Why Christie doesn’t miss Hollywood

Julie Christie may be up for an Academy Award, says David Jenkins in the London Telegraph, but she has no use for Hollywood. In the 1960s and ’70s, Christie’s roles in such films as Dr. Zhivago and McCabe & Mrs. Miller—to say nothing of her love affair with Warren Beatty—made her a Hollywood icon. But she returned to London in 1978 and never looked back. In the ensuing years, Christie, 66, has appeared in several small, quirky movies, but she has studiously avoided the major studio blockbusters. “On the whole, they’re a load of rubbish,” she said. “And you think, What is this doing to human beings who are watching it?” Instead, she’s been quite content to spend most of her time at her farm in Wales, where she has been active in the fight against global warming while striving to live an ecologically correct life. She walks or bicycles as much as possible, and even resorted to cutting up newspapers to serve as toilet paper, until her friends complained. “They didn’t like getting ink on their bottoms,’’ she says. Now that Christie’s been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role as an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Away From Her, she’s been granting press interviews and remembering why she left the Hollywood scene in the first place. “It’s boring, because here we are, talking about me, and it really is ridiculous filling papers with some person’s meaningless thoughts. I always felt that, and I’ve fallen into it again.”

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