How many superlatives can you create for Julie Christie?
She was arguably the most beautiful actress of her generation, prompting David Lean to cast her as Lara in Doctor Zhivago.
She was a cultural icon, a living embodiment of the swinging 60s in London. In 1967, Time magazine said of her: “What Julie Christie wears has more real impact on fashion than all the clothes of the ten best-dressed women combined”.
In Don’t Look Now (1973), she appeared to be having unsimulated sex with Donald Sutherland, outraging the puritanical. Some people suggested that they were just acting, and the couple denied that it was real (or coyly side-stepped the question). If it was acting, Sutherland deserved an Oscar, because he certainly convinced me this was real. This guy got paid to have sex with Julie Christie. In my brief and utterly undistinguished acting career, I never got a gig as good as Sutherland got here … not even when I wrote my own material. Writing yourself into such a scene would take the chutzpah of Vincent Gallo.
Finally, in a site dedicated to female nude scenes, can we fail to note that Julie pretty much invented them? After America’s long drought from 1935-1962, a few nude scenes started to appeared in grade Bs, or in obscure foreign films, or from unknown actresses in 1963-64, but Julie was the first distinguished mainstream actress to slake our thirst for nudity when Darling hit American screens in 1965. She demonstrated that nude scenes were not just for bimbos, but could be part of the art of cinema. When she passed that baton, other serious actresses like Helen Mirren ran with it.
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The Railway Station Man came more than a quarter of a century after her nude debut, when Julie was in her 50s, but she was still easy on the eyes (although she avoided close-up nudity), and she still couldn’t escape Donald Sutherland.
She is still with us, but no longer acting. She turned 84 last month.
Julie Christie is certainly one of the greats, but I think Jane Fonda did some nudity first in the ’64 French films La Ronde and Joy House. They were more in the brief flash category, but I assume it got people’s attention at the time. Jane deserves some credit for being the naughty little pioneer that she was.