It wasn't until I saw Julie Christie in John Schlesinger's film of Far From The Madding Crowd, a decade after it was made in 1967, that I knew who I wanted to look like when I grew up. This was a far cry for a 14-year-old North West London brunette, but with her full-mouth, heavy streaked blonde fringe and huge, blue eyes, Julie as Hardy's Bathsheba Everdene got me through English O-Level as I understood why the three male characters Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates) Boldwood (Peter Finch) and Sgt Troy (Terence Stamp) were in love with her.

Fast-forward 51 years and director Thomas Vinterberg, who made the brilliant Festen, has Carey Mulligan playing the headstrong heroine running her own Dorset estate - and very able she is, too.

Horse-riding, sheep-dipping and earning the respect of her farm-hands comes naturally to her and when she determinedly turns down Oak's premature marriage proposal declaring "I don't want a husband, I'd hate to be somebody's property" – you certainly believe it.

However, what I couldn't bring myself to believe at any point in this visually invigorating film is that Mulligan's looks would captivate and torment the shepherd (handsome Matthias Schoenaerts) the soldier (miscast Tom Sturridge) and the wealthy landowner (earnest Michael Sheen) more than would those of any other woman in Wessex.

Unlike the surrounding English countryside, I'm afraid to say that the actress is not a natural beauty and when she and Troy have a chance entanglement in the woods, where he comments on her unmatchable good looks, I wanted to send him to SpecSavers.

Now this may seem shallow and I may well be impervious to Mulligan's visual charms, but it is the combination of independence and pulchritude that makes Bathsheba so bewitching in the novel and that is the point.

The nature and the mood will win you over if you didn't see Schlesinger's film, but this Julie fan was not for turning.