The language of the war on terror made her shudder - and provoked her
to become a fearless champion of its victims, notably the Guantanamo
Bay inmate Binyam Mohamed. Robert Verkaik reports
Saturday, 21 February 2009
Julie Christie has never felt comfortable in the glare of the public
eye. For long periods of her life, the actress who rose to fame in Dr
Zhivago and Far From the Madding Crowd has turned her back on the
film world, hiding on a hill farm in Wales while others gratefully
picked up the roles she spurned.
But even throughout these wilderness years, Julie Christie has never
felt so dislocated from the world that she could ignore its horrors.
Her campaigning record reads like a history of human rights abuses
over the last 40 years.
This week she was back again highlighting Britain's role in the
alleged torture of a British resident held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In a letter published earlier this week, she accused the Government
of duplicity and the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, of helping to
cover up the crimes of America. Mr Miliband responded with his own
letter, forcefully rejecting Christie's allegations.
The resident in question is Binyam Mohamed, 31, an Ethiopian refugee
whose lawyers have been trying to persuade the UK Government to hand
over documents which they believe will prove Britain's complicity in
their client's torture.
Christie says she knows she must come across as "disgruntled from
Tunbridge Wells" but she feels "sick to the stomach" about what her
own Government is doing.
"They should have released [the documents] ages ago. Binyam Mohamed
was being tortured in 2002. In all this stuff that [Mr Miliband]
writes, there is never any mention that unless they release the
documents to clear him he is always going to be known to the world as
a terrorist.
"That's a life that has been ruined. You never hear about the human
beings involved, there's never any sadness or any remorse.".
Although she would never say so, the emotional deprivations of her
troubled childhood must make it easier for her to empathise with
those who are taken from the bosom of their families and forced to
survive in an alien environment. When she was six years old, her
mother sent her away to a Catholic boarding school in England, her
parents separated and she was left living with a foster family. The
shock of this, she says, has never left her.
Perhaps then, this is partly why she feels she has to speak up for
those who have no voice, like Mr Mohamed.
"It's a terrible thing," says Christie, "to make someone disappear.
To have no contact with anyone. They are disappeared from life and it
is just about one of the most sadistic things you can do. Especially
to someone who has not been found guilty of anything."
What seems to anger her most is that after spending years protesting
against the injustices of other regimes she now finds herself
confronting the rights abuses of her own country.
She asks: "Have we learnt nothing from the Second World War and the
importance of the of human rights protections that we put in place to
stop it happening again?"
The global response to an evil threat is one of the themes that is
explored in her new film, 1939, which is directed by Stephen
Poliakoff and also stars Romola Garai, Bill Nighy and David Tennant.
The film follows the fortunes of an aristocratic family in Norfolk at
the outbreak of the Second World War.
"It's about the movement for appeasement by the English aristocracy
just before the start of the war. I play an advocate for appeasement.
She's a fictional character so she's not one of the Mitfords, but I
think she is in that area.
"It is all about that possibility that was real [that appeasement
could stop Hitler]. But of course if [the arguments for appeasement]
had succeeded, people like Stephen [Poliakoff] wouldn't have been around."
Christie thinks that parallels could possibly be drawn between a
policy of appeasement in the 1930s and the American-driven "war on
terror" against al-Qa'ida.
"Yes I think in both it was lack of imagination, stupidity and
ignorance. When I was acting my part I did not think like that,
because as you know you have to love your part. I think she thought
what had been done for Germany she would try to do for England."
But it is the twin dangers of terrorism and the misguided "war on
terror" that threaten the world today, says Christie, whose natural
elegance and preserved beauty belies her 67 years.
"My reaction to September 11 was shock, anger and fear. The shock was
obvious because of the amount of misery caused but also the
stupidity. Because who suffered the most? The Muslim world. Then
there was anger at the stomach-clenching media and government
reaction without reason or rationale. It was as if their brains had
stopped working. At this moment when they needed to be acting most
sensibly, they were incapable."
For Christie, one of the most chilling aspects of these developments
was the new language that was created to give force to the "war on terror".
"I felt something so terrible was going to happen when Bush came up
with this phrase 'unlawful combatant'. It meant that any terror
suspect could be kidnapped, incarcerated, tortured and never brought
to trial. I thought this is going to unleash a wave of sadism on a
large part of the world and it did."
Appearing at last year's Academy Awards ceremony, after her portrayal
of a woman suffering from Alzheimer's in Away From Her had won her an
Oscar nomination for best actress, Christie wore an orange ribbon
calling for the closure of Guantanamo.
"I went around asking people at the Oscars, do you know what
"extraordinary rendition" means? Nobody did. I hate the phrase. What
does it mean? It just means disappearance."
For Christie, it has echoes of past human rights abuses which she had
campaigned against so vociferously in the 1970s and 1980s.
"We have come across this before in South Africa under apartheid and
in Indonesia in its awful war against the East Timorese. So we are
not unfamiliar with it. And I had come across it more personally in
Nicaragua, El Salvador and Argentina, where I had actually met people
who had been tortured and met people whose family had been
disappeared and whose children had been tortured.
"But I have to say that I never thought anything like this could
happen in America or here. It was so stupid of me because we have had
Northern Ireland [torture]. I had always liked to think there was
something not English and not American about it all."
Christie has been involved in protest campaigning since the early
1970s when she played a key role in the peace movement. She says her
then-debilitating shyness left her a marginalised figure in the
campaign against the war in Vietnam. That shyness was something that
her former lover, the American actor Warren Beatty, picked up on when
he described her as both the "most beautiful and the most nervous
person" he had ever known.
"I was too shy. I had to get over that. Of course I went on Grosvenor
Square march [in London] and all that. I went to a lot of
demonstrations but I wasn't as active as I could have been. I was too
shy to have my opinion counted."
She says that she partly beat her crisis in self-confidence by
studying the issues that she wanted to talk about in public.
"I was against nuclear weapons and so I went to classes and learnt
about the splitting of the atom. But I still couldn't find the
courage to stand on soap boxes or do anything like that." It was a
Chilean friend who finally gave her the confidence to take a more
high-profile role in political movements.
"I was debating whether to be one of the people leading a peace march
in Scotland with a famous musician, a communist and Robin Cook. She
said to me 'you have go and do it, to be a part of it'. And so I did.
And that was the first political action in which I was seen to be at
the forefront." Naturally it generated a lot of press coverage and
more of the many photographs of the Christie image that was already
synonymous with swinging London.
"That was the first one and later I learnt to handle it and go on to
do many more demonstrations. I also did a lot of public speaking
which I found hard and which I don't do any more, because I can't
find the words."
The 1980s would prove to be Christie's most active decade for
political protest. "When I go through cuttings of that time, I think
'good God I was busy, standing up for this and that and the other'."
She candidly admits that she is not able to recall the 1990s in quite
the same way. "I can't remember the 1990s. Perhaps it was eco-stuff
and animals. And of course the first Iraq war which got me going again."
These days, Christie is less the suffering artist. She lives happily
in the East End of London, travels around inconspicuously on public
transport and is rumoured to have married her long-time partner, the
journalist Duncan Campbell, at a private ceremony in India, the
country of her birth. Christie, who has become a patron for the human
rights group Reprieve, which is representing Binyam Mohamed and other
Guantanamo detainees, appears genuinely embarrassed that she can't
stop herself being drawn to so many different causes.
"We are talking about something so very serious and huge and then we
start talking about me," she says.
"It seems terribly inappropriate. Perhaps it's even egotistical to
think like that, so you have got to think of yourself [as someone]
who is representing something else."
So why does she feel the need to speak out?
"I was sad when the outrage began to abate, except for Clive [Clive
Stafford Smith, the legal director of Reprieve] and other lawyers and
one or two newspapers who kept trying to push the thing. I think that
sometimes we get deadened by something that is so awful and too big
to believe. I think both American and British can't believe that they
are capable of this kind of thing. I think it is too easy to be quiet."
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