Icon.(The Talk of the Town)(Julie Christie)

Columbia Road, in the East End of London, is thronged on weekends. Every Sunday, it blooms into a flower market. Visit on a weekday, however, when the street is noiseless and half the shops are shut, and you may think you have strayed onto a film set. So it felt appropriate to see Julie Christie arrive on Columbia Road one recent Friday. Her limousine of choice was an old bicycle with a wicker basket, and her entrance, through the doors of the Royal Oak pub, could not have been less grand. Of the two solitary drinkers who sat there, only one looked up.

Here was a woman to whose tune, in the nineteen-sixties, all of London swung. Historians of the period are advised to read her body language in "Darling" as a guide to the emergence of the gadabout. Christie still keeps a place in the city, although she recently spent five years in California, where her partner, the journalist Duncan Campbell, was posted as a correspondent for the Guardian. Like many British actresses, Christie (born in 1940 in India, the daughter of a tea planter) has a touch of the peregrine spirit--"I'm not sure I really come from anywhere," she said. She owns a house in Wales, and taught herself Welsh after joining a campaign there against the dumping of nuclear waste. The protest worked. "They don't bury it in the mountains anymore," she said. Who could say no to Julie Christie?

The compound is unmistakable: shyness and spotless manners--maximum radiance meets minimum vanity--plus the trenchant political urge to know her own mind and speak it. If you had to name another actor who projects the same two-tone mystery, it would be Warren Beatty; no wonder they were linked for so long. Of her profession, Christie said, "I never know what it is that I'm meant to be doing," sounding like a child in a school play. She then launched into a defense of Moazzam Begg, the British Muslim who was detained in Bagram and Guantanamo until 2005, before moving seamlessly into a discussion of the role that she turned down in "American Gigolo." ("I just thought the woman was getting a rotten deal.") Keeping up with Christie--the flow of her eagerness and her indignation--can be hard work, not least because both are voiced in the most serene of tones. If she hadn't been an actress, she would have made an ...