Oscar nominee Julie Christie ties the knot in India

Actor chooses the country of her birth to marry Guardian journalist Duncan Campbell

LONDON: She is famous as much for her luminous beauty as her powerful performances, and yet she has always shunned the limelight. True to form, Julie Christie married her partner of nearly three decades in a secret ceremony in India.

Best remembered as the tragic Lara in the great Russian epic Doctor Zhivago, Christie chose the country of her birth to marry journalist Duncan Campbell whom she has lived with for 28 years.

Christie’s younger brother, Clive, has confirmed to a British  newspaper that 66-year-old Julie has got married. Clive could not confirm what type of marriage ceremony — religious or civil — took place or where as he did not attend the wedding.

India has always had a very soft-spot in Christie’s heart and she has made repeated trips to Assam, where she was born. Her father was a British tea-planter in Chukua in Assam in the 1940-50s, and Christie grew up there going to a convent school.

At the age of seven, she was sent off to a boarding school in England and then on to Paris.

She made her film debut in a small role in Crooks Anonymous in 1963 and received her first prestige part in Billy Liar. But it was her poignant portrayal of a stylishly amoral sexual butterfly in Darling two years later that shook audiences and won her her first Oscar. From here, there was no stopping as she ascended as a bankable actress playing a variety of roles.

In 1971, she began a professional and romantic liaison with Hollywood heartthrob Warren Beatty. The romance lasted a few years, but when it ended she turned her back on Hollywood. Though she made a few selected films, she shunned the celebrity lifestyle and preferred to live at her ramshackle farmhouse in Wales or her flat in East London as a very private person.

This year, she finds herself as one of the strongest contenders for Oscar for the best actress for her poignant portrayal of an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Away From Her for which she has already won the Screen Actor’s Guild Award.

Her friends are not surprised by the secret wedding as she has always lived a bohemian, hippyish lifestyle. “The news slowly spread when people got together to celebrate Christmas and Clive found out after the event,” said a friend. Campbell, Christie’s new-husband, who works for The Guardian newspaper, reacted when asked about the wedding, “Really? Well, I never get into stories like that.”