Oscar winner and nominee Julie Christie talks about getting old

I should explain. I was still at school when Christie flitted dangerously across the screen as the social butterfly Diana Scott in the 1965 film Darling, a performance that won her an Oscar for best actress.

Wasn't she just about the most beautiful woman on whom we'd clapped our juvenile eyes?

She was Lara in Doctor Zhivago, Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, Lady Trimingham in The Go-Between. Christie, it seemed, was all blonde, all woman, simmering with lust.

By the time I was on the scene, however, able to interview film folk, she had already had sex with Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now, had her hair blow-dried by real-life boyfriend Warren Beatty in Shampoo and decided that she wanted to quit Hollywood. She shacked up with the leftie journalist Duncan Campbell - the man whom, according to unconfirmed reports as this piece went to press last week, she finally married recently - and disappeared to breed sheep in Wales. She came back every so often to appear in a movie, but knew her own mind well enough to realise she didn't want to talk to the likes of me.

"I could never really see the point of being high-profile when I loathed it so much," she tells me. "Every now and then, you can go to something like an Oscars ceremony, but nobody is holding a gun to your head. The rules were the same 40 years ago as they are now. You can either choose your spotlight - or you can stay at home."

She won't be staying at home for this year's Oscars. If the writer's strike is over and they go ahead, she will attend, albeit reluctantly. She has trenchant views on the whole business of being on show, following her most recent Oscar outing, 10 years ago, when she was nominated as best actress for Afterglow. "The film company wants you to look fantastic, and borrows clothes and diamonds from designers and jewellers for you to wear," she says. "I will not do that again. It is a pernicious pastime. Models wear designer things, so you become like a salesperson. There are actual signs outside the ceremony that say, 'Turn around.' Why? Because they want you to advertise the dress. I don't want to be involved in an advertising jamboree."

Christie has lost none of her reputed forcefulness and little of her appeal. I am surprised at her height, just 5ft 2in, and age, 66. She still manages somehow to look taller and younger. I ask her what she wants to drink. "White tea," comes the reply. White tea? In all the joints in all the towns in all the world, that's just about the last thing I ever dreamt of ordering for Julie Christie. I summon a look for the barman, as if to say: "I know this is crazy, but..." "Which type does she want?" he asks, dumping three packets of white tea on the bar.

I relate the story to Christie as I deliver her cuppa. "This is my local," she says calmly. "I have a room a couple of streets away." A room? As opposed to a house or fancy flat? "Oh, yes," she says. "I've had it for years - it's very comfy." So this is where she has hidden away, when not in Wales? "I've never thought about it like that, but I suppose I have," she says. "I like a peaceful existence."

And why, after being the biggest star in the world, did she decide to walk away from it? "I found films to be turbulent and stressful," she says. "They have caused me an enormous amount of anxiety, because I do not have a lot of confidence. You are working, intellectually and mentally, and you are having to be with people and socialise all the time. Actors like it, on the whole, but I was not born with that quality. I am very quiet and would much prefer to talk to a few people rather than a crowd."

She's talking now because she has been persuaded it is worth emerging, briefly, from the shadows to discuss her fine, complex performance in Away from Her. "This," she warns, "may also be my last movie. It seems only right to talk about it." The film is a moving and, at times, lightly humorous look at how Alzheimer's disease can change lives for ever. Her character, Fiona, a beautiful and intelligent woman, is entering the strange in-between world of forgetfulness and confusion. Her husband, played by the Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, wants the best for her. He reluctantly agrees she should begin a new life in an expensive and luxurious care home, where her every need is met. But, to hisshock,

her needs are also cared for by one of her fellow sufferers, who forms an attachment to Fiona - and she to him.From a long and happy marriage, she and her husband are forced to accept a new order in their lives. It is an emotionally charged film, well written, brilliantly acted and memorable. The young writer and director, Sarah Polley, also nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, wanted Christie in the role. But after months of trying to track her down and persuade her - and this after the two of them had twice worked together - she declared she felt like a would-be lover courting a woman who did not want to be courted. I know how she feels.

"I am just terribly lazy," says Christie, by way of explanation. "I am usually pretty ruthless about saying no. But I knew somebody else would eventually make Away from Her, and I was going to feel sick that it wasn't me. I thought Sarah Polley would have forgotten me by then."

Were there further complications because she was dealing with female ageing, a subject Hollywood prefers to avoid? "There is such an emphasis on looks. I know what I look like - then I look in the mirror and don't look like the person I think I look like. We are all dealing with changes in that way, over a certain age. We watch our skin change, and I don't think that is such an easy thing to do." How about another nip and tuck? Christie has made no secret of the fact that she has had "minor" work done. "I am tempted every time I look in the mirror," she says. "You want your familiar face back when you see all the lines around your chin, neck, eyes, mouth, your bloody arms and everything else."

She laughs long and hard at herself. "Am I going to look good and beautiful, or allow people to see what happens - on a screen, where you are blown up 30ft high - in old age? Such is vanity. Nic Roeg, who directed me in Don't Look Now, once told me, 'Life is about youth. It is all about the energy and the surge of the young. That is how it has always been.'"

It seems a good point to ask the question about that full-on love scene with Sutherland. It has been listed, endlessly, by film magazines as the sexiest scene ever in a big movie. It has also been much quoted as being known as the only real sex on camera in a mainstream film. So, did they? Or didn't they?

"I would never tell anyone that," she exclaims with a knowing laugh. "Can you imagine losing that bit of mystique?" What about Beatty's long-held claim that she was the first woman he asked to marry him, during their seven years together?"I don't remember that," she says. "I don't remember that at all." So, given her love of privacy, what was it like to be in the spotlight, when she lived in Hollywood, with Beatty at her side? "I met such interesting people with Warren, whom I would never have met otherwise," she says. "And the film Shampoo stands the test of time. I cherish all those days. But I could not hack LA. Hollywood was basically a throwaway society, run by publicity machines."

She is vague about her early years in acting, after being educated in England and Paris. It is not, it seems, out of any sense of wanting to cover it up. "The past is unimportant to me," she says. "It is the present that counts." When I point out that, according to records, she made her acting debut on stage in Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, she says: "Oh, yes, I had clean forgotten about Frinton." After some thought, she recollects: "That was my early twenties, I suppose, after drama school [London's Central School of Speech Training], and I was there for a season. I lived in a beach hut with my boyfriend from drama school. It was a fantastic time. He is now, like many of my friends, not alive."

By the early 1960s, she was appearing in television dramas - A for Andromeda was her debut, in 1961. But it was the 1963 film Billy Liar, with Tom Courtenay as the dreamer Billy, that got her noticed. It was a time of kitchen-sink drama, and new stars seemed to be emerging every other month. Christie was one of them, as our biggest sex symbol: a powerhouse of looks and screen presence. Her memories of Terence Stamp, now 68, her boyfriend from earlier in the 1960s, are warm. He shared a flat with Michael Caine at the time. "To see those two walking into a club in the evening was absolutely fantastic," she enthuses. "They were like two blond gods. If you happened to be with one of them, it was thrilling." Christie's voice goes up a notch, as if it still has not dawned that a glimpse of her in those days would have been enough to send temperatures through the roof. "But this is why so many actors' marriages break up. One partner can feel eclipsed. It is a complicated business, and we are very insecure, we actors. We all feel - and fear - we are going to be found out at any moment. Someone is going to point and say, 'You are really not very good, are you?'"

She has recently been reading letters she sent to her late mother, Rosemary, from the mid1960s to the mid1970s. "They were all written with a jocularity, along the lines of, 'You will really laugh at this, Mum,'" she says. "This was a time of big awards and things. Yet I'd be like a schoolgirl, writing, 'Guess who I have just met?'"

When she talks of her mother, it is easy to understand why Christie never adapted to Hollywood life. "It was against everything I had been brought up to appreciate," she says. "My mother was wise and frugal, and quite austere. She was conscious about the environment, even in those days. The world of celebrity did not mean a single thing to her. Which is why I take all the celeb stuff with a pinch of salt."

Christie's lifestyle seems to bear that out. She lets out her farm in Powys, Wales, and stays instead in one of the barns on her land, adapted into a home. "I always hang my washing up outside, or even on a pulley thing," she volunteers. "It is a complete waste of energy to use dryers. My mother's hate of waste has filtered down to me, probably because I was a war baby. There was no waste in the war, was there?"

I point out that many war babies are now rejoicing in luxuries their parents and grandparents could only have imagined: heat, light and running hot water, plus every labour-saving gadget. But she is having none of it. "I cannot even talk about waste without being indignant," she retorts. "My introduction to Hollywood was a society that used it, sniffed it and threw it away. We've become a bit like that ourselves in the past 30 years. There's an attitude among the successful people of spend and spend, flaunt and flaunt, and don't think of anyone else."

Her views today are in complete contrast to her early upbringing. Christie was born in Chabua, India, where her father was a tea planter. "It was colonial, middle-class," she says. "But my parents separated, and I suppose I was most influenced by my mother. She took me on holidays to Wales, and I began to appreciate what all those open spaces had to offer." She still travels to India - she had been there a few weeks before our meeting and it is said to be where she got married. There is a sense that she would be there, mucking in, like an old-fashioned hippie. "Something like that," she nods. "It is a wonderful country, which allows people to be themselves. But they are getting our disease now - the disease of greed and throwing things away."

Christie is clearly not motivated by money. "I am innumerate," she says. "I had great earning years, but it went through my fingers." There is no tone of regret. "I no longer have a career to build," she says. "So I do a few things to pay the bills. I cannot complain. I am comfortable, my God."

Her honesty explains much about her career and life. She regularly rejected roles in the 1970s and 1980s. And she pointedly avoided the chat-show circuit when she returned, playing Gertrude in Hamlet (1996), Thetis in Troy and Mrs Emma du Maurier in Finding Neverland (both 2004). It was as if she peeped out, took a look around and disappeared, all mighty fast.

She also had a low-profile return to California with Campbell in the late 1990s, when he became LA correspondent forThe Guardian. "I never went near Hollywood," she says. "I was there fighting the horrible laws of 'three strikes', in which youngsters were sent to jail for ever for their third offence. The mothers were so poor and desperate, they felt they were breeding children for prison. Fighting causes like that made the city more interesting for me."

She will be going back there in three weeks' time, though, for the Oscars. She represented the spirit of the 1960s, winning her Oscar for Darling in 1966, and it seems fitting she is returning as the favourite at the age of 66. But she is self-deprecating about the expected red-carpet treatment. "They don't give a damn about me, and it is not going to change the way people think," she claims. "Let's be realistic: you want to see people like Johnny Depp on the red carpet, or Angelina Jolie, a young woman I admire. That is the place for beautiful young people."

The years have slipped by, and she has hardly noticed. "Time has been savage in its relentless eating up of the years," she says. "Have I made the most of it? I have had an endless struggle not to be a coward about things. I know what I feel, but hate being looked at, hate doing anything in public, hate making speeches ..."

Our own time together has evaporated, but it has probably felt like a lifetime to Christie, who has been battered with questions. She's all charm and good humour, though, as she collects her bag, slips on her coat and dark glasses, and prepares to face the gale blowing outside along a street that has remained eerily empty. There's time for a final thought. What has acting, ultimately, meant to her?

"It felt, to me, like a permanent cocktail party, without the drinks," she reflects. "Acting took me away from real life to a pretend life. I wanted that real life back. I am not a dedicated actress, I'm afraid. I never have been."

The Baftas are on February 10; Away from Her has a limited rerelease on February 15; the Oscars are on February 24