London, Jan. 30: British actress Julie Christie, who bagged her fourth Oscar nomination for Away From Her this year, has got married in India, the land of her birth, it was reported today.

At the age of 66, Christie is said to have married British journalist Duncan Campbell, who has been her partner for 28 years, though the couple do not live together.

The wedding was confirmed by Christie’s younger brother, Clive, a retired Cambridge University academic, who, like his sister, was also born in Assam to English parents.

Their father, Frank St. John Christie, like many Britishers of that period, also had a child by an Indian mistress, though what became of that child is not known.

The actress was born Julie Frances Christie in Chabua in Dibrugarh on April 14, 1941. Her early years were spent in India until, as was the norm then, she was sent to school in England to have native ways knocked out of her.

In some ways, her life reflects the character she portrayed in the 1983 Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust, based on the novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, of an Englishwoman who returns to India to uncover the mystery of her great-aunt’s love affair with India and an Indian prince.

Christie did not see her father much after she left India. Her parents separated and her father died relatively young. Her mother came home to Britain to live in rural Wales when Christie was in her early teens.

Asked yesterday whether he attended the wedding, Christie’s brother, who is not thought to be close to his sister, told the Daily Mail: “No, we didn’t have any involvement.”

According to her friends, Christie did not tell her family about the marriage until after it happened.

One said: “The news slowly spread when people got together to celebrate Christmas. Julie and Clive are not all that close. Julie has a lot of hippie Left-wing views and her brother is an academic who went to Cambridge and is much more Right-wing. As such, they do not have an awful lot in common. So, for Clive to find out she had actually got married after the event is not all that unusual.”

If Christie and Campbell went through only a religious ceremony on a visit to India two months ago, that will not count as a legal marriage under British law which requires a proper certificate from a recognised registry office.

Asked about the wedding, Campbell, who works for The Guardian, reacted: “Really? Well, I never get into stories like that.”

Why Christie should choose this moment to marry is not clear because she has been against the institution of marriage all her life. She has also chosen, rather in the manner of Suchitra Sen or the late Greta Garbo, to avoid the celebrity culture of the West and lead the life of almost a recluse on a farm in Montgomery, mid-Wales.

However, the actress, who first won an Oscar at the age of 24 for her role in John Schlesinger’s Darling in 1965, and won millions of hearts throughout the world with her memorable performance as Lara in David Lean’s Dr Zhivago that same year, has just got her fourth Oscar nomination.

This is for her poignant portrayal of an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Away From Her, a role she accepted with great reluctance after much persuasion by Sarah Polley, the young Canadian director of the movie.

Christie has already won Best Actress awards for this role both from the Screen Actors’ Guild and the Golden Globe.

Christie is generally considered one of the most gifted actresses of her generation. She certainly kept diary columnists busy during her passionate seven-year affair with Hollywood heart-throb Warren Beatty, with whom she made McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), Shampoo (1975), and Heaven Can Wait (1978).

Before that, in 1973, she shot a then much talked about “did they, didn’t they?” explicit sex scene with Donald Sutherland, one of the men in her life, in Don’t Look Now.