To Christina Tilmann's best wishes in Der Tagesspiegel, we'll add ours.
From Stephanie Zacharek's appreciation in Salon in 2001: "If every great actor embodies an essential paradox, Christie's is that she's both tigress-direct and fawn-subtle, often at the same time — the cross section of haiku and a sonnet. You find yourself watching in wonder to unravel the quiet but sometimes ferocious mystery of her performances, from her shallow social climber in John Schlesinger's 1965 Darling to her shrewd but ferally tender madam in Robert Altman's 1971 McCabe & Mrs Miller to her fragile Gertrude in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet. Many of her characters are, on the surface, crisp, forthright, almost businesslike, but there's always a soft layer of vulnerability beneath her fine-boned beauty. She's naked even when fully clothed."
Which evidently sets some imaginations running wild.
A profile in the Independent in 2008 races through the biography but pauses at Billy Liar: "John Schlesinger's camera follows her like a lover, watching her across the street, through shop windows, filming not just her beauty but the procession of her moods and thoughts. 'She goes where she feels like,' breathes a smitten Billy to a male pal. 'She's crazy.' What Christie represented was a quintessentially Sixties dream of freedom. She offers Billy an escape to London from his provincial northern trap. But eventually she goes and he, pathetically, stays." See also: Peter Conrad in the Guardian on a photo taken on the set of Darling.
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