She is the elder child of Rosemary (née Ramsden) and Frank St. John Christie. Her mother, from Hove, was a painter. After being asked to leave the Convent of Our Lady as well, she later attended Wycombe Court School, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, during which time she lived with a foster mother from the age of six. As a teenager at Wycombe Court School, she played the role of the Dauphin in a school production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. Christie appeared as Lara Antipova in David Lean’s adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago (1965), and as Daisy Battles in Young Cassidy, a biopic of Irish playwright Seán O’Casey, co-directed by Jack Cardiff and (uncredited) John Ford. in the 1970s, Christie starred in smaller films such as Robert Altman’s postmodern western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), with Warren Beatty, where her role as a brothel ‘madam’ gained her a second Best Actress Oscar nomination, The Go-Between (again co-starring Alan Bates, 1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), Shampoo (1975), Altman’s classic Nashville (also 1975, in an amusing cameo as herself opposite Karen Black and Henry Gibson), Demon Seed (1977), and Heaven Can Wait (1978), again with Beatty.