Julie Christie hit the big time at the same time as the Beatles - and like the Fabs she painted the drab national consciousness day-glo. Every subsequent rebel girl is in her debt - a fact made plain in the National Film Theatre's month-long season of her work.
However much her early cinematic persona owes to the Anna Karina of Une Femme est une Femme (1961), Christie was never a director's plaything. Godard wouldn't have lasted a minute with our Julie. Yes, she was a cracker, as her scatty, swinging-down-the-lane turn in John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963) memorably shows, but she was never just a cracker.
If that kitchen sink comedy was her breakthrough it was because it found in her loose-limbed vivacity the free spirit of a new age. A couple of years later these untameable charms would net her a Best Actress Oscar
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as the on the make vamp in Schlesinger's Darling (1965).
For nobody could control Julie - not the Alan Bates of Far From The Madding Crowd (1967); not the stays and strictures of Edwardian repression in Joseph Losey's The Go-Between (1970); not even the burly George C Scott of Richard Lester's Petulia (1968).
And of all the pictures on offer at the NFT, Petulia is the one you must see because Christie's proto-psychedelic kook remains her most vital, kinetic creation.
Away from the screen, Christie has endorsed more than one variant of radicalism, but nothing she ever does will be as sweetly insurrectionary as those life-affirming movies she made in her 20s. 
FIRST POSTED MAY 3, 2007
Julie Christie season,
May 4-31, 2007, BFI Southbank
(formerly known as the NFT) Belvedere Road, South Bank, London, SE1 8XT,
020 7928 3232
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