Julie Christie

Julie Frances Christie (born 14 April 1941) is the British actress who played Emma du Maurier, mother of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies in the film Finding Neverland. A pop icon of the "swinging London" era of the 1960s, she 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 and Frank St. John Christie. Christie's father ran the tea plantation around which Christie grew up, and her mother was a painter from Hove. Christie had a brother, as well as a half-sibling from her father's affair with an Indian mistress. Christie's parents separated during her childhood. She was baptized in the Anglican church, and studied as a boarder at the independent Convent of Our Lady School in St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, from which she was later expelled, and then at the independent 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 Saint 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, A for Andromeda.

In November 2007, aged 66, Christie discreetly married her long-time partner (since 1979), The Guardian journalist Duncan Campbell. It was her first marriage and the wedding surprised many as Christie had long insisted for many years that marriage was not an option for her. She has owned a farm in Montgomeryshire, Wales, since the late 1970s, where she spends most of her time. She is active in various causes, including animal rights, environmental protection, the anti-nuclear power movement and is also a Patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.