Julie Christie

BILLY LIAR

Warner Bros., 1963.  Directed by John Schlesinger.  Camera:  Denys Coop.  With Tom Courtenay, Julie Christie, Wilfred Pickles, Mona Washbourne, Ethel Griffies, Finlay Currie, Rodney Bewes, Helen Fraser, George Innes, Leonard Rossiter, Godfrey Winn, Ernest Clark, Leslie Randall, Gwendolyn Watts.

Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) is known to his blue-collar British mates as Billy Liar because of his vivid imagination.  This film version of the Keith Waterhouse-Willis Hall stage play "visualizes" some of Billy's more outrageous fabrications.  He periodically escapes the drudgery of his job at a funeral parlor by conjuring up impossible adventures, usually involving the conquest of women.  In one of her first film roles, Julie Christie plays one of two "real" girls who wish that Billy would come down to earth and pop the question.  Following this film adaptation, Billy Liar was transformed into a stage musical, and later resurfaced as a British TV series.

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