Early Life
Christie was born in 1940 at the Singlijan Tea Estate, Chabua, Assam, in what was then British India, the elder child of Rosemary (née Ramsden), a painter, and Francis "Frank" St. John Christie. Her father ran the tea plantation where she was raised. She has a younger brother, Clive, and a (now deceased) older half-sister, June, from her father's relationship with an Indian employee of his plantation. Frank and Rosemary Christie separated when Julie was a child.
She was baptised in the Anglican church and studied as a boarder at the independent Convent of Our Lady school in St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, after being expelled from another convent school for telling a risque joke which reached a wider audience than originally anticipated. After being asked to leave the Convent of Our Lady as well, she later attended Wycombe Court School, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, during which time she lived 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 the all-girls' Wycombe Court School, she played "the Dauphin" in a production of Shaw's Saint Joan. She later studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
Read more about this topic: Julie Christie
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“O that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)