Articles & Interviews

This page features articles and interviews with both Warren and Julie.

Interview with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie -1971

Roger Ebert /

"That's all gone, now, the old, Hollywood," Warren Beatty was saying. "All gone. I remember once I was being interviewed by Hedda Hopper. Are you still going with that Joan Collins? She's too old for you. And, Warren, you really should do something about your clothes! Look at those clothes! Marriage, you should be thinking about marriage at your age, Warren.

Beatty grinned, and Julie Christie grinned, and Beatty said, "So I said . . . let me see. I think I said, 'So according to you, Hedda, I should get married, right?' Right! She says. And then I pick up her column: 'Imagine my surprise when Warren Beatty came over to my house the other morning to ask myadvice about marriage . . .'"

He reached across the table with his fork and speared a grape that nestled against Miss Christie's rainbow trout. This was in the Japanese Suite of the Ambassador West, where Beatty was holed up for 24 hours to promote "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," now at the Oriental. He is McCabe, and Miss Christie is Mrs. Miller. "At first," he said, "I put up a squawk. They told me they didn't have any room in the East, I'd have to stay in the West. Then I see this suite.

Jesus, did you get a look at the bedroom? The beds are on the floor!

"But . . . the old Hollywood, they worked all the time. I don't, I can't function that way. I've never made very many movies. Julie doesn't work very much either. There's no point in making a movie just to be making a movie. But I made . . . ah, several pictures and then it got to the point where I would have to make a good picture or get myself into trouble. That was when we made 'Bonnie and Clyde.'

"And then I didn't do anything for a couple of years, and I decided it was time to work again. I was offered 'Butch Cassidy,' and I was offered 'The Only Game in Town.' I didn't want to do 'Butch' because it was too much like 'Bonnie and Clyde.' Besides, 'The Only Game in Town' had a great director, George Stevens, and if you have a chance to work with a man like that, you take it."

But "The Only Game in Town" didn't turn out to be a very great movie, I said.

"Neither did 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'," Beatty said. "But it sure made a hell of a lot of
money. I don't know, though . . . my cut of that movie would have made even more money, I think. I don't know if they knew what they had . . ."

Is it really true that you got down on your knees in Jack Warner's office when you were trying to talk him into making "Bonnie and Clyde?"

"Probably. Possibly. I used to do all sorts of crazy things with Jack. He thought I was a little crazy. Well, I am a little crazy. Sometimes I used to think he was physically afraid of me. He was always working himself around to be on the other side of his desk from me. I think he was afraid I'd jump on the desk and go berserk or something . . .

"But those old guys, they were incredible. The Jack Warners and the Sam Goldwyns. Sam Goldwyn, for some reason, right after I came to Hollywood he took a
liking to me. He used to call me up and tell me to come over to Goldwyn Studios for lunch. Be here at one, Warren. One sharp. I eat at one sharp. Don't be late.

I'd get there at two minutes past one and Sam would be eating. "Warren! You're not working, Warren! Work! You're young, make a lot of movies, make a lot of
money. Don't wait around! You've been going two years without a picture, Warren! Make movies!

"So finally after about two years, I signed, up to do a movie and it was in the morning trade papers. At eight thirty in the morning, the telephone rings. It's Goldwyn's secretary. Please hold on for Mr. Goldwyn. Right, I think, my daily call from Sam Goldwyn. I
think he's going to congratulate me I'm working again. Not a chance. He wants to rent me space.

Beatty is a natural-born teller of anecdotes, and they come out one after another and Julie Christie pushes another grape to the edge of her plate, and he reaches out and spears it. Before dinner, she sat on one of the couches in the living room and mended an old white lace peasant dress that she's had, she said, forever, and Beatty talked about the last three or four years and referred to her as "this lady here, the seamstress . . ." Life is going well for the two of them. "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," which was directed by Robert Altman, is one of the best American films of the year largely because of the eloquence of their performances. He plays a gambler who pitches up one day in Presbyterian Church, a little mining town out in the West, and goes into business by building a whorehouse. She plays a tough Cockney madam who convinces him he can't manage the operation himself; he needs professional help. The film is done in the infectiously likable Altman style, and it is about as intimate a film as you'll see. Altman uses overlapping, conversational,
half-heard dialogue, as he did in "M-A-S-H," to create the feeling that his characters are talking to each other and not to the camera. When you see an Altman movie, you're reminded all over again how stiffly
artificial most movies are about dialog, with the
characters talking in complete sentences and never interrupting each other.

Julie Christie was talking about this quality of the film, and she also used the notion of intimacy: "The movie is so intensely private; it's as if the audience is looking in through a window . . ."

And the two principal New York critics who've liked it, Pauline Kael and Joseph Morgenstern, noticed this feeling. Kael wrote in the New Yorker that Altman's Western was, like nobody else's Western, as if Altman had never seen a Western before and had to invent the genre for himself as he went along. Morgenstern said in Newsweek that by the time the movie is over, you half-believe you could draw your own street map of Presbyterian Church.

"I'm glad that feeling came across," Miss Christie said. "I was afraid it wouldn't. Altman works in such an interesting way, letting things occur in the film even if he didn't particularly plan them. We lived in that town, you know. Everybody lived there. We were up to British Columbia and built the town as the movie was made, all raw lumber and mud in the streets. And the cast and crew lived in the buildings. It was
uncanny; I think perhaps Presbyterian Church seems like a real place to the people in the movie because it was a real place for all of us. The question is, will the film take off? Beatty said he thinks maybe it will. He remembers "Bonnie and Clyde," which flopped in seven of its first nine American engagements, and then got a new lease on life after the London critics fell over each other in praising it. "Bonnie and
Clyde" has earned $34,000,000 to date, and 40 percent of the profits go to Beatty, so perhaps he has an
excuse for not working for two years.

"Now, with 'McCabe and Mrs. Miller', he said, "it's a funny thing. We're getting the same sort of strong critical response we got with 'Bonnie and Clyde':
strongly positive or strongly negative."

By this time all of the grapes were finished, and all of the rainbow trout, too. There had been talk of
catching the 10 p.m. flight to New York, but then one thing led to another and it was 9:25, with no chance of getting to O'Hare on time.

"When is the next flight after that? "Miss Christie said.

"I've got it all written out here . . . let's see. One o'clock."

One o'clock?" Miss Christie said. "And we get in at three?"

This was dismal news, because Beatty and Miss Christie had taken the overnight from Los Angeles to Chicago, and neither one can sleep on an airplane, so they were already beat when they got here. And Miss Christie had to be conscious and functioning in New York because her other new film, "The Go-Between," was opening there.

She was particularly happy about "The Go-Between" because of the way Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and its
president, Jim Aubrey, had treated it, which was very badly. The film was directed by Joseph Losey and is, she said, "a dreamlike, very personal film. Aubrey saw it and went out of his head. He couldn't believe it. No sex, no violence, nobody took off their clothes. MGM was just going to dump it on the market and get rid of it. Losey talked him into selling it to another distributor, instead, and Columbia picked it up. And then it won the Cannes Film Festival!"

She grinned. "God, can you imagine how Aubrey must feel now?"

"I'll tell you what," Beatty said. "I tell you what we should do. Get a good night's rest here, and fly to New York in the morning."

"But . . . I particularly wanted to go to New York tonight," she said. "Particularly."

"Well, we've missed the ten o'c1ock," he said. "And, I mean, if we got there at three in the morning . . . you're mad at me, aren't you?"

"Lovey," she said, "why would I be a thing like that?"

LOOK Magazine, June 1, 1971

"Warren and Julie: Together At Last"

Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, the movie stars, have been together, "or whatever you want to call it," since late in 1967. "And whatever you want to call it," says Beatty, "is your problem."

Happily, the problem is really not serious. Julie's reply to questions about whether or not they're going to get married is, "If we do, we do. If we don't, we don't." Warren vouches that they are not. But if their relationship until now has been curtained off- however carelessly- at last it has gone public. For this summer, they are apperaing in Zinc, their first filom together, the original title was The Prebyterian Church Wager, but that sounded religious- Julie plays a madam, vintage 1902, who goes into business with Warren, a gambler, and through the skilled uses of vice, they bring prosperity to a nice little mining town. Inevitably, the wages of sin are death. But as we shall presently see, Warren's and Julie's wages, from the standpoint of cash, turn out to be excellent.

In addition to providing an agreeably racy script for Warren and Julie, Zinc gave them most of the winter near Vancouver B.C., to ponder out their relationship in private. It also provided gossip columnists an unparalleled opportunity for their kind of pondering. "Are Julie Christie and Warren Beatty secretly married?" was the question Joyce Haber put to her readers in January. "That ponderous question," she continued, "caused the London Sunday Express to ponder as nothing has since the rumors that Princess Margaret and Tony had agreed to schism..."

The picture was shot far from the madding intrusions of friends, columnists, and other diversions. Warren and Julie took a house together on Horseshoe Bay, about ten minutes from the film's outdoor location, and when they weren't on set, they were home- alone, or with their narrow little group. Included were Julie's hairdresser, her chauffeur (she usually drove herself) and Alfreda "Alfie" Benge, who left a job with IBM in London to be her dresser. Since Julie dresses herself, this was never an exacting assignment. Fourth member of their circle was Bob Jiras, co-producer of The Boys in the Band, and Warren's makeup man and confidant. Since Warren generally fixes himself up, makeup for Jiras proved more of a title than an activity. Few outsiders were invited, even doctors. When Julie injured an eye, Warren simply phoned Jules Stein, a former opthalmologist who is now the multi-millionare chairman of MCA, to prescribe a cure.

Winter evenings are long and rainy in Vancouver, and in an effort to brighten them, the production company imported feature fims, which were shown to the cast immediately following the day's rushes of the previous day. Such was the informality of these nightly sessions that the junior-most grip or extra might find himself sprawled on the floor next to Robert Altman, the director, or David Foster and Mitchell Brower, the co-producers. One night, as a teasing embarassment to Warren (it was never Mr. Beatty) the attraction was a $6 million disaster called The Only Game in Town, which Beatty and Elizabeth Taylor, the stars, would both probably prefer to incinerate. Julie cooed in his ear, "I though you were wonderful baby." ("It was like telling a joke underwater," says Warren.)

At the film's climax, Warren tries to persuade Elizabeth that they should legalize the intimacy of their relationship. Why get married? she asks ("really taking the offensive," it said in the script.) Then, the script goes on, "he takes a moment to colect himself; faces her," and "leveling as never before," he gives her seven pages of reasons, along these lines: "Granted that marriage is a most faulty, pitiful, and wheezing institution, right now it's the only game in town and we're going to play it." He has convinced her. There's a clinch, and she succumbs.

Warren claims he agrees with these sentiments, but the lines don't translate convincingly into his private life. Back in the 60's - now he's talking about the real Warren - he started living the way a lot of people do today. " thought then, why should I get married when i know I'll get divorced in two or three years? Actually, Julie and I haven't lived so differently than married people. We just haven't ever married."

Warren scurries in and out of ideas. Talk about marriage will slip off into talk about Julie, her eyes, her intensity, directness, intelligence, independance, his plans for their next film. So it may be several hours before he's back again on marriage. "Is it fair," he asks, "to take a woman and make the vows one makes in the marriage ceremony, and then wink at them- sayin we always knew we could get out of this in a year or two years or six months? People nowadays expect to go from one marriage into another. Humans change in varying ways and at varying speeds, and society should simply not be surprised by more than one relationship in a person's life- at different times of course."

Warren has been called a very private man who only incidentally toils in a very public business. This is true as well of Julie, for whom he serves generally as public spokesman. "What we have is privacy," Warren says, "and if that dissapears, what's left?" While the pictures on these pages, the first ever posed by them together, were being taken, both began to get uneasy. "Aren't we giving away something we shouldn't?" Julie asked.

Now the subject drifts to business. Warren is proof- if any is needed- that gold is still to be mined in Hollywood. He made so much ($8 million) from the 1967 film, Bonnie and Clyde, which he produced and starred in, that he could live comfortably without ever working again. Warren, rich as he is, admits that he doesn't mind picking up an extra million and a quarter, as he did for Only Game. For Zinc, he gets a thick ten percent of the gross in lieu of salary, Julie, a little less. She is totally vague about money; it bores her. He turned down a part in Ryan's Daughter, which might have brought him $3 million, and the Sundance Kid part in Butch Cassidy, worth $3-3.5 million, he says. "What would you want it for?" asks Julie, who had turned down Nicholas and Alexandra, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, and Anne of the Thousand Days.

In 11 years, he has made only ten films- three right off- and he thinks his eleventh could be his last. (Apart from three insignificant early roles, Julie has made only seven films.) "It seemed silly in 1961," he says, securing his arm around Julie's stomach, "to climb onto a treadmill that leads nowhere except to more treadmills." "I had all the money I wanted and I was surrounded by all the beautiful girls I wanted. I didn't (he still doesn't) smoke, take drugs or liquor or sleeping pills." According to Julie, however, he eats well- "like a baboon."

All this money and success have made him, "suspicious" about himself. "You see before you, a guy who, ever since Bonnie and Clyde, could have directed any film- but didn't. Why? Because he was so goddamn lazy. I feel guilty about having done nothing, but you get to love life, and your partner, more, if you're not making movies all the time." To which he adds: "If you're in a particularly lightweight period, well, maybe you're a lightweight."

"Unpredictable" might be a more appropriate word for Warren. Barbara Walters, who rarely has problems with guests on the Today show, found normally talkative Warren "the most impossible interview I have ever had," but David Frost wanted to devote an entire 90-minute show to Beatty. He astonishes listeners with the variety of subjescts on which he is an expert. He worked frantically and effectively on Robert Kennedy's presidential primaries, and has talked about entering politics himself. ("The most desperate feeling in the world is to hope people will vote for you"). He's an alert businessman who understands real estate and investments, and he handles them in unending telephone calls. There are those who believe that if he wanted to, he could successfully head any film studio in the world. Languages are no hurdle: After living briefly with the Soviet ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, he developed a working knowledge of Russian. This could serve him in what he hopes will be his next project, a film about John reed, the American journalist who became a champion of the Communist revolution. He's prepared at least three variations of the screenplay and is working on a deal in which the Russians would finance the picture but not control it. He would act in it, write it, direct it, and perhaps produce it. "One thing that's holding it up," he says, "is my own inertia."

Inertia is not a Beatty problem. In order for him to have made $8 million on Bonnie and Clyde, the picture had to gross $35 million. And for it to gross $35 million, Warren had to get out and work. The film did well enough the first time around. As it begand to fade from local screens, five magazines ran cover stories, whereupon Warren talked the distributors into strating it on its rounds again. He dropped into theaters where Bonnie and Clyde was showing. If If the sound was wrong, which it often was, or the image was out of focus, he had it fixed. "I think of a workday as 12 hours," he says, "plus four hours at home."

With bot Warren and Julie, talent is another word for energy. "She's a hyper-motor," he says, "who could make a hummingbird look sluggish. I knew she was an artist, but until I started acting with her, I never knew to what extent. With her, there always seems to be something happening even when nothing is happening." Unlike Warren, who improves his performance as he goes along, Julie has worked out her lines before she says them, and each take is much like the one before. Both have contempt for tidy living arrangements. Their house outside Vancouver- a cold glass box that they despised- became cozy as they imposed their personalities on it. Julie supplemented the dining room furniture with hairdressing equipment-they ate on the floor of the living room. Antique orange-crate labels were pasted to the windows to discourage birds from dashing against the panes.

Julie did most of the cooking, strong on the Chinese and vegetarian. Both drove beaten-up cars. They shocked the natives with their unmovie-like clothes. No furs, except a massive ripped bearskin that Warren wears in the film. Both were so unexacting in their requirements that when her stand-in caught the flu, Julie stood in for her stand-in. "Ideal stars for your movie," Bob jiras observes. "They make no demands except privacy."

Warren can be relied upon to remain true to their relationship- in his fashion. Maybe he wouldn't mind, he says, making a film with one of his former girlfriends, of course, only with Julie's approval. "I'm madly in love with him," she says, "and he's madly in love with me, that's all that matters." Last March, while he was in Germany making $, his next picture after Zinc, he suffered cuts and bruises in a studio accident. He was rushed to the hospital, where the nurse, taking the usual statistics, asked if he were married.
"No," he replied, "but I'm in love."

Motion Picture Magazine, November, 1975

"Julie Christie: Uncensored"

Julie Christie marched out the front door of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where she and Warren Beatty were staying while they were filming Shampoo. The sun was hot, summertime hot, and L.A.'s smog was getting threatening again. 
"Where can we get away from this air?' Julie asked me, waving a hand at the sky. "It's awful! How can you stand it?" I told her I can't, that's why I live in Venice, by the ocean.
"Let's drive out to Malibu!" she said suddenly, remembering the summer he and Warren had rented a beautiful home in the Malibu Colony. "I haven't seen those beaches for years. And it's such a hot day - lets's go!"

I knew I was going to be the one to do the driving when Julie began casually chatting about how her driving hadn't improved much since the years she refused to drive at all. I can still remember her telling me, "I'm exactly the kind of person who should never drive. My mind wanders too much. I'd see a man start to cross the street, then I'd glance at the trees and at the sky and I'd dream- and then i'd kill him! No I should never drive!"

I drove. The air really did seem to cool and clear as the Santa Monica Freeway rushed us toward the sea. Julie settled back in the car, watching the sights and going through my 8-track tapes, looking for something she liked.

"Do you have any modern jazz?" she said. "I love modern jazz. What about Carole King? Remember that night at the Troubadour?" Julie and I had bumped into each other back in 1971 at L.A.'s famed music hangout and coffee house, The Troubadour. Carole King, virtually unknown at the time, was making her Los Angeles debut, and I met Julie for the second time. (We met originally in New York when Julie won the New york Film Critics Best Actress Award for Darling.) "Remember how fresh and original she sounded that night?" she went on. "And Lou Adler escorting her on and off the stage? What a scene! I just remember thinking: This girl is going to be big!"

I suddenly thought it was odd that Julie Christie was thinking about someone else's stardom. "Do you miss being big?" I shot out without thinking. "Oh I'm sorry..."I meant..."

"Nooooo, I know exactly what you meant and the answer is no! I know everybody loves to have a lot of attention paid to them. i'm no different, but I was really freaked by my movie stardom! You know. You remember what i was like then. Terrible!"

I really did remember too. And she was right. She was terrible- jumpy, moody, insecure, basically unhappy about everything. She always felt guilty about the money she was getting, and always, always felt like she was selling her "mates" out by becoming part of the entertainment business. A traitor? A sell-out to the Establishment? These were her questions and they haunted her continually. At the time she was living in a modest part of london, with a local artist, Don Bessant.

Julie's words cut through my thoughts as I drove. She must have been thinking the same things. "The conflict was so bad back then. I thought I would flip out for a while. Do you remember?" I assured her I did. "I was going through such changes. I couldn't believe that I didn't have any time for myself anymore. It was like right after Doctor Zhivago my whole life crashed in...everything changed...I had to take interviewers with me when I'd go to visit my mother 'cause there was no time to fit them all in otherwise- uck! A terrible time! People treated me like I was a machine. kick it and it'll give you an autograph! I couldn't stand it!'

And so Julie began taking steps to protect herself from the onrush of public adoration. She stopped giving interviews. She refused to sign a contract with any major studio. She insisted on having "directorial choice" written into all her contracts. ("I don't want my career ruined by some inept director!") She stopped doing magazine fashion layouts, stopped going to parties, and only occasionally attended a premiere of her own film.

By the time she finished Far From the Madding Crowd, her and Don were having troubles. "i'm not Don's ideal girl," Julie confided years ago. "I think he'd like someone quieter. i just can't hold still." When the film premiered in America, Julie came to the states without Don. She stayed on to film Petulia in San Francisco for several months, telling everyone things were fine with Don. ("He didn't want to leave England because he has work to do there," she told one columnist who trapped her between takes.)

It was during this stay in America that Julie really met Warren Beatty. Warren was enjoying the height of his career (so far). Bonnie and Clyde was the toast of hollywood and just about every place else! Warren was charming and Julie fell easily. Although Julie insists that Warren was NOT the reason for her breakup with Don.

"I'm in love!" Warren told friends, and just about anyone who would listen. Julie was afraid to say anything. "I don't trust my feelings anymore, they change. I didn't think there could ever be anyone besides Don. Now this..." Julie didn't trust herself. But that was seven years ago.

Warren and Julie had a lot of adjsuting to do, but they were in perfect agreement about two things: They were madly in love with each other, and they didn't want publicity! So far they've only broken their silence for two things: political causes (McGovern, gun control) and "special films" they want to push. (McCabe and Mrs.Miller and now Shampoo)

"I really think Warren is doing a super job in this film," Julie said proudly. "it's the first time since Bonnie and Clyde he's been both the producer and star. This film is really wonderful, he's done a brilliant job with it."

I asked what the title, Shampoo, meant. "It's about a Beverly Hills hairdresser who makes it with all his clients. Warren plays a guy like jay Sebring or Jon Peters - though the part is definitely not based on either man! He's a playboy, a sexy guy always coming on. Anyway, Warren is absolutely great in it! Wait til you see."

We were arriving in Malibu and i could feel Julie's excitement. "I'm going to swim. What do you say?" I didn't have my suit, but lo-and-behold, she did- under her clothes. We walked on the sand, and Julie kicked aimlessly at tiny shells and bits of seaweed strewn across the beach.


"Warren and I always meant to live here," she said, nodding at the row of Malibu beach homes etched into the shore line. I think if we ever decide to take up permanent residence in America, we will." She hesitated a moment. "Well either here or further north, Sausalito, where you can live in houseboats. When we were shooting Petulia I lived in a beautiful yellow houseboat in Sausalito. I almost bought the place, but the deal fell through."

Julie stopped and went for a swim. She looked really happy in the water, really at home. "I wish Warren were here," she says with a grin, "at our pool at home he does this thing where he throws me up on his shoulders and then splashes me into the water." It suddenly occured to me that she probably agreed to a short interview with me so that she could get a quick ride to the beach for a swim. When I suggested this to her she laughed- "Exactly!"- and continued to bounce around in the waves. Julie was having such a great time. I really wished I had brought my suit!