A changed Julie Christie starring in new role

LONDON — For moviegoers who fell for Julie Christie in the 1960s (and they were legion), she will always be the tousle-haired blonde with the dazzling smile who lit up the screen in "Darling," "Doctor Zhivago" and "Far From the Madding Crowd."

Today, they need not feel disappointed. In her new movie, "Away From Her," which opens in the United States on May 4 (in a few larger metropolitan cities, and then gradually to the rest of the country), she is still a tousle-haired blonde with a dazzling smile. But yes, like her fans, she too has changed. At 66, she is no longer attracted by fame. She is not even much interested in the Julie Christie of legend.

"I have no connection with that person at all," she said over lunch in a pub near her home in the East End. "That person has gone."

Indeed, since that person went — by her own calculation, sometime in the late 1970s — Christie has become a reluctant actress, choosing political causes over show business, turning down more movie roles than she has accepted, preferring the calm of her country life in mid-Wales to the jostling egos and stress of film sets.

"I don't like that world very much," she said. "I feel I should apologize because it sounds so prissy and so ungrateful. Of course, I have got so much out of it and I'm glad my life has gone the way it has. But I can't help it: It leaves a slightly bad taste in my mouth."

So it is not surprising that she took some persuading to play the lead in "Away From Her," the first feature film directed by the young Canadian actress Sarah Polley. Christie's last major role was in "Afterglow" a decade ago. Since then, she said, she has made only cameo appearances "to pay for my roof to be fixed."

Polley, 28, who had Christie in mind when she adapted Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" for the screen, was nonetheless determined to have her in her movie. "I knew I'd get a few noes before I got a yes," Polley said. "And I was just hoping the yes would eventually come."

It did, although not because Christie had a sudden change of heart about the movie industry. Rather, it was because she met Polley in 2000 when they were both filming Hal Hartley's "No Such Thing" — Polley in the lead, Christie in a small role.

"I fell totally in love with her," Christie recalled. "Of course, when she sent me this screenplay, I said no. But she kept on and on. She said she felt like a stalker. In the end, I thought, if I don't do it, I'll miss the opportunity of being with her on her first feature film."

And now she has no regrets.