'I had to escape Hollywood's madding crowd!' Julie Christie on swapping glamour for sheep

Julie Christie is back on screen reliving one of her most triumphant moments in the original 1967 film of Far From The Madding Crowd, released just weeks ahead of a brand new version with Carey Mulligan in the starring role.

For audiences it will be a chance to compare performances playing one of Thomas Hardy's most memorable and feisty women, Bathsheba Everdene.

Christie, then 27, was one of the world's biggest stars having won a best actress Oscar two years earlier for Darling. Mulligan, 29, won a best actress Bafta for her 2009 role in the film An Education.

For those who watched Christie's tantalising performance opposite her former lover Terence Stamp playing army officer Troy - her other co-stars Alan Bates (Gabriel Oak) and Peter Finch (William Boldwood) are both long dead - the only question will be: why make another? For Christie it will be a memory of a long-ago time on which she has firmly closed the door. She is pragmatic about comparisons with the emergence of new stars. "Life is about youth," she told me. "It's all about the energy and surge of the young. That is how it has always been."

Whatever the judgment, Mulligan will have a long way to go to even match Christie's phenomenal power. She became world famous for playing Lara in Dr Zhivago and moved to Hollywood on the back of it.

There was no let-up in the early 1970s. She co-starred with her equally famous lover Warren Beatty and delivered the brilliant and disturbing Don't Look Now in which her realistic love scene with Donald Sutherland is debated even today. But she turned her back on fame, quit California for a farm in Wales and began breeding sheep rather than tread the red carpet.

She has since picked her films carefully, kept a low profile despite other Oscar nominations for Afterglow (1997) and Away From Her (2006), quietly married her long-term boyfriend Duncan Campbell and travels around London using her pensioner bus pass.

Christie, 74, admits that she sometimes has difficulty recalling the past but when we met she had no problem at all in remembering why she reshaped her life at the height of her fame. It was all delivered with down-to-earth common sense.

"Hollywood was against everything I had been brought up to appreciate," she said. "My late mother Rosemary was wise and frugal, quite austere. She was conscious about the environment, even in those days.

"I always hang up my washing outside or even on a pulley. It's 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? Everyone had to make do with what they had got.

"I can't even talk about waste without being indignant. My introduction to Hollywood was a society which used it, sniffed it and threw it away. We have become a bit like that ourselves in Britain. There is an attitude among successful people of spend and spend, flaunt and flaunt and don't think of anyone else.

"The world of celebrity didn't mean a single thing to my mum. Her attitude filtered down to me, which is why I take all the celeb stuff with a pinch of salt.

"I was able to re-read letters I had sent to her from LA which were all written with a jocularity, along the lines of, 'You will really laugh at this mum.' This was a time of big awards yet I would be like a schoolgirl writing, 'Guess who I have just met?'"

Christie not only met the biggest names in movies, she became one herself. But she is casual about her own claim to fame.

As for old boyfriend and Far From The Madding Crowd costar Terence Stamp, now 76, she says: "I am still fond of Terry after all these years."

In the 1960s he shared a flat with Michael Caine. "To see those two walking into a club in the evening was absolutely fantastic," she enthuses. "If you were with one of them it was thrilling."

As for Warren Beatty, 77, once the best-known star and playboy in Hollywood, who claimed he had once asked Christie to be his wife, she says: "I met such interesting people with Warren who I would never have met otherwise.

"And the film Shampoo [a 1975 romantic comedy set in 1968, in the 24 hours after Richard Nixon wins the US presidency] stands the test of time. It was all down to director Hal Ashby.

"I cherish all those days but I "I cherish all those days but I couldn't hack LA. Hollywood was a throwaway society run by publicity machines."

A film she made in Venice, Don't Look Now, has been listed endlessly by film magazines for including the sexiest scene in a major movie. So did they? Or didn't they? "I could never tell anyone that," she says. "Can you imagine losing that bit of mystique? Director Nic Roeg was wonderful at his job."

But Christie's personality, she claims, is not the kind that easily embraces the hullabaloo around red-carpet events, premieres, parties and award ceremonies. "I like a peaceful existence," she says. "Films have caused me an enormous amount of anxiety because I don't have a lot of confidence.

"Making them is very social. You have to be with people and you socialise all the time. Actors like that on the whole but I was not born with that quality.

"I'm very quiet and do not like to talk to more than two people at the same time. Filming and being with film actors is like being in one long cocktail party without the drinks. Acting took me away from real life to a pretend life. I wanted the real life back."

SO JULIE returned to Britain - "I could get all my favourite sauces," she says - bought the farm in Wales and rented what she describes as "a room in an old warehouse" in London.

By the time she met in 1979 her future husband Campbell, a journalist, she was more interested in "Iother issues than just acting but she did continue to work. "I wish I had been good with money," she admits. "But I'm hopeless. I didn't fully understand what Raquel Welsh pointed out years ago that showbusiness was two words, show and business.

"I had some great earning years but it just went through my fingers. The truth is that I had no real idea at the time of my biggest successes or what was really happening.

"I realised then that you can choose your own spotlight. Whenever I hear anyone complaining about the strains and stresses of fame I always think, 'You can stay at home if you don't like it.'

"For my own part I hated being looked at, hated doing anything in public and hated making speeches. That's why I am so impressed by some of the young actors who take it in their stride."

And what of her famous and beautiful looks? "I'm always tempted to have some work done every time I look in the mirror," she says disarmingly.

"You want to get your familiar face back when you see all the lines around your chin, neck, eyes, mouth and your bloody arms and everything else. I know what I look like and then I look in the mirror."

However the future looks assured.

"I prefer real life, whatever real life is," she says. "I no longer have a career to build and I can get by. I consider myself a lucky woman."

Far From The Madding Crowd is re-released on March 13. The new version is released on May 1.