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 has a brother, Clive, and an older half-sister, June from her father’s relationship with an Indian woman, who worked as a tea picker on his plantation. 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, from which she was later expelled. 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. Schlesinger directed her in her breakthrough role, as the amoral model Diana Scott in Darling, a role which the producers originally offered to Shirley MacLaine. 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 François 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 smaller films such as Robert Altman’s postmodern western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), with Warren Beatty, where her role as a brothel ‘madam’ gained her a second Best Actress Oscar nomination, The Go-Between (again co-starring Alan Bates, 1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), Shampoo (1975), Altman’s classic Nashville (also 1975, in an amusing cameo as herself opposite Karen Black and Henry Gibson), Demon Seed (1977), and Heaven Can Wait (1978), again with Beatty. She had a major supporting role in Sidney Lumet’s Power (1986), but generally avoided appearances in large budget films and appeared in non-mainstream films.