Few film actresses have burst on the scene as dramatically as Julie Christie did in 1965 when she went from a virtual unknown to a superstar, based on the release of “Darling” and “Doctor Zhivago.”
The actress had drawn attention for her beauty and charm in the small role she played as Tom Courtenay’s dream girl in “Billy Liar” (1963), but no one knew what a powerful (and mysterious) screen presence she was about to become, or that 42 years later she would still be a star, competing for a best actress Oscar (for “Away from Her).”
Tonight at the Fairfield Theatre Company, I’m hosting a “Martini and a Movie” screening of “Darling,” the John Schlesinger drama about the manufacturing of celebrities that won Christie the best actress Oscar in March of 1966.
The movie is a rather scathing look at a pretty young thing’s rise from obscurity to tabloid and fashion magazine fame based almost entirely on her face and figure. The movie is rooted in London pop culture of the mid-1960s, that brief period when England became the style center of the whole world, thanks to The Beatles, James Bond, “Tom Jones,” and, yes, Julie Christie.
A woman who could be perceived as the Paris Hilton of her time becomes a more sympathetic figure thanks to Christie’s charisma and natural warmth.
In retrospect, some critics have suggested that the casting of Christie softened the material.
“Either it should have been a more astringently moral film or she should have been a more defiantly amoral person,” Alexander Walker writes in “Hollywood, England” (Harrap), his excellent study of British filmmaking in the 1960s.
“The film caught the compromising, opportunistic infection of the very times it was trying to diagnose. But what it also captured, this time very successfully, was a picture of the compulsive promiscuity, professional as well as sexual, of a figure of the times, the freelance female whose ambition barely outlasts her attention span and who moves from bed to bed on the presumption that fidelity means having only one man at a time,” Walker adds.
“Darling” was a sizeable box-office hit on both sides of the Atlantic and received several Oscar nominations including one for best picture (“The Sound of Music” won in most categories that year).
Nearly everyone connected with the film was launched into the Hollywood stratosphere. Schlesinger would go on to make the ground-breaking “Midnight Cowboy” in 1969 (for which he won an Oscar). Frederic Raphael, who won the best original screenplay Oscar for “Darling,” would go on to write the scripts for the 1967 Audrey Hepburn-Albert Finney classic, “Two for the Road,” and the controversial 1999 Stanley Kubrick swan song, “Eyes Wide Shut.”
And, Julie Christie went on to become one of the most popular (and enduring) stars of her time.
(The free screening of “Darling” is tonight at 7 p.m. at the Fairfield Theatre Company, 70 Sanford St. For more information, call 259-1036 or visit www.fairfieldtheatre.org.)
