And so they get at her call her right- on suggest she

And so they get at her, call her right- on, suggest she should just get on and be a babe instead of reminding us of starvation, injustice and impending environmental disaster. Hollywood stars aren't supposed to be intellectuals, for God's sake! Since Old Times opened in Clwyd, Julie's agent has had dozens of requests for interviews; she has turned down all but a handful of them because she dreads being misconstrued or unable to put across things she thinks important.What those who scorn her fail to realise is that having a conscience doesn't preclude fun or humour. That changed when I came to London in my twenties." She fell for a young postman "I met him when he delivered the post. I couldn't believe he didn't know things I knew from school - he opened my eyes to the privileges of my class."Julie's commitment has sometimes irritated interviewers and profile writers. Their sneering tone suggests they'd prefer to know about the inside of actresses' handbags rather than their heads - unless of course they'd care to unburden themselves of their sexual intimacies.

"I was the sort of person who wouldn't have gone out with anyone who had a regional accent and would actually vocalise that distaste. That was the whole point of getting out of London and buying a house in a Welsh valley. Intending to find somewhere within easier reach of London, she originally cast about for somewhere in Sussex but found southern England to be an "extended suburb of London". She would have gone north but visited friends in Wales and decided that was the right place for her. "I hate the town, it's like a prison!"Julie is often associated with speaking out against injustice and oppression and has lent her support to many issues over the years. Last Sunday she joined the demonstration in Trafalgar Square against nuclear testing in the Pacific. She cares passionately about the environment, about cruelty to animals, about any kind of inequality.

Not that she has always been conscious of these things - it was a romance in her twenties that started her thinking. Julie the romantic is hotly pursued by Julie the person of unimpeachable integrity: "... a place we don't have any more, a country with a progressive government, an indigenous population that is not in the front rank of the first world, that's not spewing out waste and consumerism at every corner."The place she'd go wouldn't be a city. I'd like to be somewhere where I could lift the tent flap and see the sand ..." This is Julie the romantic speaking.

The brain may be the same, but her hard work has paid off in another way - she's more confident, not as heartbreakingly humble, apologetic and brittle as she sometimes was in the past.During her remaining 30 years, she'd like to go to places she's never been to, like Kate, her character in Old Times. But unfortunately it has stayed the same brain." Her aim in pursuing these courses was to find something she could do besides acting, but she decided she was no good at anything else. "I am passionate about nature and the environment, so I thought biology would be a good subject for me, but my innumeracy made it impossible." She tried linguistics, but found that it too depended heavily on a grasp of spatial and numerical skills. And then a few years ago she started a history and politics course with the Open University. "It's wonderful, although I thought by forcing myself to do academic work I could make my brain into another brain.

She made forays into academia a long time ago when she was still living and working in Hollywood She enrolled for a biology class at UCLA. "Ah yes, memory, the crux of the whole matter - I forgot! With Lindy you don't have to learn your lines because you go through so much investigation into the words that you learn the lines like that - that's another reason why I don't think I could do it with anyone else." She pauses, trying to remember a line from the play, head in hands, but she can't. "Got to go on stage and do this in an hour," she mutters.What is it about her memory? "It might be something to do with being slightly dyslexic. I'm innumerate and can't get directions." A little later she attempts to calculate how many years she might have left "How old am I?" She looks perplexed "Fifty-five," I reply She counts on her fingers "Fifty-five," she mutters "Sixty-five, 75, 85 ... Thirty years - that's not long."Life's too short to go on being "scatterbrained", she says. To those who have followed her career closely, however, it will come as no surprise that she has an extraordinarily bad memory. She pulls a cutting out of a folder and quotes from Pinter: "Words are as often used to distort or deceive or to manipulate as they are to convey actual and direct meaning, so that a substantial part of our language is essentially corrupt." Julie likes this, it relates to real life.JULIE CHRISTIE is famous for her acting talent and her remarkable, unfading beauty.