Julie Christie is a British actress. She was a pop icon of the "swinging London" era of the 1960s, and has won the Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Christie was born in Chabua, Assam, India, then part of the British Empire, the first of two children of Rosemary (née Ramsden) and Frank St. John Christie. Christie's mother was a Welsh-born painter and childhood friend of actor Richard Burton, while Christie's father ran the tea plantation around which Christie grew up. Christie's parents separated during her childhood. She was baptized in the Anglican church, and studied as a boarder at Convent of Our Lady School in St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, (from which she was later expelled), and then at Wycombe Court School in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, also living with a foster mother from the age of six. After her parents' divorce, Christie spent time with her mother in rural Wales. As a teenager at Wycombe Court School, she played the role of the Dauphin in a school production of George Bernard Shaw's "St. Joan". She later studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama before getting her big break in 1961 in a science fiction series on BBC television, entitled A for Andromeda.

Christie's first major film role was in The Fast Lady, a 1962 romantic comedy. Her breakout role was as Liz, the friend and would-be lover of the eponymous Billy Liar played by Tom Courtenay in the 1963 film directed by John Schlesinger. Schlesinger, who only cast Christie after another actress dropped out of his film, directed her in her breakthrough role, as the amoral model Diana Scott in Darling (1965), a role which the producers originally offered to Shirley MacLaine. Though virtually unknown before Darling, Christie ended the year 1965 by appearing as Lara Antipova in David Lean's adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (1965), which was one of the all-time box office hits, and as Daisy Battles in Young Cassidy the John Ford-Jack Cardiff directed biopic of Irish playwright Sean O'Casey. In 1966, the 25-year-old Christie was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role when she played a double role in Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and won the Academy Award for Best Actress and BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Darling. Later, she played Thomas Hardy's heroine Bathsheba Everdene in Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and the lead character, Petulia Danner, (opposite George C. Scott) in Richard Lester's Petulia (1968).

In the 1970s, Christie starred in such films as Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) (her second Best Actress Oscar nomination), The Go-Between (1971), Don't Look Now (1973), Shampoo (1975), Altman's classic Nashville (1975), Demon Seed (1977), and Heaven Can Wait (1978). She moved to Hollywood during the decade, where she had a high-profile (1967-1974), but intermittent relationship with actor Warren Beatty who described her as "the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person I had ever known".

Following the end of the relationship, she returned to the United Kingdom, where she lived on a farm in Wales. Never a prolific actress, even at the height of her fame in the 1960s, Christie made fewer and fewer films in the 1980s. She had a major supporting role in Sidney Lumet's Power (1986), but other than that, she avoided appearances in large budget films and appeared in riskier fare.

Christie has turned down many leading roles in films such as They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Anne of the Thousand Days, The Greek Tycoon and American Gigolo.

Christie made a comeback with her appearance as Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996). Despite her training, it was her first-ever venture into Shakespeare. That same year, she played the role of Queen Aislinn in Dragonheart She next starred as the unhappy wife in Alan Rudolph's domestic comedy-drama Afterglow (1997). Critics were delighted with her performance, for which she received her third Oscar nomination. Since then, Christie has appeared mostly in small roles in British and American films.

Christie made a brief appearance in the third Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), playing Madame Rosmerta. That same year, she also appeared in two other high-profile films: Wolfgang Petersen's Troy, and Marc Forster's Finding Neverland, in which she played Kate Winslet's mother. The latter performance earned Christie a BAFTA nomination as supporting actress in film.

Christie portrayed the female lead in Away From Her, a film about a long-married Canadian couple coping with the wife's Alzheimer's disease. Based on the Alice Munro short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain", the movie is the first feature film directed by Christie's sometime co-star, Canadian actress Sarah Polley On December 5, 2007, Christie won the Best Actress Award from the National Board of Review for her performance in Away From Her. She also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role - Motion Picture, and the Genie Award for Best Actress for the same film. On January 22, 2008, Christie received her fourth Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for the 80th Academy Awards.