JULIE CHRISTIE, who came to symbolise an unblemished vision of beauty, has told how acting as an Alzheimer’s victim has forced her to confront the effects of ageing — and once again consider a facelift.

Almost 45 years after half the male population fell for her in Billy Liar, she is to play a woman entering the final stage of her life as a new arrival at a care home.

Although her looks have withstood the passage of time, at 65 she says she can no longer see traces of her younger self. “I know what I look like — then I look in the mirror and don’t look like that person. I think, ‘I don’t know who that is’.” She added that, as a working actress, she was forced to ask herself: “Am I going to look good and beautiful — or allow people to see what happens in old age?”

A decade or so after having “minor” work done, she admitted it was once again on her mind: “I’m tempted every time I look in the mirror. You want to get your face back when you see all the lines around your chin, neck, eyes, mouth and your bloody arms and everything else.”

In her latest film, she plays Fiona, a beautiful and intelligent woman who is entering the in-between world of forgetfulness and confusion as Alzheimer’s takes hold. To the dismay of her husband, she forms an attachment to a fellow sufferer in the care home.

The movie Away From Her, which has its UK premiere this weekend at the Belfast Film Festival, and opens at cinemas in late April, has led her to ponder the problems faced by actresses as they get older.

“We are all dealing with changes in that way, over a certain age,” said Christie in the April issue of Saga magazine, which is for people aged over 50. “We watch our skin change and I don’t think that’s such an easy thing to do.

“As for getting older in this business, everybody is thinking, ‘How am I going to deal with it?’ . . . Such is vanity. I was complaining once about not being employed as an older woman — I was in my forties.”

She shows a flash of the steel she has brought to causes ranging from animal cruelty and arms sales to Nicaragua when recalling a remark by Nic Roeg, who in 1973 directed her in Don’t Look Now.

Roeg, whose direction of the love scene with Donald Sutherland was so convincing that many maintain there was no acting, told her: “Life is about youth. That’s how it’s always been.” Christie, who declines to say whether the sex was real, retorts: “We older people are in such numbers, you can’t reject our presence any more.”

She is one of several Sixties icons forced to confront ageing. While Cher has preserved her looks with the aid of a surgeon, Marianne Faithfull admitted she had resorted to therapy.

Christie now lives in Hackney, east London, and Wales, but in the 1970s she lived with Warren Beatty in Beverly Hills.

“Hollywood was against everything I had been brought up to appreciate. My mother was wise and frugal and quite austere. She was conscious about the environment, even in those days. The world of celebrity didn’t mean a single thing to her and that attitude filtered down to me.”

Her last experience of the Oscars still rankles. She was nominated in 1998 for her role in Afterglow — she had won best actress for her role in the 1965 film Darling — and says the event is little more than “pernicious” advertising.

“It was such a strain to look like I did. Even when you solve this horrible problem of getting something to wear, you have to think about hair and make-up. The film company wants you to look fantastic to promote the film. Designers lend clothes and jewellers lend diamonds . . . It is as if you have become a salesperson.”

“At the Oscars they actually have signs saying things like ‘Turn around’. You are told to turn about for the cameras. So you are, in effect, advertising.”

This interview appears in the April issue of Saga magazine www.saga.co.uk

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