Julie Frances Christie

She is a British actress and sex symbol. A pop icon of the "swinging London" era of the 1960s, she has won the Academy, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Julie Christie was born in 1941 in Singlijan Tea Estate, 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 father ran the tea plantation where Christie grew up, and her mother was a painter from Hove. Christie has a brother and 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. She then attended 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 the early 1960s, Christie dated actor Terence Stamp. She became engaged to Don Bessant, a lithographer and art teacher, in 1965, before dating actor Warren Beatty (1967-1974). She is best friends with his sister Shirley MacLaine. 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 and Reprieve.

She was ranked 9th in FHM magazine's "100 sexiest women of all time" and in 2009 Christie (aged 68) was ranked 2nd "Sexiest Women In The World" in the Hungarian magazine Periodika.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Christie