A Star Is Weaned

The effects of a beautiful girl are swift. It takes about three-fourths of a second to turn a healthy man's head. After that, two minutes of bright and lissome speech can erase the memory of all previous commitments. In some such fashion, Englishmen of every status are falling in love with Julie Christie. Americans will soon get their chance -- when a new picture called Billy Liar opens in U.S. moviehouses in September.

Lame Dreamer. She plays a nonchalant and free-roving girl of the world, in love with a pathological fibher. For much of the picture, she is just a name, an offstage figure who has gone away to find the freedom yearned after by the miserable hero, who hangs suspended between poverty and affluence in a lower-middle-class house in Yorkshire. He hides in a world of lies. He lies to others and he lies to himself, creating a Walter Mittyland called Ambrosia, of which he is king.

His only chance comes with the one stunning girl who has always seen into him and his Ambrosia and wants to help him find a real escape into a real outer world. Toward the end of the film, she returns to town, reunites with him at a dance, makes love to him in a park, and succeeds in getting him to a train station to begin his freedom ride. They will go off and live together in London. From Richard Burton to the Duke of Windsor, any man could be expected to drop everything and follow her. But not this crow. The train pulls out with her aboard, him on the platform--an ending far more moving in the film than it was in either the Keith Waterhouse novel or the stage version, because Actress Julie Christie is such a considerable package to lose.

Lonely Mat. She is 22, unmarried, slim, athletic, 5 ft. 4 in.--a blonde with blue-grey eyes, a firm and gracious definition of face, and full lips in a wide mouth that is often shaped in a wonderful grin. Refreshingly, the sense of sex that this composite production exudes seems intended to reproduce rather than destroy the best of mankind. Her father was a tea planter in India, where she was born. She went to a series of English boarding schools and London's Central School of Speech and Drama.

With no scholarship and little money, she entered a kind of determined vagrancy, carrying an air mattress with her. "I would turn up at even the remotest friend's place and ask for floor space," she says. "A cupboard. Anything. God, it was awful, moving around with my little mat." She worked at odd, wearying places in the summer, such as a Schweppes factory ("Ugh"), where she grew to hate the taste of bitter lemon. Then BBC-TV picked her up for a science fiction serial called A Is for Andromeda. Movies have weaned her away from television. Her first two were unnoteworthy, but now, with Billy Liar, which last week seemed most likely to win the top award at the current Venice Film Festival, she is established as a film star.

Notwithstanding her brief appearance, London critics have been all but umbrella-fencing in Leicester Square in their efforts to court her. But Actress Christie herself was too far away and far too busy to take more than a pleased glance at the papers. She is up in Warwickshire working in the Birmingham Repertory Co. for $45 a week.

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