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Julie Christie… a sort of fabrication - actress - part 2 - Interview
Interview, March, 1997 by Graham Fuller
GF: Did you leave America because you were disillusioned with Hollywood?
JC: No. To be honest, most of the time I spent in America I was having a love affair with some American or other. I was just passing through but I stayed because of these chaps. So when one relationship was breaking up very unhappily, and there didn't seem to be another one around the corner, I went back to England. I'd never been content in America.
GF: Did you experience culture shock back in Britain?
JC: It was a terrific shock. I wrote reams of pages about it. Having lived in Beverly Hills, I was very grateful to come home and see old women looking like old women, with little coats on and shopping bags, instead of being made-up, jeweled, and label-dressed. Mind you, as I say it, I know I'm probably not going to let my hair go gray and walk around with a shopping trolley. [laughs]
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GF: I can't imagine it.
JC: And this is funny - I started noticing how stained the pavements are in London. The pavements in Beverly Hills aren't used; in London, they're used for everything. It doesn't matter how much they're cleaned, they still reflect light. They're not dirty, just stained. I was also surprised to see people in England wearing clothes that didn't look as if they'd just come from the dry cleaners but looked as if they might have been worn for more than one day. And I was pleased that we still had shops instead of supermarkets. What I'm saying is, I just loved being back. A big part of that was - I don't know if it's still true - that in England at that time you could get reasonably fair news coverage of, for instance, the situation in Israel, which you just couldn't get in America, where the Palestinians were demonized and you'd just get the Israeli point of view. There was a consciousness of what was going on in the world, and I realized that I'd been living in a vacuum in America. So that's the kind of culture shock I got. Of course, everybody I knew lived much more simply then, and there didn't seem to be such a huge gap between rich and poor, which there is now, since Thatcher.
GF: When you did Heat and Dust [1983], it took you back to India, where, of course, you were born. Did that resonate with you?
JC: I haven't got a memory, so there was very little resonance. I can only say I was instantly familiar with it. Despite all the problems we endured, I loved it.
GF: Why do you think you blot out so much?
JC: I have no idea. I'd like to find out. I think maybe one of the reasons - and this is totally simplistic - is that my parents sent me away from India to [school in] England when I was six years old. Suddenly, there were no servants, it was cold, I couldn't walk around barefoot. The little things that made up the fabric of the first six years of my life were suddenly ripped away, and, of course, I didn't have anyone around me who loved me. Not one single person. And the people who did love me and whom I relied on were absent, including my ayah - my Indian nanny. The English in India used to hire tribal girls as nannies and they would bond very deeply with their little white charges. My ayah's daughters - my sisters - have told me that when I was sent to England, it was extremely agonizing for both her and me. So I think that could explain why I have so few memories. Children can only take so much and they deal with it however they can.
