? What the hell am I doing there?’

“For a long time I didn’t put it anywhere; a friend of mine had it. I was too embarrassed by it. What a stupid cow I was! Then I grew up a little bit more and thought, ‘Wonderful, look what I’ve got,’ ” she said.